Well well well.  Looks like it’s time for everybody’s favorite “oh my god, I’m such an idiot for missing this” post.  I do relish looking back, especially after everyone else’s lists have been posted, and seeing what slipped under my radar, be it because of a lack of time or energy or even because I haven’t been checking out some of these genres as much as I should.  Whatever the reason, we imperfect beings miss a few things here and there, but that’s why I do this post.  It gives me another chance to look back on my many, many moments of “oh, I’ll get to that later” that never seem to come to fruition.  Toxic traits be damned, I’m getting to it now.  And this time, I’m keeping the list genre-agnostic, which means you’ll find metal, non-metal and metal adjacent albums to check out, all of which hold up just as well as anything on a main list that came out a month or so ago.

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Auriferous Flame – Ardor for Black Mastery

Now this one is definitely a classic example of “ooh, I’ll get to this later” and then not getting to it at all.  Of course when the musician known as Ayloss releases a record under any of his various and sundry monikers I take notice (doubly thanks to Colin’s excellent review), but this one got buried under the mountain of my to-do list for so long that getting around to it took until now to do so.  What a fool I was not to jump on this.  I’ve been getting into more and more raw black metal this year, and Ardor for Black Mastery is raw in all the right ways, but with the signature mark of Ayloss’ technique and style.  Colin puts it best: this album is straight ahead black metal, but it’s anything but generic.

Check out the aforementioned review right here!

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OK Goodnight – The Fox and the Bird

I have never heard of OK Goodnight before, but seeing chatter about The Fox and the Bird at year’s end made me look this up, and the gorgeous album cover hooked me before I even hit play.  And I gotta be honest, I’m not sure what I was expecting, but whatever it is, The Fox and the Bird was not it.  This album really is something else, proggy and folky and equal parts gentle, serene storytelling and viciously brutal riffing, coupled with highly intellectual musical performances all around, but above all else it expertly features the talents of singer and lyricist Casey Lee Williams (who first pinged my radar for her work with the TV show RWBY).  At the end of the day, I’m always going to be a sucker for a story that features talking animals going on an adventure together, and this is a very compelling piece of fiction.

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Jesus Piece – …So Unknown

Okay, so I didn’t technically *miss* …So Unknown last year.  I listened to it the week it came out, and I liked it, it just took me a while to come back around to it and realize why it was getting so much acclaim.  The fault is mine, but also, …So Unknown came out in April, and March and April of this year were absolutely stacked with releases.  I had two dozen or more albums to be excited about, and while this was one of them, I didn’t get to come back to it until much later.  But oh boy, did I ever come back to it.  This is Jesus Piece operating on a much higher level than ever before.  …So Unknown almost ventures into deathcore territory at points, but the hardcore vibe remains strong even when the music takes much more violent turns.  It’s a short, but hyper-focused release from a band that keeps improving with every release, and frankly it’s about time people started taking notice.  

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Warcrab – The Howling Silence

Thank you to Buke for a lot (truly, a lot) of good things in my life, but as far as bands go, thank you Buke for putting Warcrab on my radar.  It was far too late for The Howling Silence to make my year end list, but with a name like Warcrab, I knew I had to keep this one high up on my to-do list, and I was not disappointed with it, to say the least.  Death doom that is heavy on the death, with that classic buzzsaw guitar sound and an atmosphere that cements every killer riff in a foundation of swirling tides of ambience, The Howling Silence is a strong release from a band that, apparently, has been consistently putting out killer sludgy releases for a while now.  This one is much more energetic and tighter, and the ripping death metal helps imbue the doomier, sludgier parts with an energy that makes The Howling Silence a great time to listen to.

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Armand Hammer – We Buy Diabetic Test Strips

Another album that I briefly mentioned having listened to, but that took me a while to fully comprehend, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips also had me immediately with the name alone, but it being a rather dense and slightly esoteric form of hip hop, I needed more time than usual to properly digest it.  At first glance, you could write off Test Strips as another “weird” hip hop album, but that would be a rather dismissive and frankly condescending way of talking about the unconventional flow and samples on this collaboration between billy woods and E L U C I D.  The duo work together with a flair and a passion for turning expectations on their head, and if you’re game to dive into more abstract and outwardly puzzling tracks, you will be rewarded for your patience and dedication with some of the most fascinating and enthralling rap this year.

