PopMatters' 20 Best Metal Albums of 2022

On their 12th album, Japanese black-metal experimentalists Sigh contemplate mortality. With assistance from vocalist/saxophonist Dr. Mikannibal, bassist Satoshi Fujinami, Kreator guitarist Frédéric Leclerc, and Fear Factory drummer Mike Heller—plus an array of traditional Japanese instruments—Sigh mastermind Mirai Kawashima faces down death on *Shiki*. “This turned out to be a heavy, dark, and very Japanese album,” Kawashima tells Apple Music. “As I wanted to express my fear of getting old and my fear of death as honestly and straightforwardly as possible, I had to use my own language instead of English this time. I always wonder what the point of making extreme music is when you are 50, but I believe this is an album only 50-year-old me could make—and this could be an answer to my own question.” Below, he describes each song. **“Kuroi Inori”** “An album intro that consists of only my voices. The title stands for ‘Black Prayer,’ and my voices are prayers in a fear of death.” **“Kuroi Kage”** “The title stands for ‘Black Shadow,’ which definitely implies death. This is the first track I wrote for the album. At first, I was thinking of making something in the vein of *Scorn Defeat*, and I guess this slow and heavy track has its remnants.” **“Shoujahitsumetsu”** “The title means ‘All the Living Must Die’ or something like that, which reflects a very Japanese/Asian/Buddhist view on life. Yes, I know, but still—I do not want to die. This is the fastest and the most straightforward song on the album.” **“Shikabane”** “The title simply means ‘A Corpse,’ and again, this is about how I am afraid of death. This is another very straightforward song with a strong Celtic Frost or Bathory feel. You can hear a great percussion solo by Mike Heller.” **“Satsui - Geshi No Ato”** “This one is a combination of two totally separate songs—the former means ‘Intent to Kill’ and the latter ‘After the Summer Solstice.’ ‘Satsui’ shows my personal view on the death penalty and ‘Geshi No Ato’ implies a fear of getting old. ‘Satsui’ is probably the catchiest number on the album, while ‘Geshi…’ is pretty much experimental, which means, musically, these two songs are poles apart too.” **“Fuyu Ga Kuru”** “The title stands for ‘Winter Comes.’ Now I am 52, and if a life had four seasons, I’d be in late autumn and winter is coming soon. There’d be no spring after that. Probably the weirdest song on the album, with lots of jazzy saxophones and flute on it.” **“Shouku”** “The title means ‘You Suffer Because You Live,’ which is a very Buddhist way of thinking. The song has a bit of a strange structure, and the second half is based on the rhythm Mike Heller came up with. The ending has a feel of Italian horror movies from the ’80s.” **“Kuroi Kagami”** “The title stands for ‘Black Mirror.’ This is an excerpt from a track which we decided not to use. It turned out that this part was cool enough to be included, though!” **“Mayonaka No Kaii”** “Definitely my favorite song on the album. It’s got everything from a cool guitar solo by Frédéric Leclercq to Hammond solo, flute solo, shakuhachi solo, vocoder, whistle scream, throat singing, and more. So many scenes are layered in this only five-and-a-half-minute song. The title means ‘A Strange Incident at Midnight,’ and this is based on an eerie experience I had to go through. The details are at the end of the video and in the booklet of the album.” **“Touji No Asa”** “This is our album outro, and it’s kind of a reprise of ‘Kuroi Inori.’ It ends with a high whistle played with an instrument named iwabue, which is just a small stone with a hole. The sound of the instrument represents the salvation of your soul.”

