Stereogum's 10 Best Metal Albums of 2022

Created as a collaboration between DMP and BLUT AUS NORD, the Order of Outer Sounds was a subscriber-only forum and collective hub which ran over two year-long seasons between February 2020 and February 2022. Fostering an uplifting sense of community based around the hallucinogenic hellscapes of BLUT AUS NORD, the Order provided the artists with an inventive new playground for experimentation, and a place in which to conjure the cosmic dimensions of Lovecraft via the darkest, most obscure side of their music. The 6 bespoke tracks comprising "Lovecraftian Echoes" were unveiled in instalments during Season 2 of the forum between April 2021 and February 2022 and were recorded/mixed by Vindsval at Earthsound studio. Due to their unearthly quality and thematic coherence the tracks are now available to non-Order members in digital format. It must be emphasised that this is NOT the new BLUT AUS NORD album but instead a compilation of custom-made pieces continuing the musical exploration started in 2003 with "The Work Which Transforms God". The music contained in "Lovecraftian Echoes" has been described variously by OoOS acolytes as: "glorious anthems to the Great Old Ones", "mesmerising", "nightmarish", "beyond frightening", "subterranean", and "madness!"

VINYL AVAILABLE THRU SEEING RED RECORDS! chromeghost-us.bandcamp.com in our follow up to the (shockingly) successful record The Diving Bell, we wanted to keep exploring sounds and figure out how we can keep ourselves and our audience excited about this music. House of Falling Ash is our longest record, our most sonically ambitious record, (with pedal steel guitar, arpeggiated synths, mellotron) but also our most thematically ambitious record. this loosely-formed concept record is about a sort of dreamscape of the unconscious where the pain and secrets of our lives rest locked away in a decrepit home choked in roses and encircled by guard dogs. this pain has nowhere to go and the world (and the house) are crumbling around it and threaten to go down in flames. our long-time collaborator pat hills returned to engineer this record as well as lending his talents to multiple instruments. the furnace features the second appearance of CHRCH's eva rose to bring her flamethrowing vocals. the fourth track, where black dogs dream, features a gorgeous interlude by yseulde, and a climactic last third with vocals from brume's susie mcmullin. basically, we called in the cavalry on this one. FOR BEST RESULTS INCREASE VOLUME love you all, thanks for everything

Escrito entre Enero y Abril del 2022, excepto "Qui Vivra Verra", escrita en 2019. Producido durante la segunda mitad del verano de 2022. Support me on patreon: www.patreon.com/whitefalconstudio Cassettes (coming soon): cantiereticiproductions.bandcamp.com/album/partida

2nd Album

Seven years after "Beyond The Red Mirror", Krefeld metal kings BLIND GUARDIAN make a brilliant return and compensate for the waiting time with their new studio album "The God Machine". Offering anthems like "Blood Of The Elves", "Secrets Of The American Gods" and "Violent Shadows", the album proves to be a modern masterpiece that transports the trademarks of the classic "Imaginations From The Other Side" into the here and now. Hansi Kürsch explains: "We didn't want to rehash our style from 1995, but on the other hand we didn't want to have to continue on our current path forever. "The God Machine" is a new beginning for us. We're putting everything back to square one and return to certain patterns that we neglected a bit on previous releases." Look forward to an album that is straighter, more aggressive, but always blessed with highly infectious melodies and hooks."

