Rolling Stone's 20 Best Metal Albums of 2016

File this under Perfect Skateboarding Music. Anchored by James Hetfield’s unctuous roar, songs like “Hardwired,” “Moth Into Flame,” and “Atlas, Rise” are no-frills, hard-charging thrash that knocks over everything in its path. The furious pace comes to a simmer on the nuanced “Dream No More” and “Here Comes Revenge,” both worthy of stadium anthem status. But the prevailing mood is downcast. *Hardwired… To Self-Destruct* is hard music for hard times, an amplified reaction to—and reflection of—an inhumane society.

The Northwestern metal band takes a huge leap forward with this impeccably engineered display of doom. Like the trunk of an ancient tree, “Rigid Man” is dense and primeval—its heaving rhythms will leave you picturing a behemoth rolling a boulder up a mountaintop in a thunderstorm. From a squalling haze of noise, “Image of Control” coalesces into a deeply satisfying cudgel-swinging riff. Unlike its doom metal peers, Sumac is never drowsy. Their musical ambitions heat up “Blackout,” a writhing epic that occupies the overlapping territory between Sleep’s stoner metal, Sub Pop’s grunge, and Slint’s scathing math rock.

SUMAC (Aaron Turner on guitar and vocals, Nick Yacyshyn on drums, and Brian Cook on bass) invests in the recursive exercises of chaos and control, which manifest on the band’s second album What One Becomes. The trio’s debut The Deal (2015) revealed a new side of Turner’s combustible songwriting and guitar work, further expanding on his efforts in Isis and Old Man Gloom. On the new album, the trio has elevated the songs’ complexities with a greater entanglement of velocity, density, form, and function. The results are a testament to the tour-honed collective intuition and technical skills of drummer Yacyshyn (Baptists), bassist Cook (Russian Circles, These Arms Are Snakes, Botch) and Turner. The music of What One Becomes requires that each player be attuned to the dynamics and the tension within the multilateral structures. On “Clutch Of Oblivion” the riff develops from a languid desert-rock melody and blossoms into a dense aggregate of rhythm, force, and vigor. A muscular hypno-rock aspiration burns out before reaching escape orbit, and the ensuing plummet of solitary guitar notes lead the band into the realm of introspection before another volley of motorik pummel. “Rigid Man” begins as a lurching epithet that finds the trio in a shadow boxing lockstep for the song’s first half of pugilistic rhythm and noise, only to smash itself on the ground amidst a diabolical feedback whorl from Turner’s guitar and to tear free from the rhythmic underbelly, tapping into the vein of unhinged expressionism howled by Les Rallizes Denudes and Caspar Brotzmann Massaker. There is a profound anxiety that leaches through What One Becomes. SUMAC's choreographed structures parallel the internal and personal struggles with anxiety. They seek to identify the source, devise a course of action, and confront that condition at hand. Turner explains, “Much of it has to do with questioning fabricated structures of identity and what it means when those structures are destabilized by contact with the outside. That has been a unnerving process to undergo, but also fruitful in terms of discovering the path to individuation and realized connection with the self. Another facet of experience I’m working to convey is about living with the sustained presence of anxiety, and avoiding reliance on musical devices of cathartic release to provide escape from this condition.” Sumac channels psychic distress into their rigorously algebraic maneuvers and syllable-crack dissonance. These are an acts of honesty in the face of a particular conduction as well as acutely prescient designs of musical intensity that commands attention to all of this detail.

The heaviest of swan songs. Billed as the New Jersey unit’s final LP, *Dissociation* is arguably their finest, a culminating effort whose violent mood shifts and tangles of barbed guitar are met with dark, atmospheric grandeur. From the dizzying post-hardcore of “Limerent” to the dystopian R&B of its title track and schizophrenic thrills of “Low Feels Blvd,” its impact is felt long after it’s over. 

Eight albums and 20 years deep, a determination to stretch metal’s boundaries remains sacrosanct for the Californians. Another key Deftones tenet—bonding aggression with vulnerability—rages throughout an album that captures a band invigorated and reflective. “There’s a new strange, godless demon awake inside me” sings Chino Moreno on cacophonous opener “Prayers / Triangles” and it sets the rapturous tone. The juddering “Doomed User” amps up the drama while “Geometric Headdress”, “(L)mirl” and “Phantom Bride” are piercing examples of the band’s propensity for melody.

