Metal Hammer's Top 10 Death Metal Albums of 2021

On their first album in eight years, Liverpool death metal titans Carcass double down on the infectious harmonized riffage and medical-atrocity lyrics of their 2013 comeback album, *Surgical Steel*. To say that *Torn Arteries* is long-awaited is an understatement: The album was originally supposed to be out in early 2020. In fact, Carcass released the first single, “Under the Scalpel Blade,” in late 2019. When the pandemic hit, the band decided to delay the record’s release until they could safely tour. To tide fans over, they released the four-song *Despicable* EP in October 2020. But now, the moment of truth has arrived, and Carcass vocalist/bassist Jeff Walker isn’t giving any spoilers. “I don’t want to talk about the lyrics because you’re giving the game away,” he tells Apple Music. “It defeats the object of me not wanting them on the album, and you’re kind of instilling in people how they should be thinking.” Still, we managed to extract some comments from him on some key tracks. **“Dance of Ixtab”** “Ixtab is the Mayan goddess of suicide by hanging. I’ve no idea how I stumbled across it, honestly. I could say I was on an alien peninsula or something, but that’s bullshit. Maybe I was watching *From Dusk Till Dawn*. I was probably doing some ‘research,’ and we all know what that means these days: Google. But it’s not glorifying suicide or dwelling on people being depressed. It’s a bit more sleazy than that.” **“Eleanor Rigor Mortis”** “If there’s anything that we dusted off from the old days for this album, it’s this song title. We joked about using it way back on the first album. It falls into this Kinks/Beatles quintessential Englishness that we’ve always incorporated into Carcass. That was the vibe I was going for. I’m sure \[Carcass guitarist\] Bill \[Steer\] cringes over the fact that I bothered to use it.” **“Under the Scalpel Blade”** “We’ve managed to release this song three times now. With every album, you have a song that kind of becomes a single. So, we released this at the end of 2019 as a flexi single with *Decibel* when the album was supposed to be out in 2020. But then, of course, that didn’t happen. When we decided to do the EP, we had three songs that are not on the album, so we brought out one album track as well. And, of course, the song has to be on the album itself.” **“The Devil Rides Out”** “This is a movie title I’ve always loved, but the song has nothing to do with that. There’s always been anti-religious songs, but this is an anti-Satanic song. Satanism is just as fucking stupid as Christianity or every other ‘ism,’ you know? I really fancied the idea of doing a song that could be picked up by Christians and then they run to town thinking it’s a pro-Christian song. I love the idea of the label servicing some Christian radio stations with this track, but it never happened.” **“Kelly’s Meat Emporium”** “This was a real shop in Liverpool, but it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s somewhere I’d pass occasionally, and I just thought it was quaint because one minute it was open and then for years it was kind of derelict. To me, it was just a sign of the times. But the title is totally disconnected from the lyrics. It’s like ‘The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue’ from the EP: It’s not like I watched the movie and wrote a song about it. I just liked the title. Like ‘Eleanor Rigor Mortis,’ it feels quintessentially British.”

As of 2021, Cannibal Corpse is 15 albums deep into a career that has made them the biggest death-metal band in the world. With *Violence Unimagined*, the Floridian masters somehow muster new levels of brutality and technicality—due in part to new guitarist (and longtime producer) Erik Rutan, also of veteran death-metal trio Hate Eternal. Given that Cannibal Corpse’s lyrics are almost exclusively about violence, it’s stunning that they haven’t actually used the word formally before. “I thought *Violence Unimagined* just had a great ring to it,” drummer and co-lyricist Paul Mazurkiewicz tells Apple Music. “I think it also sums up what the band is about.” With four of the band’s five members contributing lyrics, Mazurkiewicz, Rutan, bassist Alex Webster, and guitarist Rob Barrett give a rundown on the tracks they wrote. **“Murderous Rampage”** Mazurkiewicz: “This is a song Rob wrote, and he also came up with the title. I just wrote the lyrics about someone who does just that—goes on a murderous rampage while collecting body parts from the killing spree and putting them on display in his house.” **“Necrogenic Resurrection”** Webster: “This song is about a cult that worships a notorious deceased murderer and seeks to resurrect him through human sacrifice. Even though I don’t believe in the supernatural, I’ve always enjoyed supernatural horror movies and novels, so the inspiration for lyrics like these probably comes from being a fan of that sort of stuff. I can’t think of a specific source, though—it’s just an idea for a story that I had.” **“Inhumane Harvest”** Barrett: “‘Inhumane Harvest’ takes a look inside one of organized crime\'s more sinister