Nine albums in, Swedish tech maestros Meshuggah are still pushing metal’s boundaries forward. *Immutable* sees the band honing and expanding the djent style they’re credited with originating while offering a glimpse of an ominous future. “A lot of the lyrical content of the album is social commentary on what we see happening around us, and man’s inability to change and evolve,” drummer and lyricist Tomas Haake tells Apple Music. “The cover art tells the story—you have a man that’s burning, but he’s still going for a knife. The title also references the band itself—we’re doing the same thing we set out to do many years ago.” Below, he comments on each track. **“Broken Cog”** “This one is ‘third time’s the charm.’ We actually started recording this for *Koloss* back in 2012, but it just didn’t feel right. We tried it again for *The Violent Sleep of Reason*, but it didn’t happen again. This time, we finally got it to work. It was a deliberate choice to put this first, a song that builds and builds, and once the vocals kick in, it’s not even \[vocalist\] Jens \[Kidman\]—it’s just warped whispers and stuff. It’s definitely an esoteric choice of first track, but I think it’s cool because you have no idea what to expect of the next one.” **“The Abysmal Eye”** “This is a track that me and \[bassist\] Dick \[Lövgren\] worked on for a long time. We had two or three hours’ worth of different riffs that we honed down to this. Lyrics-wise, it’s the big AI scare. To a certain degree, it was inspired by an interview with Elon Musk, where he talks about AI. It’s daunting and scary if you allow yourself to get into that mode of thinking.” **“Light the Shortening Fuse”** “This is one of \[guitarist\] Mårten \[Hagström\]’s tracks, and he wrote the lyrics for it as well. It’s a commentary on how social media has changed everything and become such a tool for idiocy and disinformation. It’s become a political tool that people look to as some form of verified news outlet, \[whereas in\] reality it’s quite the opposite. No one should ever listen to it. And also, for kids, as far as body dysmorphia and all these filters that make you look a certain way—social media fucks with everything.” **“Phantoms”** “We’re one of those bands that can sometimes write music and rhythms completely based around drums. This was a song that I’d been messing around with for a while, and I put some weird, downtuned guitars on it, but then Dick came in and wrote real riffs for it. Lyrically, this is one of the few that’s a bit more personal. It’s about memories and regrets over things you’ve done or said in life that you really wish undone. As you get older and step out of your younger self, you get a better sense of how hurtful some of those things were.” **“Ligature Marks”** “This is another one of Mårten’s tracks, and to me it’s one of the strongest on the album. I heard him playing this thing about a week before we went into the studio and was like, ‘Dude, what is that?’ Apparently, he’d had it laying around for years, but it made it to the album with a week’s notice. The song is using S&M vocabulary as metaphors for how we act in life as masochists or sadists on a spiritual level—as a species, but also as individuals being the threat to our own existence.” **“God He Sees in Mirrors”** “Dick Lövgren wrote everything for this. It’s a very short, rhythmical phrase that never starts the same way, which makes it weird to listen to. Lyrically, this is about how the well-being of the individual and the collective is subdued under the policies of tyrants and dictators. Instead, the gaining of power and personality cult becomes way more important than policy-directing. See Trump, for example. Or Bolsonaro in Brazil. There’s plenty of them around the world. They see God in mirrors.” **“They Move Below”** “This is an instrumental, and it’s one of Mårten’s tracks. This is his go-to place. For each album, he always writes something in the style of this, where it’s a little sludgier, with almost one foot in stoner rock and one foot in metal. It also has a two- or three-minute intro that’s only clean guitar. It’s beautiful-sounding. We’re using this track as a tool on the album to take things down several notches and start over.” **“Kaleidoscope”** “To me, this one is a little bit like the *Koloss* track ‘Do Not Look Down,’ which was a little bit more rock and not quite as metal. This is another one me and Dick worked on together. We weren’t really sure about this one until we heard Jens’ vocals and started mixing it. Then we realized, ‘Oh, this thing is hopping.’ Lyrically, it’s imagining a drug you could take that lets you see things for what they truly are, whether that’s injustices or lies or even good things.” **“Black Cathedral”** “This is an intro for ‘I Am That Thirst,’ but it is its own track. The weird thing is, on the album there’s a long gap between them. I felt like they should have been more put together. But it really ties into ‘I Am That Thirst’ in the sense that you have the same tremolo-picking going on with something like 20 or 30 guitars stacked on top of each other. Sometimes you’re feeling like you just want to put something on there that’s not what people expect at all, and this is one of those things.” **“I Am That Thirst”** “That’s a track by Mårten, but I wrote the lyrics for it. He usually goes into sludge mode or thrash mode, and this is definitely his thrash mode. People might recognize this style from some of the earlier works we’ve done. Lyrically, it’s about man’s desire for wealth and immortality—and the thirst for more, regardless of the status or wealth that you already possess. A ‘grass is greener on the other side’ type of thing.” **“The Faultless”** “Another Mårten track with my lyrics. This is a first for us because it has Jens, Mårten, and me doing vocals for it. There’s a part that goes from left to right, where Mårten does a vocal and Jens does the answer. And then there’s a spoken vocal part that comes in—that’s my voice, and we just pitched it down a half a note or something. Lyrically, it’s about mental and psychological abuse through words and actions, and how some people go through life inflicting injury on others while being completely unable to see their own faults and flaws.” **“Armies of the Preposterous”** “This is one of me and Dick’s tracks. It’s a waltz, which is unusual. We’ve only done that once before, which was ‘The Demon’s Name is Surveillance’ off the *Koloss* album. It’s also one of the few songs on the album that has faster double bass for longer periods of time. Lyrically, it’s about the preposterous rise of neo-Nazism and far-right policies around the world. It’s scary to me how supposedly functioning individuals can stand there and say that the genocide of the Jews during World War II did not happen.” **“Past Tense”** “It’s been a few albums since we ended on something really calm like this, but it’s a tool we used to implement in the ’90s, especially on *Chaosphere* and *Destroy Erase Improve*. We just wanted to strengthen the sad note that ‘Armies of the Preposterous’ ends on by adding a final track that’s sad and melancholy.”