THE NEW STUDIO ALBUM FROM THE JAPANESE LEGENDS. AN OPUS OF DARK & ECLECTIC BLACKENED HEAVY METAL, SHROUDED IN TRADITIONAL EASTERN INFLUENCES Cult Japanese black metal legends Sigh formed in 1989/90, featuring mainman Mirai Kawashima, Satoshi Fujinami & Kazuki Ozeki. Following initial demos, Shinichi Ishikawa was brought in to replace Kazuki, and Sigh set about recording the masterpiece debut ‘Scorn Defeat’ for Euronymous’ Deathlike Silence Productions, going on to become one of the country’s greatest and most revered metal exports. With a journey through the strange and the psychedelic, incorporating a whole eclectic mix of genre styles & experimentation throughout their career, Sigh has remained a vital creative force in the avantgarde field whilst maintaining their old school roots. ‘Shiki’ marks the latest chapter in the Sigh legacy, and includes some of the band’s heaviest and darkest material for some years; a fine hybrid of at times primitive black metal akin to early influences such as Celtic Frost amid more epic melodic heavy metal riffing and solos. The album also utilises a whole host of instruments to give further texture and dynamics to the compositions and eerie atmosphere, incorporating traditional oriental instruments such as the Shakuhachi & Sinobue flutes. The word "Shiki" itself has various meanings in Japanese such as four seasons, time to die, conducting an orchestra, ceremony, motivation, colour. The two primary themes for the album are "four seasons" and "time to die". The concept and artwork is based around a traditional Japanese poem, and on ‘Shiki’ Mirai explores how at this stage of life he himself is going through Autumn, with Winter coming soon, and so empathises with the contrasting sentimental feelings from watching cherry blossoms (a symbol of spring) in full bloom. Joining Mirai and Dr Mikannibal for this release are Frédéric Leclercq of Kreator, plus US drummer extraordinaire, Mike Heller of Fear Factory, along with an appearance by longtime member Satoshi Fujinami on bass. ‘Shiki’ was recorded across multiple studios, and mixed and mastered by Lasse Lammert at LSD studios in Germany.

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept. Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut LP. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over 40 minute runtime, God’s Country displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.

‘HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE is a sonic exploration of the ways that subjects under late capitalism are constrained and set in motion via the various structures that uphold stratification and oppression in urban contexts. It is inspired by brutalist, postmodern and utilitarian architectural structures that are found throughout post-industrial cities, hauntological in nature, being designed to provide for the populace through affordable housing but ultimately cost-cutting exercises and unfit for purpose. The term hostile architecture refers to design elements in social spaces that deter the public from using the object for means unintended by the designer, e.g. anti-homeless spikes, which the album presents as emblematic of a foundational contempt for the poor and working class, an exemplification of a status quo fortified in concrete. The album invites the listener to explore the dissonance of these contradictions in their own circumstances and perhaps consider possibilities for a world beyond what Mark Fisher called “Capitalist Realism.”’ Tragic Heroin Video: youtu.be/XBNY-l3NT9s

When working on material for their eighth album, the members of Canadian noise-rock quadrangle KEN mode ended up writing twice as much as they intended. This creative outpouring left vocalist/guitarist Jesse Matthewson, his brother and drummer Shane, bassist Skot Hamilton, and saxophonist/pianist Kathryn Kerr with a decision to make. “From a writing and story standpoint, we wanted it to all be one big piece,” Jesse tells Apple Music. “But for a band of our size and style, a big double record is a really bad idea. But the material is really good, so we figured we could divide it into two distinct stories that build off of each other.” As a result, *NULL* is the first half of a collection that will be completed by a second album—aptly titled *VOID*—at some point in the future. Below, Jesse discusses each track on *NULL*. **“A Love Letter”** “This was one of the first songs I started writing while I was teaching myself how to do preproduction on a digital audio workstation, so I probably rewrote it six times. When it came time to get the saxophone going, I wanted Kathryn to make a sound like a dying elk, and that’s the sound that you hear in the verses. When we were writing the chorus parts, she whipped out this mildly obscure jazz lead that felt part Miles Davis, part war horn. It sounded so special to me that it really set the stage for how I wanted to utilize saxophone on all our writing.” **“Throw Your Phone in the River”** “I wrote this shortly after George Floyd and the subsequent internet eruption. Obviously, it was a horrible act, but I couldn’t deal with how awful everyone was being to each other during the fallout. I get it—we were all in lockdown and people were freaking out and frantic, but it was fucked up. This song is largely about my inability to help those around me cope with their own mental health problems, because I just couldn’t keep my shit together. I mean, it’s no secret that social media is destroying the fabric of society, and I feel like more people would be better off if they pitched their smartphone in the river. At the same time, we need them for almost everything these days.” **“The Tie”** “I’ve been messing around with synthesizers since 2019, but during lockdown, I really got to experiment a little bit more. Skot and I wrote the bones of this one together, just messing around on my synths, creating a loop and getting together with Kathryn to throw some saxophone on top of it. The lyrics are entirely Skot’s because since he joined, I’ve been attempting to get him to contribute lyrically to the band because he’s a very good writer. You’d have to ask him about the motivation behind it, but I feel like it’s him facing his artistic ego head-on.” **“But They Respect My Tactics”** “This will make me sound like an old man, but you know how the kids say, ‘This one slaps’? I feel like it gets misused a lot, but for me, the riffs on this one slap. Lyrically speaking, it’s very much a commentary on social media and marketing in and of itself, with a mild disappointment in the world. It’s very much an existential circling-the-drain situation where I don’t want to become someone who clings for dear life onto a former version of myself. I get why that happens, but it just seems sad to me.” **“Not My Fault”** “One of the very first lines in the song is about dealing with an unnerving tension in the air. You just want to help get people through it, but it’s all for naught and you have the weight of that crushing you every day. This one was another of the early tracks that I wrote when I was starting to feel comfortable writing all by myself again. When I came up with the first riff in this song, I was just really happy with how catchy it was. Which I know sounds silly when it’s something you wrote yourself, but that’s usually a good sign that you’re onto something.” **“Lost Grip”** “This is another one that I wrote with Skot, and it’s very much a humans-abusing-the-planet song. It’s also a commentary on Western culture and everyone’s obsession with wealth and power and megalomania. It’s very much coming from the perspective of, ‘We deserve this pandemic. We had it coming.’ I can’t help but feel that there’s a lot of people on this earth that, no matter how they spin it, don’t mean well for everyone at all. They’re just trying to sell everyone their agenda. It’s also one of my favorite songs we’ve ever written.” **“The Desperate Search for an Enemy”** “I wrote the bassline for this on a synth and all the drum parts in MIDI without actually playing it, so Shane had to figure out how the hell he was going to apply that to an actual drum kit. Lyrically, it very much goes back to ‘Throw Your Phone in the River,’ about everyone feeling more virtuous than the other side that they’re raging against—and their obsession with making an enemy out of anyone who doesn’t agree with the way they think. I hate to come across as some bullshit centrist, but that’s where most of the world actually is, and I’m getting so tired of watching everyone fight all the time.” **“Unresponsive”** “After I came up with that one riff that’s like total Swans/Black Flag worship, I tried to create dynamics utilizing percussion and my voice alone. My brother has said he feels this is the strongest vocal performance I’ve ever had on any of our records, so I’m happy that he feels that way. Lyrically, it’s about feeling, like, this rise in tension just never gives. I was writing it when there was a storm rolling in that just never seemed like it was going to reach its crescendo. It felt like a metaphor for everything that was going on in the world.”

