Jon Rosenthal writes: Holy hell, this is outrageous. I generally know Eli Wendler as a drummer (you can find him kit-fronting Colorado's Spectral Voice), but, as it turns out, he has quite the mastery of black/death metal guitar riffing. Endless Wound is grotesque and chilling, never losing itself in its cavernous qualities, but rather using the spooky ambiance they craft as a means of aggrandizing their already massive music. Also featuring Jonathan Campos of Primitive Man fame and Wendler's Spectral Voice bandmate Morris Kolontyrsky, Black Curse's pedigree is clear, and the talent which comes with it is unreal. One of my favorite death metal albums of 2020 for sure.

As the world caught on fire, Boris returned with their fastest, most direct album in years. It's almost entirely made up of punk-informed thrash and speed metal, and it's done in a way that's unmistakably Boris. They eschew generic thrash tones and play this stuff with the same thick sludge tones that are more typical of their music, and they work in a handful of snail-paced sludge breakdowns too. It's overflowing with anger, and that anger is channelled in all the right ways. English-speaking listeners may not understand the lyrics, but that was sort of the point. "These shouts that have no proper meaning as words will help release the raw, unshaped emotions within you," Boris said. [Andrew Sacher]

Four killer songs from one of the best death metal bands in existence -- clear and precise without toning down the band's raw attack, melodic and tuneful without letting up on the abrasion. I don't know what else you can ask for from a band with a back catalog as solid as this one. [A.S.]

Langdon Hickman writes: Each one contains traces of the other, a dreaminess and absinthe headiness latent within Thou and a resolute feral heaviness lurking within Emma Ruth Rundle, so this combination makes tremendous sense on paper and delivers more or less exactly what you'd hope for in that arrangement. It doesn't sound like a collaboration; it sounds like one band, almost like the previous records from both were solo projects of a larger band we just hadn't heard yet.

Formed by Jason Tarpey (Iron Age) and including long time member Blake Ibanez (Power Trip), it's hard to not look at Ravening Iron through the lens of the trying year that has faced both bands. And yet the triumph that is the Austin band's sophomore effort is far from a sympathy vote– it's track after track of epic heavy metal of the highest caliber, bursting at the seams with impeccable riffs and soaring vocals. The key here is the personnel on the new effort, which counts the core of the classic heavy metal crew Sumerlands and hardcore favorites War Hungry. It's this massive intersection of jawdropping players that proves sometimes the sum of the parts can be much bigger than the whole. [Fred Pessaro]

Faceless Burial's Speciation is everything you want in a death metal record– It's mean, exploding with genius riffs, with a strong ear for killer songwriting and production is nothing less than terrifying. There's a technicality that's more impressive than showy, a trait found in the best moments by bands like Death, Immolation and Suffocation– all of whom make inspirational appearances here. But most importantly, Speciation is filled with utterly fantastic songs that take unexpected left turns, making for a truly memorable and endlessly listenable record that is nothing short of genius. [F.P.]

Huntsmen owe as much to 1970s prog like Yes, Pink Floyd, and Jethro Tull as they do to the roaring sludge of bands like Mastodon and High on Fire, and they've got all the riffs, folky passages, sprawling prog odysseys, and soaring vocal harmonies needed to pull it off. It's too metal for classic rock radio and too clean and melodic for the extreme metal crowd, but if your taste exists somewhere in between those two extremes, few albums in 2020 scratched the itch as perfectly as this one did. Huntsmen really make sure there's strong songwriting at the center of everything they do, which makes Mandala of Fear a record that keeps you coming back for more. These songs stick in your head long after it's stopped playing. [A.S.]

Liturgy's most honest, sincere album yet is also quite possibly their best. Liturgy always approached black metal on their own terms, embracing many of its traditions wholeheartedly but also reshaping those traditions into something the band's mastermind Hunter Hunt-Hendrix could call her own. Her uncompromising vision and outspokenness is what turned a lot of black metal purists against Liturgy, but it's also what made them awesome, and what made them continue to stand out amongst a sea of tremolo-picking Darkthrone worshippers. Liturgy nearly left black metal behind on 2015's art rock-leaning The Ark Work, before returning with the whiplash-inducing H.A.Q.Q. in 2019, and in hindsight, those albums feel like stepping stones for Origin of the Alimonies. Liturgy's vision is clearer than ever, and this album feels like a culmination of everything they've been working towards, with orchestral arrangements, trap beats, avant-garde pieces and more all worked into the unmistakable brand of black metal that Liturgy have been perfecting since day one. [A.S.]