In honor of their late mother, brothers Joe and Mario Duplantier of French metallurgists Gojira respond to tragedy with some of the most emotional songs of their career. Epic suites yield to sharpened body blows. For every pummeling track like “Silvera” and “The Cell” there are moving salutes like “The Shooting Star” and “Yellow Stone,” where sadness and depression transform into submission and ultimately salvation.

With their mind-melting eighth epos, Cult Of Luna & Julie Christmas bring you to the outer rim of the ever expanding boundaries of the cosmos, where the rules of man are not applicable and the cold, dark nothing envelops the harsh realities of the universe.

Get blasted by this California hardcore band’s 20-minute masterpiece of powerviolence. The band wastes no time assaulting your pressure points with the extraordinary title song—after just 90 seconds, you’ll have to examine yourself for internal bleeding. “Violence Is Forever” detonates with relentless fury, punk rage, and metal force. The band’s commitment to life-threatening viciousness never falters. To punctuate that point, “In Pain” ramps up its rabid confrontation in the final seconds. After preparing you with nine abbreviated attacks, the eight-minute “They Come Crawling Back” recruits you for a truly apocalyptic epic.

ABBATH unleashes the fury of a Nordic blizzard at full force with his crushing debut album. The heavy-metal icon and former IMMORTAL front-man returns with a self-titled album packed with his signature razor-sharp riffs and black metal anthems. Stellar cuts "Winter Bane", "Ashes of the Damned", "To War", "Fenrir Hunts" and more are nothing short of true heavy metal thunder. 'Abbath' is the black metal album of 2016, and returns him to his rightful place as the face of the genre.

NORWAY'S FINEST TRADITIONAL HEAVY METAL BAND DARKTHRONE RELEASE INSPIRED BLACKENED METAL ALBUM Norwegian duo Darkthrone began in the late 80's as a thrash/death metal act & progressed through technical death/doom metal experimentation to become legends of the black metal world and one of the original leading bands of the Norwegian scene, as well as inspiring a whole generation of metal bands. They returned in 2016 with their first new studio material since 2013’s triumphant The Underground Resistance; the album becoming the band’s most successful release in recent years. The heavy metal odyssey of 2016, Arctic Thunder, far outstripped even The Underground Resistance and powered the band straight to the front of fans' and critics' wanted lists. The album became an instant favourite as Fenriz and Nocturno Culto once more showed their mastery of “the riff”, demonstrating why Darkthrone remain one of the most respected and enduring acts in the history of extreme metal. An eclectic mix of free-spirited 80’s fuelled blackened heavy metal, all executed in Darkthrone's trademark raw and organic style, 2016's Arctic Thunder was recorded & produced by the band themselves, with the sessions conducted at Darkthrone’s old rehearsal unit "The Bomb Shelter", which they had originally used between 1988-1990. With themes based around hate, contempt, and the inner mind & soul, and with the notable presence of Nocturno Culto on vocal duties across all songs for the first time in recent years, Arctic Thunder retains a grim atmosphere, with a healthy dose of raw black metal inspired riffing permeating the album's 8 tracks. Mastering was again handled by Jack Control at Enormous Door.

Crowbar’s eleventh and latest album, The Serpent Only Lies, is both an affirmation of the band’s staying power and a nod to their legacy. “To me, it’s a fresh-sounding version of old-school Crowbar,” says vocalist, guitarist and mastermind Kirk Windstein. “I intentionally went back and listened to a lot of old Crowbar stuff, like the self-titled and Broken Glass albums, to get a feel for what my mindset was 20-plus years ago. I also went back and listened to the bands that influenced Crowbar in the beginning, like Trouble, Saint Vitus, Melvins, and the first Type O Negative record. So it was kinda me doing my homework.” The result is an album that stands toe-to-toe with those early Crowbar classics while maintaining the lumbering hooks of mid-period standouts like 1998’s Odd Fellows Rest and 2000’s Equilibrium. Bolstered by massive riffage, new songs“I Am The Storm,” “Embrace The Light” and the title track explore the themes of life, loss and spirituality, respectively. “Even lyrically, the approach was a little more old-school,” Windstein offers. “Some of the songs have less lyrics to let the riffs breathe a little more, which I had kind of gotten away from over the years. It was a conscious thing to go back to that.”