NULL, the band’s brand-new aural abrasion, may be the group’s quintessential statement of mental collapse and despair made sonic, a direct psychological reaction to the collective experience of the last two and a half years. Drawing from not only the desperate noise and industrial sonics of the 80’s and 90’s ala Swans, Einsturzende Neubauten, or even a Nine Inch Nails, the band has mixed in a decidedly more desperate tone to their already pointed metal/hardcore influenced “extreme noise rock” (see Melvins, Today Is The Day meets Converge and Botch), that has become their signature. Featuring 8 new tracks recorded and produced throughout the fall and winter of 2021 by Andrew Schneider, mastered by Carl Saff, with artwork and layouts by the band's longtime collaborator Randy Ortiz. Recorded October 2021 @ Private Ear Recording in Winnipeg, MB, Canada by Andrew Schneider, cello on 'Unresponsive' by Natanielle Felicitas. Guilty Parties: Jesse Matthewson, Shane Matthewson, Scott Hamilton, Kathryn Kerr.

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On September 23rd an album of full-blown darkness is set to be unleashed. Nordjevel presents Gnavhòl! Conceptually, Nordjevel evolves further and ventures into even more sinister territories. Gnavhòl is driven by war, destruction and hellish esoteric beliefs, they have created an album that is even darker and more brutal than their previous releases. About the album Nordjevel states: “Gnavhòl is darker, more dynamic and tecnhically on another level than before. This is how we want Nordjevel to sound.” Nordjevel entered the international black metal scene in 2015 and spread like a plague, capturing audiences at festivals such as Inferno, Kaltenbach Open Air, Wacken, Hellfest, Bloodstock, Maryland Deathfest and In Flammen Open Air. The band was founded by Doedsadmiral, and consists of established musicians from bands such as Ragnarok, Myrkskog and Dark Funeral. Through distinctive vocals set to a brutal and instrumental sonic desert, Nordjevel leads the listeners into an empire of infernal rage filled with an obscure, barbaric darkness. Their self-titled debut album was released in 2016, and Nordjevel entered the field like a freezing storm, and quickly became a force to be reckoned with. Nordjevel`s brutal and true take on black metal impressed. The band’s atmospheric and committed sound paired with high technical finesse, unique interplay and raw, unfiltered imagery, has the power to give any black metal fan the chills. In 2019, Nordjevel released the follow-up album Necrogenecis, and in 2021 they released the EP Fenriir. Both releases show the hugeness Nordjevel is capable of, receiving raving reviews and top scores from press and fans all over the world. All of Nordjevel’s releases has made it to numerous “best of the year lists”, and they have quickly proved their position on the international black metal scene. Tracklist: I Djevelens Skygge Of Rats and Men Satans Manifest Within the Eyes Gnavhòl Antichrist Flesh Spores of Gnosis Gnawing the Bones Endritual Twisted Psychosis*

