The Best Metal Albums of 2019
These are the albums that defined the sound of metal in 2019.
The list, sorted alphabetically, includes albums found on Pitchfork’s main year-end tallies as well as additional records that did not make those lists but are just as worth your time.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2019 wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
Blood Incantation: Hidden History of the Human Race
In one sense, Blood Incantation are traditionalists. The warped, intricate death metal of the Colorado quartet’s sophomore album takes influence from legendary bands like Death and Morbid Angel, while its all-analog recording and illustrated sci-fi cover art feel further rooted in the past. Even the side-long closing track, “Awakening From the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul),” seems like a nod to the ’70s prog acts whose dark visions helped inspire countless subgenres of heavy music. Yet the real brilliance of this music lies in how free it sounds from what’s come before. On these four songs—ranging from gnarled chaos in “The Giza Power Plant” to the psychedelic slow burn of “Inner Paths (to Outer Space)”—Blood Incantation find their own corner in a storied cosmos, where even the most familiar textures can feel thrilling and extreme. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Candlemass: The Door to Doom
For most of this decade, these dismal Swedes seemed ready to burn out. But the decade-spanning doom metal pioneers found a new spark from an old flame by reenlisting Johan Längqvist, the singer from their landmark debut Epicus Doomicus Metallicus. They emerged with The Door to Doom, a sprawling expanse of barbed riffs and belted hooks that reinvigorates even the hoariest doom-metal tropes. The music is awash in them—“Astorolus - The Great Octopus,” an epic tale of a murderous tentacled beast, even trots out an appearance by Tony Iommi himself. For a band forever obsessed with death, they find joy in being reborn. –Grayson Haver Currin
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Cloud Rat: Pollinator
Cloud Rat’s evolution from a weird political grindcore band into a more unquantifiable (though still political) extreme music band came to a head in 2019 when the Michigan trio released Pollinator, their many-headed fourth LP. Cloud Rat’s inspired songwriting chops are on full display on tracks like the brutally melodic “Al Di La” and “Luminescent Cellar,” and the closer “Perla” ends in a burst of fury. Vocalist Madison Marshall’s gothic yowl has never sounded stronger, or more torn. –Kim Kelly
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Crypt Sermon: The Ruins of Fading Light
One of the best choruses of the year reads as follows: “I looked over the edge of the rainbow/I stood atop the thunder head/Far away, a dark horizon/We are lost and Christ is dead.” The song, called “Christ Is Dead,” is sequenced near the beginning of Philadelphia doom band Crypt Sermon’s second album, and vocalist Brooks Wilson sings it like he wants you to rise from your seat and join him on his heavenly mountain top. It’s uplifting in the most literal sense, even if the words are steeped in the kind of hopelessness that reminds you how their subgenre got its name. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Dawn Ray’d: Behold Sedition Plainsong
The second album from the anarchist and antifascist UK black metallers Dawn Ray’d would have made a splash even without the backdrop of looming global fascism. But Behold Sedition Plainsong over-promises and over-delivers: There’s an insurgent need ingrained in its every note and rasp, from the icy anti-capitalist bite of “Like Smoke Into Fog” to the anthemic melodic heft of “To All, To All, To All!” Their unlikely marriage of radical working-class resistance and violin-infused punk-crusted black metal has gelled, breathing life into their tales of defiance. If it’s time for a new pedagogy of the oppressed, then Dawn Ray’d have written metal’s definitive red (and black) songbook. –Kim Kelly
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Inter Arma: Sulphur English
On the Richmond quintet’s fourth LP, doomy sludge remains the base ingredient, but the band’s willingness to pull in elements from further afield fuels their best effort yet. On Sulphur English, they genre-hop with impunity: “Citadel” is the best death metal song of 2019; “Howling Lands” is a mind-warping seven-minute percussive ritual with no discernible genre root; and “Stillness” glows with the light of a psychedelic prairie fire. As the murky roil of “The Atavist’s Meridian” and mammoth title track show, the progressive influence that was teasingly introduced in Inter Arma’s earlier material has truly come to the fore—and their chimerical sound is all the richer for it. –Kim Kelly
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Moon Tooth: Crux
Moon Tooth worked overtime to make Crux sound so immediate. It’s one of the year’s catchiest metal albums, but it’s also one of its most compositionally intricate, swerving between wild time signatures, unlikely accompaniment (horns, keyboards), and alternating moods (rage, despondency, hope). In a lesser band’s hands, it would sound unfocused, but the Long Island quartet makes it feel like one fluid thought; a constant sweep of adrenaline that peaks in anthems like “Musketeers” and the waltz-time closer “Raise a Light (Epilogue).” While the parenthetical in that latter song title suggests a narrative behind their music, Moon Tooth succeed on a more untraceable arc. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Obsequiae: The Palms of Sorrowed Kings