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Nothing/Full of Hell – When No Birds Sang

As always, there’s one December release every year that manages to sneak under my radar, and this year the honor goes to maybe the most obvious whiff on my part ever.  I should have checked this out the instant it dropped, but alas, list season was already upon us, and I was too busy looking backwards to appreciate another fantastic collaboration from Full of Hell, who seem to have no shortage of people who want to collaborate with them this year (see also their MASSIVE collab with Primitive Man).  The ferocious and unhinged grindcore of Full of Hell and the grungy shoegaze of Nothing might seem diametrically opposed on paper, but When No Birds Sang is a masterclass in subtlety and restraint.  Even when it is at its loudest, it is still brimming with little nods to the softer underpinnings that tie these two projects together.

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Parannoul – After the Magic

“Meteoric” might be the word to describe the rise of Parannoul, the anonymous South Korean shoegaze phenom currently tearing at my heartstrings as I write this.  After the Magic was an album I heard chatter about in the first half of the year, but when I saw it pop up again on diverse and varied year end lists, I knew I had to check it out.  Magic it certainly is.  After the Magic is not a delicate, stripped back shoegaze album.  Rather, it revels in excess, all strings, layered vocals, glitch electronics, jazzy beats, whirling guitars and keyboard melodies.  Above all else, though, it is absolutely gorgeous, and listen after listen uncovers more reasons for me to repeat it.  Even Parannoul themself describes the album as “what I always wanted”.  At this rate, the project is bound to be a household name stateside, and I cannot wait for more people to hop on the hype train.

Did you catch Chris and Dan recap last year’s best non-metal, where they talk about this album and a few other of my favorite metal-adjacent releases this year?  Go do that now then!

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Phobocosm – Foreordained

Foreordained is another album appearing in my life because Buke happened to text me at just the right moment to take it in.  “Make sure the foundation on the fucking house is solid,” he said, as if we needed anything else bad to happen to our house.  Originally I had this band confused with Phobophillic, whose excellent Enveloping Absurdity tickled me last year, but this is a thing completely unto itself.  The atmosphere alone is enough to choke the life out of you, but once the riffs kick in full bore, you feel like someone is trying to punish you for some slight you committed.  This is the textbook definition of “brutal” with shades of Ulcerate and Mitochondrion poking through in the best ways possible.  Foreordained will literally knock you dead if you let it, but you’ll get right back up and ask for more as soon as you finish being dead about it.

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Oldest Sea – A Birdsong, A Ghost

Okay, fine, yes Angela, sweetheart: I forgot to read your review for this album, and then in turn I forgot to listen to it.  You can consider this a public apology.  But you, dear reader, don’t have to make the same mistake I made.  You should go listen to A Birdsong, A Ghost post-haste.  Nothing better than a husband and wife duo doing it big, and big this is.  Doom can be crushing because a massive wall of fuzz is coming straight to your dome, but this is crushing in its sparsity, the same way BIG | BRAVE and Kowloon Walled City are crushing.  It’s crushing in its melancholic atmosphere, but therein lies the catharsis of listening to A Birdsong, A Ghost obsessively like we have been.  This is how you do the genre right and make it as evocative and emotionally devastating as possible, and it should be no small wonder that we’ve been trying to tell you for months to listen to this album.  I should have listened sooner.

If you, like me, blanked out on reading Angela’s wonderful review, look no further.  Also, Josh wrote a profile of Oldest Sea if you want a deeper look into the couple’s ethos.

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Portrayal of Guilt – Devil Music

What’s better than two EPs for the price of one?  With Devil Music, that’s exactly what you get.  While on the outside it might not look like your typical Portrayal of Guilt release, what you get is insanely inventive and truly unlike anything else.  The EP spans ten tracks, and the first half is exactly what you’d expect: five new Portrayal of Guilt tracks, violent and vicious and ripping start to finish.  The real magic, though, is in the back half: all five tracks are remixed and reimagined as chamber pieces, with cello and French horn and tuba replacing the guitars and bass, with vocals and percussion recut to match.  To top it all off, it gets paired with a haunting short film that elucidates the story behind the music.  Nobody grinds harder than Portrayal of Guilt, and whoever forgot to tell me about this last calendar year is my enemy forever.  This isn’t just a fantastic new EP, this is a whole work of art.

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We’re never truly done trawling through the content mines here at Nine Circles, Inc., and while we have a lot more 2024 to go, there is some benefit of hindsight, for longevity.  As Chris appropriately pointed out earlier this week, we can’t possibly cover everything, every month, all the time.  But goddammit, we’re gonna try, even if it comes a few months too late.  At the end of the day, you’ve hopefully got a few more timeless albums to check out, and as we scramble to keep up with all these albums as they come out (holy smokes, 2024 is already off to a roaring start), it’s important to remember that sometimes albums find you precisely when they’re meant to.  Never too late, or too early.

— Ian