activities: the human organ trade. Desperate buyers will pay a high price for a much-needed organ transplant to either save themselves or a loved one from certain death, which makes for a lucrative business in underground crime rings.” **“Condemnation Contagion”** Rutan: “As the pandemic began in early 2020, I was watching a lot of movies like *28 Days Later*, *Dawn of the Dead*, *It Comes at Night*, *I Am Legend*, and *Contagion*. I also had the news on in the background for hours on end. I became obsessed with the chaos of it all. That combination inspired the fictional writing of the lyrics and the depth and heaviness of the music.” **“Surround, Kill, Devour”** Webster: “This song is about a situation where society has completely collapsed and people are starving to death. The desperation drives some people to form cannibalistic hunting groups, preying on other survivors who are weak or alone. I had recently read an article about wolves and it talked about the teamwork they use while hunting. I thought that it would be interesting to have the human antagonists in this song hunt in a similar way.” **“Ritual Annihilation”** Rutan: “With ‘Ritual Annihilation,’ I really wanted to create a complex song that was aggressive, attacking and pummeling. Then, as I was writing, it took a different turn onto a heavy and dark path. There is a lot of two-guitar-part harmony and counterpoint going on that definitely represents some of the insanity of when I was writing it in the first quarter of 2020.” **“Follow the Blood”** Barrett: “This was the last song that I wrote the music for on this record, and I intentionally wanted to make it a slower, more mid-paced song compared to the other three that I had already written. The lyrics are about a wartime scenario.” **“Bound and Burned”** Barrett: “This is the first song that I wrote the music for on this record. I basically built all of the riffs around the middle section where the vocals and solos keep going back and forth. When it comes to the lyrics, I prefer not to explain them, as I\'d rather have the individual determine what they\'re about or what they mean to them.” **“Slowly Sawn”** Webster: “This song is told from the point of view of the victim, a man who has been captured and is being tortured to death by methodical dismemberment. We usually write the music for our songs first and the lyrics second, and sometimes the former can help inspire the latter. That was the case for this song. It’s hard to explain, but the song’s slow, grinding riffs made me think of something bad happening to someone in a protracted way. In particular the bridge section of the song, which shifts into an even lower gear, evokes a torturous vibe.” **“Overtorture”** Rutan: “The origins of this song started one morning in February 2020. Leading up to recording the album, I was on a strict regimen where I would wake up, drink water and coffee, have breakfast, check emails, ride the bike, and then play guitar and work on songs all day, every day. That morning, I just had this maniacal melody floating around in my head and it would not leave. This ended up being the first riff of the song, and it all took off from there.” **“Cerements of the Flayed”** Mazurkiewicz: “This is a song that Alex wrote and also came up with the title for. I wrote about someone who gets buried alive wearing the skin of another human that is also still alive. The person survives the ordeal only to succumb to this horrific act in the end.”

With their seventh album, Swedish death metal masters At The Gates have delivered a finely crafted concept album about pessimism. “I guess I had an amateur view of pessimism, as most of us do,” vocalist and lyricist Tomas “Tompa” Lindberg tells Apple Music. “I thought it was just the ‘glass is half empty’ kind of thing.” Some initial research led him back to American author Thomas Ligotti, whose horror fiction Lindberg had read while working on his 2017 side project The Lurking Fear. Then At The Gates guitarist Martin Larsson recommended Ligotti’s nonfiction. “It’s basically an introduction to pessimism,” Lindberg says. “I got about halfway through and realized that this worldview is very death metal.” The result is *The Nightmare of Being*, a ripping and majestic death metal album influenced by the writings of Ligotti, Emil Cioran, Peter Zapffe, and contemporary philosopher Eugene Thacker, whose ideas surfaced in the first season of HBO’s *True Detective*. Below, Lindberg takes us through each track on *The Nightmare of Being*. **“Spectre of Extinction”** “Since \[1995’s\] *Slaughter of the Soul*, we’ve written almost every track to fit the sequence and flow of the record. So ‘Spectre of Extinction’ was really written as an opener with the classic metal intro thing—acoustic guitar, big Judas Priest chord swinging out, and then At The Gates after that. The middle part was written specifically for Andy LaRocque to play a solo. I call it the Death part because it really sounds like *Human* by Death. Lyrically, it’s basically the introduction to the idea that we’re the only species conscious of our own mortality.” **“The Paradox”** “This is the only one that was not written for this place in the sequence. It was written very early on in the songwriting process, and it turned out to be this weird death metal song, but it has a lot of the classic Mercyful Fate vibes to it—very melodic at certain points. We had it hidden later in the album, but then \[mixing engineer\] Jens Bogren said, ‘This is a monster. This has to be the second or third track, guys.’ And then Andy LaRocque and \[engineer\] Per Stålberg said the same thing, so we put it at number two. It’s a little bit of a rager in that sense.” **“The Nightmare of Being”** “I’ve done this on a few records now, where the title track is the whole concept of the album in one song, basically. This has a line about the ‘parasites of the subconscious’ which I really like—even if we are aware of our mortality, we’ve got to have a defense mechanism to keep us sane. Our subconscious is always tricking us because all this pain and suffering is too much to take in. So the ‘nightmare of being’ is basically the pain of existence. It’s a heavy, slow song with lots of acoustic parts, and the end is almost like a breakdown—we never wrote something that heavy before.” **“Garden of Cyrus”** “This is one of the curveballs of the record. I think the big challenge of this album for us was to build upon what we started on *At War With Reality* and *To Drink From the Night Itself*—the orchestration, different arrangements—just seeing how far we could take that without losing what is At The Gates. This one has the dreaded saxophone, so my hope is that someone listens and recognizes At The Gates, even if it sounds like a Goblin or King Crimson song in a way.” **“Touched by the White Hands of Death”** “Again, it’s about the instrumentation. This was really written to come after ‘Garden of Cyrus’ with a really slow build by a low flute. If you were to play that on electric guitar, it wouldn’t have the same emotional impact, because every instrument has its own voice and emotional tone. But then it turns into a classic At The Gates thrasher in a way. Lyrically, it connects to the opening track because it’s about the knowledge of mortality again, and this song is about those defense mechanisms being attacked.” **“The Fall Into Time”** “If you get the vinyl, this would be the start of side B. It’s really heavy, with a slow build and almost like a free-form prog part in the middle. It reminds me of the more epic songs we’ve had before, like ‘Neverwhere’ from the first album or ‘Primal Breath’—like a triumphant, majestic kind of piece. Lyrically, it connects to Cioran’s ideas about the fall into time, the whole Adam and Eve thing with the apple of knowledge, which connects with his pessimist philosophy.” **“Cult of Salvation”** “This one is based more directly on the defense mechanisms which I talked about before. The first person to talk about this was a Norwegian philosopher called Zapffe. He talks about religions, states, and worldviews as distractions, and about trying to live your life aware that you have these defense mechanisms. For example, we create music as an escape from the everyday struggle. But as long as I’m aware that I’m using it as a defense mechanism, then I can actually live my life a bit more fully and understand why I work the way I work. I love the middle part here—an homage almost to Goblin.” **“The Abstract Enthroned”** “I think this is the one that changed places with the ‘The Paradox,’ actually. It was a latecomer to the record, with a big orchestral part in the end and a great guitar solo. This one is a little bit more like pure death metal. You can almost hear the Morbid Angel in parts of the verses. It’s the only really aggressive song on the record. It deals with religion and how we enthrone the abstract, basically putting blinders on ourselves to be able to cope with life. I unintentionally put the word ‘virus’ in there somewhere. That’s the only pandemic reference there is.” **“Cosmic Pessimism”** “Musically, we really wanted to do something different here. We wanted a monotonous, almost oppressive musical landscape, similar to some of the krautrock bands like Neu! or Tangerine Dream. I had read three books by one of the current writers about pessimism, Eugene Thacker, and then I stumbled upon his personal email. I sent him a really long email explaining the concept of the record and dared to ask if he would want to participate in some way. He allowed me to use some passages from his book *Cosmic Pessimism* in the lyrics, which I did as a spoken-word part.” **“Eternal Winter of Reason”** “This was written specifically as a closer. I feel it’s the most emotional song on the record. \[Bassist\] Jonas \[Björler\] really wanted to try something else, too—if you notice, only the chorus riff returns. All the other riffs just build and build. I think there’s eight riffs or something, but they never come back. Lyrically, I tried to describe the emotional impact that this concept had on me as a person. There are some really strong, melancholic riffs, so I couldn’t do anything else but give in emotionally. So it’s like closure: What did I learn emotionally from this record?”