Obsequiae do interludes differently. Rather than your average horror-movie snippet or terrifying caterwaul, the Minneapolis trio thread ornate Medieval harp passages around bucolic field recordings, set pieces of what they call “castle music.” On their magnetic third album, The Palms of Sorrowed Kings, these snippets are the preambles for a battle of power metal and black metal, with guitar solos that slice through tales of distant empires and fallen monarchs. Obsequiae make fantastical music, but listen during a walk through the park, where their grandeur imparts magic to everyday objects. It’s a suit of arms for our own frailty. –Grayson Haver Currin
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Pissgrave: Posthumous Humiliation
Pissgrave are disgusting. You know as much from looking at their NSFW cover art, a barrier of entry that requires a trigger warning for even the most seasoned horror fans. But it also becomes apparent from just a cursory listen to the Philly quartet’s seedy death metal. Observe the production: What kind of band wants their music to sound like this? It sputters and clips like it’s being played from a VHS tape on a broken television in the next apartment over, mutated guitar solos collapsing almost as soon as they begin. The gurgled vocals that occasionally rise above the murk echo like someone choking at the bottom of a sewer just as you walk by. But proceed with caution—they’re not asking for help; they’re trying to pull you down with them. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Profetus: The Sadness of Time Passing
The geologic pace, the sepulchral growls, the humorless countenance: Funeral doom is a subgenre defined by barriers to entry. On The Sadness of Time Passing, Finnish quintet Profetus indeed growl inscrutable curses and grind through themes at a glacial tempo, dutifully nodding to progenitors Thergothon and Evoken. But listen for the way an organ traces every contour or how the slyly harmonizing guitars twinkle—they frame this prevailing darkness with a hopeful glow, the way the sun’s corona reminds us that light still exists during a total eclipse. –Grayson Haver Currin
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Ragana: We Know That the Heavens Are Empty
The Oakland anarcha-feminist metal duo’s 2019 EP was inspired by a poem from early 20th-century anarchist heroine Voltairine De Cleyre, and its lone two tracks trade off doomed tension and moments of stark beauty. There is a shoegaze influence that melds seamlessly with the songs’ atmospheric black metal, and the vocals alternate between bright and harsh. There is a fragility in their sound, but that vulnerability is not masked by distortion; rather, it is amplified. The gods are silent, but Ragana still roars. –Kim Kelly
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Sunn O))): Life Metal
Sunn O))) spent the bulk of this decade living like a legacy act, indulging in fantasy collaborations, commemorative reissues, and festival-headlining status. But in 2018, Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley put on the robes, huddled with engineering wizard Steve Albini, and reemerged with their most absorbing music in years. Life Metal, the first and best of two complementary 2019 LPs, is a master class in controlling something bigger than yourself—in this case, walls of sound bent with the superhuman skill of a Richard Serra sculpture. These four pieces are overwhelming and affirming, 70 minutes of cleansing amid a very messy year. –Grayson Haver Currin
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Teitanblood: The Baneful Choir
After three years of inactivity, Teitanblood reemerged with The Baneful Choir, a frenzied and bestial churn laced with chilling ambient interludes and dense walls of articulated fury. Spain’s blackened death metallers glory in savagery, but they subvert war metal’s simplistic bone-headery; Teitanblood is ugly and chaotic, yes, but also smart. The album is blessedly well-produced, and tracks like “Inhuman Utterings” show off the virtuosic command of their instruments. They might have a taste for blood in their mouths, but this is no banal sop to the nuke-obsessed hordes. –Kim Kelly
Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Tidal
Tomb Mold: Planetary Clairvoyance
A major trend of metal in the 2010s has been old-school death metal revival. Taking the gurgling nihilism of the subgenre’s heyday and bringing it to more dynamic, spiritual places, bands like Horrendous and Blood Incantation have steadily expanded their subgenre. Among those bands, Toronto’s Tomb Mold began as the most reverential; their pivot toward atmospheric territory began with last year’s Manor of Infinite Forms, but it fully comes alive on Planetary Clairvoyance. Their voyage through the cosmos is filled with brilliant riffs, inventive song structures, and ambiance that seems to signal the strange visions to come. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Tidal
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