Over 30 years since releasing the genre-defining grindcore classic Scum, Napalm Death are still pushing boundaries. Lesser bands start losing stream by the fourth or fifth album; Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism is Napalm Death's 16th album, and it sounds as energized and inspired as this band ever has. It pulls from grindcore, death metal, punk, post-punk, industrial, and more, and some even lighter music that you might not hear on first listen like My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins. "I kind of twist [those influences], make it more abrasive," Barney says. Throes sounds almost nothing like classic ND, and it barely even sounds like their last album, yet you'd never mistake this for the work of any other band. It's no small feat to be able to reinvent yourself over and over while remaining so distinct. [A.S.]

We said: It's the exact opposite of a sophomore slump; it's bigger and better than their great 2017 debut Blood Offerings in every way. The recording is bolder and crisper, really allowing for Mortal's myriad of mind-melting riffs, throat-shredding growls, and bulldozing rhythms to punch you in the gut even harder than they did on Blood Offerings. [A.S.]

Finland's Oranssi Pazuzu push psych-metal to ecstatic heights and evil depths on this year's rip-roaring Mestarin Kynsi. The year's pre-eminent metal headphone listen, these long-gestating freakouts are draped in experimental electronics and effects, using hypnotic repetition to build towards explosive passages of heaviness. Opener "Ilmestys" exemplifies this approach as minor-key guitar figures and and stuttering synths swirl around an ominous bassline, only to erupt into a swaggering, head-bobbing doom groove. They've moved away from black metal (the album-closer "Taivaan Porti" is the only thing here that recognizably falls into that category), which used to be a much bigger part of their sound. What they've kept are the Satan's-croak vocals, which enhance the feeling that we're participating in some kind of unholy rite. There's also a palpable sense of fun; some of this stuff is even dancey. The industrial "Kuulen Aania Maan Alta" is like an evil club song (it's reminiscent of Trent Reznor and Karen O's cover of Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song"), built around an unctuous synth-bass and stuttering, grimey drums before going full death metal. It's an album of apocalyptic party music. It's unlike a lot of contemporary psych in that it isn't content to rehash old sounds, but rather seeks to move the druggy spirit of the genre in new sonic directions. It's an absolute blast. [Rob Sperry-Fromm]

We said: Forgotten Days finds Pallbearer doing what they do best. Brett Campbell's vocals still sound like Ozzy Osbourne and Geddy Lee in a blender, the band's riffs still worship at the altars of Sabbath and Candlemass, and Pallbearer still dabble in atmospheric prog passages that tip their hat at Pink Floyd. For some bands, employing the same tricks four albums in would start to get old, but Forgotten Days is as compelling as just about anything this band has done previously. [A.S.]

There's nothing we can say about this album that Andy Gibbs from Thou didn't say better, so, to quote Andy: "The arms race is over. Primitive Man has won. They’re heavier than your band. I don’t care how much money you spend on amps this year, you won’t be heavier. Yes I’ve heard that Burning Witch record or whatever other record you’re thinking of right now. We all had a good time competing but it’s over now."

Morbus Chron's Sweven, released in 2014, is one of the very best metal records of the decade, one of the very best death metal records of all time, and any other superlative you want to throw at it. That the band broke up afterwards has only served to deepen its mystique, as has the fact that -- for all the great new death metal bands that have sprung up or continued to release new material in the past few years -- none of them really scratch the same itch that that record did (although Horrendous comes closest). But like manna from heaven, The Eternal Resonance appeared this year from a new band, fronted by the same guy (Robert Andersson, convincingly making the case that he was the principal creative force all along), named after that already-canonized classic. And it feels like Andersson hasn't missed a beat as we're plunged once again into this lush sonic landscape. One doesn't often think of death metal as pretty, but that's often the descriptor that comes to mind here. The Eternal Resonance delves even deeper into proggy dreamscapes, but while that description might conjure noisy cacophony or trippy psychedelia, Sweven's great strength is their gestural clarity. It's full of harmonic complexity without sacrificing direct emotional hits. There are times when it rolls into post-rock or black metal, but it's never fully one thing, morphing unpredictably as soon as we think we have a handle on its sound. It has plenty of fist-pumping, riff-tastic moments, and its more plaintive passages are often driven by jazzy arpeggiation which keep things constantly engaging, avoiding an over-reliance on ambience or slowness that can bog down proggy work from lesser bands. When the album-closer "Sanctum Santorum" bursts, with shocking beauty, into a choral outro, it feels completely appropriate: for the past hour, we've been in metal church. [R.S.F.]

There's no band quite like New Zealand's Ulcerate. Their latest LP embraces melody through death metal with open arms, all while riding the line between mind-blowing instrumental prowess and pitch black ambiance. Ulcerate executes with proficiency and in service of the song– dazzling throughout the duration of the offering but making sure technicality never takes priority. All of this is to say that Stare Into Death and Be Still may be Ulcerate's best offering, a balanced mix of menace and musicality that never sacrifices one for the other. In the battle between melody and brutality, Ulcerate win on all fronts with Stare Into Death. And so do we. [F.P.]