The Best Metalgaze Album - Metal Storm Awards 2024

Alcest - Les Chants De L'Aurore

It's Alcest. Honestly, that alone is enough to get all of us to swoon, so this nomination comes to no one's surprise. On Les Chants De L'Aurore, Alcest mostly stay in the lane they already carved for themselves (that lane being the entire reason this category exists), adding only enough elements like some goth rock-ier sections and some cinematic strings to not entirely rely on tried and tested methods. Unsurprisingly, it works.

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BleakHeart - Silver Pulse

Living up to BleakHeart's bleak and grim debut, Dream Griever, offers a melancholic dreamy doom-gaze experience you can't ignore. Through beautifully crafted instrumentation and staggeringly emotional performances, the album reflects on themes expressing pain and suffering regarding disease, loss, and unknown certainty, and how we can seek hope and understanding in powers beyond our grasp. BleakHeart once again live up to their name, delivering one of the most beautiful and heart-wrenching albums of the year with Silver Purse.

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Dawn Treader - Bloom & Decay

How can a debut album in a genre that has already had its time in the spotlight find its footing? Maybe by having gorgeous cover art. Maybe also by figuring out how to make the sound sound exciting even as half of the tracks are instrumental, and not just the interludes, but full-bodied songs whose emotional resonance is so finely tuned and that are so well-written that they stand toe-to toe-with the tracks on Bloom & Decay where Ross Connell's shrieks do appear. It's ambitious, it's heart is in the right place, and it's hard to resist the heartstrings being pulled.

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Einvigi - Monokroma

Yö Kulje Kanssani was an album that instantly drew comparisons to genre giants and fellow nominees Alcest, but that also had moments of deviation. Those deviations get built up a lot more in Monokroma, like the specific lighter Finnish rock/folk affectation in the clean vocals that recalls something like Viikate, and the more pronounced Insomnium nuance in the melodies. The blend of the melancholic and upbeat vibes works even better through the harsh/light contrast specifically because each side feels more developed this time around, and it works towards something that feels like a definitively Finnish take on blackgaze.

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Envy - Eunoia

Now for a band that completely eschews the black metal aspect and yet still managed to have been a formative band in the genre. Having preceded the metalgaze sound, initially operating in the screamo/post-hardcore sphere before incorporating more post-rock sounds, Envy now finds themselves almost at the receiving end of a feedback loop, with Eunoia finding more moments where both the lighter and the harsher sides feel in turn influenced by how metalgaze evolved, while also keeping a lot of specifically Japanese touches in the impassioned spoken vocals and in the Mono-ish leanings in the post-rock side.

Ghostheart Nebula - Blackshift

'Doomgaze' has already become enough of a trend to be a recognizable genre term; now it's the turn of death-doomgaze, thanks to Ghostheart Nebula. Blackshift, the band's second album, has the harsh growls, crawling tempos and hints of extremity of death-doom (plus hints of melodic/folk black metal), but the tone of the album is predominantly shaped by the warm, dreamy gazing walls of guitar, tender leads, and evocative singing of clean vocalist Lucia Amelia Emmanueli. Some of the album's more celestial inclinations also bring to mind Ison, but the fusion of styles and synergy of sounds crafted by Ghostheart Nebula arguably outshines even that band.

Sadness (USA) - I Want To Make Something As Beautiful As You

To say that Sadness is prolific would be an understatement, with the band having released three albums in 2024 alone. Among them, I Want To Make Something As Beautiful As You stands out as the most engaging one, featuring four compositions in the familiar form of long, hypnotic songwriting that often uses repetition to put the listener in a trance. It’s all about post-rock and blackgaze that are woven together wonderfully to create dreamy soundscapes for those in love.

Suldusk - Anthesis

Anthesis begins drifting in weightlessness: ethereal, oneiric, gently clouded in an ambient, folkloric mystery. And then the weight comes crashing down: blasting, crushing, howling in ghastly peals of pain. On a purely stylistic level, Anthesis never stays in one place for very long - atmospheric neofolk, urgent black metal, romantic doomgaze, and delicate post-rock mix fluidly in the hands of an ensemble that includes cello and violin in addition to the usual roster. Whether acoustic, electric, or very electric, however, Suldusk is able to maintain a consistent mood that unifies all these sounds into one feeling, turning tremolo-picking and shrieks into new-age and turning soft, wordless intonations into metalgaze.

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Together To The Stars - The Fragile Silence

If silence is fragile, how fragile can music be that has the power to break it? Together To The Stars, founded in 2015 in Stockholm by multi-instrumentalist David Steinmarck as Sweden’s answer to Deafheaven and Harakiri For The Sky, explore this question with their third full-length album, which unites the contrasting elements of its two predecessors. The Fragile Silence blends the dreamy, melancholic, and depressive blackgaze moments of their debut An Oblivion Above with the more direct and impulsive post-black metal passages of their sophomore release, yet it offers more than just the sum of its parts. Over the four years since As We Wither, Together To The Stars have gained significant musical maturity, refining the art of allowing musical contrasts to intensify each other. Rarely have blastbeats sounded so heavy-hearted, and rarely has silence felt as intense and dramatic as it does on The Fragile Silence.

Vestige - Janis

You probably have certain expectations of what "metalgaze" sounds like, especially an album that has a Neige feature. You are not adequately prepared to experience Vestige. Shoegaze is certainly the conduit to melody here, and there are times when that becomes the light, tremolo-picked riffing and spacious, dreamy production associated with the classic blackgaze formula, but the metal side of Vestige is most frequently a bass-heavy, high-gain gut punch that borrows its thunderous compositional approach from post-metal and its audacity from djent. Janis spends its time both gently plucking some gauzy soundscapes and double-fisting breakdowns for an album of contrasts and intriguing spins on the idea of this genre.

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