My taste in music has pivoted steadily toward black metal in the last few years. A third of my favorite records of 2016 were black metal, and in 2017 the genre claims half my list, with its fingers in (most of) the other half. There are any number of reasons for this shift, but maybe the most salient is that when I listen to music, I want to feel as if I’m in the presence of something greater than people playing instruments; and black metal, with its conceits of mysticism and the occult, of nonconformism and transcendence, fits that bill better than most styles of music.
Anyway:
Anyway:
10. Dodecahedron - Kwintessens
Hailing from the Netherlands rather than Iceland, Dodecahedron have a lot in common with that country’s black metal, although they take a stormier approach that gives them room to explore more idiosyncratic musical territory than their contemporaries. Kwintessens contains the single heaviest “interlude” track I’ve ever heard, and despite the album’s overall jaggedness, it makes for such a quick, smooth listen that I would find myself addictively looping the record for hours in the early part of the year. It hasn’t lost its dark luster since.
9. Artificial Brain - Infrared Horizon
An arbitrary rivalry began in Metal Lifestyle Group Chat (TM)between Artificial Brain and Pyrrhon a few months ago as we tried to determine which of these two New York death metal bands was “better.” There’s no way to answer that question, but for my money, I enjoy Artificial Brain’s cold, inhuman version of the style more than Pyrrhon’s noise-inflected cacophony (which isn’t a jab at them; What Passes for Survival is a helluva record). By removing the humanity from the sound, they gesture toward something larger: non-humanity, and what happens after the species collapses. That chill of cosmic horror has stayed with me all year.
8. Almyrkvi - Umbra
And, at the tail end of the year, an echo of that same chill came to me in Almyrkvi’s Umbra. Arguably more powerful in the context of black metal’s historic nihilism, the album lives up to song titles like “Forlorn Astral Ruins” and “Stellar Winds of the Dying Star” with an expansive, frozen sound full of dread, melancholia, and a creeping paranoia that one is listening to something better not heard. Umbra is a bad dream; like watching the shadow of a strange planet fall over the world and knowing it will never pass.
7. Vitriol - Pain Will Define Their Death
Everything I feel I needed to say about this record was said in my review. At only three tracks, placing it above three other fully fleshed-out records may raise some eyebrows, but there is a wholeness to Pain Will Define Their Death that transcends its short runtime, and something corrosively fresh underneath. It’s a statement in three parts, one whose implications may not reveal themselves until we have a proper Vitriol full-length in our hands, or until others take the record up on its implicit challenge to death metal. For now, this is one of the most memorable releases of 2017, heralding even better to come.
6. Blaze of Perdition - Conscious Darkness
I’m late to the Blaze of Perdition party, but given the number of times I’ve sat in awe of Conscious Darkness since discovering it, I think I’ve earned my place. As a Polish blackened death metal band, they have much in common with latter-day Behemoth: an arsenal of bludgeoning, darkly melodic riffs; an occult mystique; conviction. Conscious Darkness introduces itself with a clip from The Young Pope that functions as a miniature portrait of the album’s spiritual turmoil before it crushes the listener beneath it: “Everyone must learn that it takes sacrifice and suffering to find God. It's too easy to come to terms with God as the sun is setting. They have to find Him in the cold and the dark of night. The way I did.” On the heels of a personal tragedy that affected both members of the band (yes, this is a duo; have another listen and be dazzled all over again), Conscious Darkness teems with human emotion and cathartic power even as it strives to overcome them, and its failure leaves a wound.
5. '68 - Two Parts Viper
The most unabashedly Josh Scogin record with which Josh Scogin has yet been involved, Two Parts Viper may just be the definitive record of his career, a sentiment I share with my Metal Lifestyle pal Alex Brown: it’s a brash, exciting, and excited record that excavates Scogin’s own beating heart for the thrill of it. Two Parts Viper swaggers, shakes, and implodes; it’s flecked with the splinters of broken instruments; it pulses with that inimitable southern mannerliness that defines Scogin’s persona on and off the stage. It sounds as if it was both meticulously planned and thrown together on the fly. Everything is here. Everything is happening at once. As anyone who’s attended a live set of theirs has asked themselves, how the hell do they do it?