For their 11th album, extreme metal troupe Aborted worked backwards to find their inspiration. Instead of creating physical merchandise to fit the concept of the release, the international band—which includes musicians from Belgium, Italy, and the US—came up with the product first and wrote their record around it. “We wanted to make an action figure to go with the album,” vocalist and founder Sven de Caluwé tells Apple Music. “Of course, it had to fit with the ’80s and ’90s horror universe of the band, so we decided to create a slasher to rule them all. His name is Waylon, who’s a cult leader summoning demons to bring about the end of the world. He’s a metaphor for everything that’s been going on in this wonderful little playground we call a planet the last couple of years—the crazy conspiracy theories and all the insane division we’re having on a societal level.” Below, de Caluwé details each track on *ManiaCult*. **“Verderf”** “All our previous albums either started with an audio sample or some not-metal sounding intro. This time, we wanted to have something heavy and depressing to set the atmosphere for the ride that’s about to ensue. It’s pretty short, and there’s a couple of Dutch words in there—which is the first time I’ve ever done that. The title is Dutch for ‘decay,’ by the way.” **“ManiaCult”** “At first, we couldn’t put more than two or three riffs together for this song, so we gave it the working title ‘Small Lunch.’ I think we had maybe 10 versions of it until we got the track that came out. It became one of our favorites, so we decided to name it the title track. It’s more midtempo than the other stuff on the record, but there’s a lot of headbanging stuff going on there and a big-ass breakdown in the middle with Joe \[Badolato\] from Fit for an Autopsy.” **“Impetus Odi”** “This was the first single, and it was also the very first song written for the album. It’s probably one of the fastest songs we’ve ever done. There’s some exploration of vocal styles, with a lot more weird goblin or black metal vocals going on, so it’s definitely something new. I think it’s a very well-rounded Aborted song. It’s got the crazy-fast stuff, it’s got some technical stuff, it has the leads. There’s the black metal-tinted vibes in there and a big breakdown.” **“Portal to Vacuity”** “The last song was fast, but this is definitely the fastest song on the record. It doesn’t sound like it, maybe because there’s a lot of midtempo and even slower doom parts going on, but the last fast parts are 328 BPM or something like that. Starting with the *Retrogore* album in 2016, we infused a lot more black metal into the music, but every time we did that, we didn’t have the perfect mix of high-energy grind and death metal. So, this time we really wanted to get the balance right. I think it’s one of the most diverse songs on the record.” **“Dementophobia”** “This is probably the most simple and catchy song on the record. We brought a bunch of things back that we haven’t done in a long time, probably since *The Necrotic Manifesto*. We actually did a pretty funny animated video for this one. We’re all characters in a *Scooby-Doo* episode and a lot of silly stuff happens.” **“A Vulgar Quagmire”** “More black metal in this one, but with a mixture of grind and the tech-y side of Aborted—and dare I say, Cradle of Filth influences here and there. The song is simply about poop. Usually, we have one song per album about poop, but I was very dumb last time, and I actually forgot to put one on *TerrorVision*, so we made up for it by having two songs about shit on this one. But it’s also about *Family Guy*, because quagmire is quite vulgar.” **“Verbolgen”** “The title is Dutch for ‘disgusted.’ It was written by \[drummer\] Ken \[Bedene\] as something to break up the record, so there’s no metal in it. It’s strictly a piano interlude. We felt that *TerrorVision* was a long record that was very intense from start to finish, so sometimes the aggression didn’t hit that hard because there were no breaks. This time around, we really wanted to have something to cool things off and not pummel you relentlessly—so, when the next song hits, it’s like taking a sledgehammer to your teeth again.” **“Ceremonial Ineptitude”** “This is one of the first tracks we wrote, and I think it has a lot of very different things that we’ve been doing for the last couple of years. There’s a lot of vocal experimentation on this one, and some guest vocals from Ryo \[Kinoshita\] from Crystal Lake. I think it’s definitely one of the more catchy tunes on the record, so hopefully people enjoy it.” **“Drag Me to Hell”** “We always like to have a little homage to movies, since the horror universe is basically what we’re all about. I didn’t want to do a very mainstream movie, so we took the Sam Raimi movie *Drag Me to Hell* because it’s just like we are—incredibly silly and over the top. We’ve also got Filip Danielsson from Humanity’s Last Breath on this one, but the song is literally about the movie. I can’t remember how many times I laughed at the scene when that blond girl kept getting her hair pulled out.” **“Grotesque”** “That’s song number two about poop, so I invite you to read the incredibly silly lyrics. It’s also one of the last things we completed for the record, and it’s a little bit of an atypical song for us. It’s quite technical but also ventures more into the direction of a band like The Black Dahlia Murder. So, it’s a bit more foreign than the other stuff we’re doing, but it fits perfectly in the record.” **“I Prediletti: The Folly of the Gods”** “We’ve got Ben Duerr from Shadow of Intent on this song, and I think it’s quite a mixture of brutal death metal and black metal. You might even think Behemoth here and there. There’s a lot of different atmospheres going on, but it’s quite punishing from start to finish. The beginning is very surprising for us because it starts with a quite melodic guitar intro, which is very unlike Aborted, but I think it’s a perfect closer for the record.”