The Best Alternative Metal Album - Metal Storm Awards 2024

Coilguns - Odd Love

From a background in noisy, off-kilter sludge and post-metal Coilguns comes into a leaner and sleeker style on Odd Love. While departing from the band's mathcore origins, Odd Love still deviates into sounds unexpected for its fundaments; some of this comes from the alt rocky/country-adjacent solo work released by singer Louis Jucker in the years since Watchwinders, some of it comes from a well of versatile tricks that let the band dip into post-metal, hardcore, and other less confinable styles. Even a less frenetic Coilguns still has a great capacity for dynamics, and the band shows no intention of coming to rest in any kind of genre you could call straightforward.

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Doodseskader - Year Two

If we sold you Doodseskader as "hip-hop + metal", you'd be thinking Limp Bizkit, right? Well, it ain't the '90s anymore; there are nu ways to make nu metal. The hip-hop style employed by Doodseskader is an aggressive, industrial one, with rigid, mechanized beats and raw vocals that alternate between shouting and growling; when traditional instrumentation appears, it's grinding and whining in a manner that invites comparison to noise artists more than metal ones. The metal portion is slow and pulsing, scraping up everything in its path with unrelenting heaviness learned from sludge and post-metal. Year Two is rarely calm, but when it is, it's haunting; and when it's cranked, it's menacing and isolating to a degree achieved by few metal artists who have ever claimed hip-hop as an influence. This is noise - it's not nice, and it's not for the radio. The breakdowns here are of the mental kind.

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Jerry Cantrell - I Want Blood

Insane as it is to consider, there have been two Jerry Cantrell solo albums since the last Alice In Chains album. No, Alice In Chains are still active. Yes, the two Jerry Cantrell albums sound a lot like Alice In Chains, but they shouldn't just be seen as replacements. I Want Blood is better at integrating the country/southern twang sounds than Brighten was and at making you not feel the lack of vocal harmonies we're so used to hearing Jerry's voice in. But most of all, the songs pack more of a punch and feel a lot more memorable.

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Julie Christmas - Ridiculous And Full Of Blood

When a singer is most known for fronting classic post-metal acts like Made Out Of Babies and Battle Of Mice and for collaborating with the biggest post-metal band out there on Mariner, it would make a lot of sense for the many-years-later return to follow in that style, and a lot of Ridiculous And Full Of Blood does, especially since the album's lineup contains two Cult Of Luna members. But it also takes a lot from the weirdo alt metal of The Bad Wife, creating this caustic blend of alt meets noise rock meets sludge metal, one where each song gets its own personality, and if there's anything one can find in abundance on the album, and especially in Julie Christmas's vocal performance, it's personality.

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Kozoria - The Source

A decade in the making, The Source is an impressive debut album from France's Kozoria that deftly balances influences from various spheres of alternative, progressive, and extreme metal in a mature and memorable manner. Comparisons to Gojira are inevitable and warranted, but while Kozoria's muscular grooves and technical abilities bear some resemblance, the sound of The Source arguably owes as much to American alternative metal heavyweights such as Trivium, Lamb Of God, and Avenged Sevenfold, particularly when thrashier tendencies and memorable clean vocal hooks are unleashed. Capped off by a level of sophistication that allows them to successfully pull off a 9-minute closing song, The Source's long incubation time has paid off handsomely.

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Madder Mortem - Old Eyes, New Heart

Madder Mortem have always been something of an enigma stylistically, encompassing elements of styles such as gothic, progressive, and alternative metal without fitting into any particular niche. With over 30 years under their belt, that style has become more familiar, but it continues to mesmerize on their eighth album, Old Eyes, New Heart, which continues to fluctuate between progressive complexity and alt-metal approachability. Crafted in the aftermath of the passing of founding siblings Agnete and BP Kirkevaag's father, it's an album with an unusually high degree of fury; however, alongside the bouts of anger, there're also songs and passages that are poignant, and even moments imbued with a western twang. Although evidently shaped by a pursuit of catharsis, Old Eyes, New Heart is very much the work of a band that is a master of their own unique domain.

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Mother Of Millions - Magna Mater

Magna Mater is Mother Of Millions’s heaviest and most intense album to date, both conceptually and musically. It is an album about loss, coming after the sudden and tragic death of their keyboardist Makis Tsamkosoglou, but it is ultimately about life. Bringing together sounds of alternative, progressive, and doom metal, this release is possibly these Greeks’ top achievement, giving bands like Soen and Leprous a run for their money. Melodic, atmospheric, emotional, and mesmerizing, Magna Mater is nothing less than a cathartic experience both for the band and for the listener.

Poppy - Negative Spaces

Remember when Poppy playing metal was a novelty? Having originally started as more of a performance art ironic pop act that specifically poked at creepiness, Poppy's first forays into metal were done with the same tongue-in-cheek ironic sense. Years and years later, that sense has dissipated, and Negative Spaces is her first metal album as a sincere artist. Taking in sounds from all around the alt metal sphere (some not metal at all), and thus giving each song its own personality, it is the most well-developed, well-composed, engaging, and breakneck of all her releases.

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Slope - Freak Dreams

What if Red Hot Chili Peppers stayed good? You know, what if, during that period from the ‘80s through the mid-‘90s when they were still fun, funky, and punky, RHCP fused with Suicidal Tendencies and emerged a metallic, hard-riffing version of that sunny SoCal sound? Slope attack the skate funk approach with loads of energy and an occasionally Primus-like sense of loose weirdness in their rhythms; they’re up-tempo, but not recklessly punky, always locked into a groove, with shouted, call-and-response vocals and a flippant delivery reminiscent of the Beastie Boys. Slope are a little freaky, a little dreamy, and always loud, punchy fun.

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Wheel - Charismatic Leaders

At three albums in, Wheel are taking all-important steps to distance themselves from their Tool-indebted origins and establish a firmer identity of their own. Part of the way in which they strive to achieve this on Charismatic Leaders is by injecting additional directness and intensity into their music, with the album described by the band as "their heavy album". In spite of this, the band's proclivity for complex songwriting, polyrhythms, and syncopation remains undiminished, delivering compelling atmosphere, builds, and hypnotizing technicality alongside the more direct and catchy hooks on the record. The successful balancing act of getting the most of out both extremes renders Charismatic Leaders the band's most mature album yet.

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