4. Dödsrit - Dödsrit
I love Totem Skin. Sometime in the near future, I’ll cobble together a retrospective piece on the little Swedish metalcore band that swept me off my feet, and it will almost certainly drip with misty-eyed fanboyisms despite my best efforts to filter them out. Dödsrit (which translates to something like “Deathride,” or maybe “Deathrite”; my Swedish is only as good as Google Translate) is the solo project of ex-Totem Skin guitarist Christoffer Oster, with which he explores the gloomier aspects of his former project’s blackened crust/emo/powerviolence sound. In fact, it’s built from the repurposed parts of Totem Skin’s planned third record. “The Void” is a powerful example of the direction Totem Skin may have taken, invoking the majesty of “Seasons Don’t Fear the Reaper, We Can Be Like They Are” updated with the dynamism of Weltschmerz. In other words, it’s one of my favorite songs of the year and the album’s unquestionable centerpiece. Once again, Dödsrit is short at four songs and a runtime just under half an hour, but it does right by the legacy of one of my favorite bands--I’ve spent more time exploring its impenetrable mists and forlorn glens than most of my favorite records this year, and that counts for something.
3. Full of Hell - Trumpeting Ecstasy
Full of Hell have long been one of the hardest-working bands in metal. Trumpeting Ecstasy is their defining moment. Members of Metal Lifestyle will try to tell you that it’s actually Rudiments of Mutilation, and they’re entitled to their opinion; it’s mine that Trumpeting Ecstasy not only boasts some of the deftest songwriting of their impressive career, but that it’s also their most thematically consistent, and their most (sorry) full of hell, tapping the same well of grinding madness from which they’ve always drawn, but now with a more pronounced backbone of death metal and an experimental edge honed over their collaborations with the body and Merzbow. Around the release of “Deluminate,” vocalist Dylan Walker mentioned that the band had been influenced during the writing of the record by the films of Ben Wheatley, director of Kill List, one of my favorite films. Wheatley’s movies are defined by a sort of nihilistic absurdity, most visible in Sightseers and A Field in England; like those movies, Trumpeting Ecstasy thrives on scorn and irreverence. This is a bitter, hateful album with acid in its veins. It’s Jane Doe for Xenomorphs.
2. The Great Old Ones - EOD: A Tale of Dark Legacy
France’s The Great Old Ones turned what should have been a gimmick into a glorious performance philosophy with their first record, Al Azif, and haven’t let up since, expounding on their ominous debut (lyrically indebted to H.P. Lovecraft, a major selling point) to deliver an album-length adaptation of “At the Mountains of Madness” for their sophomore record Tekeli-Li, and now “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” for their third record, EOD: A Tale of Dark Legacy. As a horror nerd and a fan of epic-sized black metal, The Great Old Ones are catnip; and as their best-realized work thus far, EOD is nirvana, replete with cavernous walls of sound and an aura of illimitable darkness. By turns, it recalls Emperor at the heights of their powers, around Anthems to the Welkin At Dusk; Wolves in the Throne Room; and even Sulphur Aeon’s Gateways to the Antisphere, with which is shares a similar aqueous sensibility and an air of cosmic transgression. I’ve listened to this record consistently since its January release and couldn’t imagine 2017 without it.
1. Der Weg einer Freiheit - Finisterre
Google Translate, my old pal, tells me that the band’s name means “The Path to Freedom,” but it won’t give me a proper definition for the album title. It doesn’t matter: that word means the end of the world, and every second of Finisterre is spent underscoring the meaning of that phrase in blood and fire. I’m not sure there’s a way to prepare for the first time the drums enter the picture on “Aufbruch,” or for the dizzying, heart-in-throat histrionics of “Ein Letzter Tanz”--if I ever found myself in a situation where I was required to soar into a battle for humanity on the back of a dragon, wielding a sword of fire, this would be the first song I queued up on Spotify. Then I’d just let the album play. This is a record to trample things to, but also to watch a friends die by; it’s an paralyzing storm of emotion at every turn, bogglingly dense and immersive; it’s fastidiously detailed and performed with expert technical precision; it’s brutal as hell and existentially tragic, and it doesn’t once fall into the ruts that derail other black metal bands when they try to be either of those things.
How much more hyperbole can we come up with? Finisterre is the most terrific music I’ve heard in 2017. Fucking listen to it.
-Brian L.
Archival details
- Original URL
- https://metallifestyle.weebly.com/metal-lifestyle/brians-top-10-records-of-2017
- Recovery source
- live-weebly
- Recovery date
- 2026-07-22
- Stewardship polish
- 2026-07-22
- Preservation status
- restored
- Missing assets
- None recorded
Preserved by Bloodsoaked Media · The Archives