There’s a real sense of loss on Brooklyn experimental black metalists Scarcity’s debut album Aveilut, an inescapable presence of the realities of death. Multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-Myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble since Branca’s passing) wrote “Aveilut” while processing the sudden deaths of two people close to him, tracked it while caught in Beijing’s first lockdown of 2020, and finished it while surrounded by the overwhelming plague visuals of New York’s early COVID peak. Back in Brooklyn, vocalist Doug Moore (of Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) soon found himself in the midst of an equally bleak lockdown experience — living next to a funeral home when New York City was America’s COVID epicenter. From conception through development, tangible death surrounded Aveilut. The result of such a profound closeness with death is the grief-stricken Aveilut, which takes its name from the Hebrew word for mourning. 72-note octaves, alternate tunings, psychoacoustic phenomena andmacro-phrases embody the hugeness of loss, the inexplicable space of death’s void that Randall-Myers faced both on a personal and existential scale. Together with Moore’s gripping vocal delivery and stark lyrics, the album takes the form of a hyperobject, an entity with such vastness and reach that it’s difficult for the human mind to comprehend. Consisting of one 45-minute composition, the music is black metal roughly in the vein of Jute Gyte, Krallice, Mare Cognitum, and Ehnahre – with hefty doses of post-Branca microtonal guitar abuse, and a cinematic scope that draws on Randall-Myers’ work with orchestras. Aveilut’s mathematical abstraction and lyrical focus on the greatness of the void breed raw emotion, attempting to represent a catastrophe, the vastness and inevitability of things outside our control; as well as a direct expression of grief, a kind of requiem. Though born of Randall-Myers and Moore’s intense intimacy with absence, Aveilut is an attempt to present a harrowing universal representation of death’s true form.

“New Catastrophism”, the first LOCRIAN release in seven years sees the iconic experimental music trio return back to their roots through four immersive tracks that signal towards the band’s signature expressions through dark ambient, experimental music, drone and post rock. Massive dystopian soundscapes through the intricate, layered, and spacious sound palette LOCRIAN unveil. LOCRIAN is a prophetic voice of decline. From the band’s inception, it has comfortably straddled both the experimental and metal underground, weaving themes of apocalypse, urban decay, environmental destruction and birth/death/rebirth throughout its multifaceted and genre-defying releases. The trio formed in 2005 in Chicago and features Terence Hannum (synthesizers, vocals, tape loops), André Foisy (guitars, electronics), and Steven Hess (drums, electronics). Over their sixteen-year history, Locrian have released six studio albums, three collaborative albums, and numerous limited-edition releases.

The legendary BORIS celebrate a 30 year career as one of experimental music's most forward-thinking, heavy, and innovative bands with the new album Heavy Rocks (2022). Continuing their series of Heavy Rocks records, BORIS once again channels the classic proto-metal sounds of the 70s into something all new. The album, 10 pulse-pounding tracks, highlight the very trajectory of BORIS and their storied career - from the driving, fuzzed out Rock N' Roll opener "She is Burning", to the punk, raucous "My Name is Blank", BORIS are heavier than ever before. "Question 1" is just kickass - D-beats give way to a doomed, spaced out and heavier-than-anything guitar wailing and feedback, before diving back into their Metal, sending the listener into a complete frenzy. This is unmistakably BORIS, and this is the band at the height of their powers. Elsewhere on the record, a more daring, "out there" side of the band begins to shine on tracks such as the aptly titled "Blah Blah Blah", the industrial "Ghostly Imagination" and the truly wild "Nosferatou". Noisy passages (not unlike prior collaborations with legendary artists like Merzbow,) collide with visceral vocal howls while a relentless, almost Zornian-saxophone shreds harder than any guitar solo ever could. In 2022, BORIS cement what Heavy Rock means to them, and release one of their most captivating records to date.