Black Metal Recommendations

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Aara: I will soon write and submit an official review for this one. Aara are a melodic Black Metal band from Switzerland with a female vocalist who sounds pretty badass. Admittedly, however, her high pitch does give me wear and tear feelings by the end of the album, which I've listened through almost 12 times now. Let me state that if I'm listened through an album 12 times already and still haven't written the review, it's a great album. Melodically, it has some fun qualities, such as a repeated alternating two note sequence that often resolves in different directions at times for different results. I don't fully describe that here very well, but I will do so more in depth on my review for the Metalcrypt. You can hear several great examples of it here in this track, which is the highlight song of the album without a doubt, as it not only has some of the most memorable melodic lines but also the cool clean singing in the background which sounds East Asian inspired. I do wish that feature was on more than just this one track, but oh well. Really cool stuff worth your time. I definitely give it a 4/5 for my review, and am almost leaning towards 4.25.

[stringypoo]

I really need to get back to listening to music more and posting more of the cool stuff I found. Here's one.

Hats Barn: Lol, I really don't know what to make of the band name, but here we have a French Black Metal band that are doing a lot of great things on this new record entitled Y.a.HW.eH. There is a melodic edge to it without it sounding like a melodic black metal album, so this one is easy to listen to if you're not a deep fan of traditional Black Metal. At its purest points, it sounds like a slightly cleaner Burzum (although you won't hear that on the track I'm sharing here) with extreme ends pointing more to early Mayhem. But this is more listenable than either of those two pioneering bands I just name dropped. At times the vocals are quite emotive and really provide a deeper layer of depth to the music. Definitely worth checking out for Black Metal fans or those of you who are Black Metal curious.

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Darkthrone: Far from an unfamiliar name to likely any of you who, even if you've never actually listened to a Darkthrone song before. Luckily (or unluckily for me), I have heard quite a lot of their material, mostly to build a sense of understanding and familiarity with their music and transformation (hint, transformation is a big word here!). Many people forget the first record of Darkthrone (Soulside Journey), which was a very decent old school death metal album. But most people familiar with the band are more familiar with the soon-after work such as the uber famous raw black metal album Transylvanian Hunger, which is a very dull listen in many ways while still remaining a revered classic in the subgenre. As the band have continued to release several albums over the last decades, they've been leaning more and more into old school traditional heavy metal and doom metal directions with their take on black metal. This is the second (or third, depending on how you see it) of the doomy black metal records Darkthrone released, not long ago. It's quite a great listen, although really two tracks dominate the record in terms of interesting qualities. The best one is the track I'm attaching here, "The Sea Beneath the Seas of the Sea." Fucking great title there!

Enjoy:

[stringypoo]

Dødsengel: Now here's a really cool album and band I found just the other day, a late release in December that just was too late to make a year-end list. The band's name means "Angel of Death" in Norwegian, and they are indeed a Norwegian Black Metal band. There are plenty of black metal tropes here, but at the same time, I found there to be some unique items here, especially vocally on some tracks but also in the songwriting. This track here begins much more like a typical Black Metal track, but man does it just do the job well!
Not sure how many people on the forum these days are into Black Metal, but this one is really well worth checking out!

[stringypoo]

Vosbúð: Here's an Icelandic band whose album released in January and I cannot get enough of this. 5 songs, palindromic in structure, with the outermost two tracks both being within 5 seconds of difference in length and both at the 17 minute mark while the 2nd and 4th tracks mirror each other in most ways as well, track 3 being the short one. Very clever release full of intensely great melodies and building sections. There is not a moment of filler despite the extremely long song lengths, which makes this an absolute stunner of an album. JUST CHECK OUT THAT AWESOME MOMENT HERE AT 9:20 AND ONWARDS! UGHHHHHH!!!!!!

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Immortal: I bet almost everyone who is reading this knows who Immortal are already. Well, they don't have Abbath anymore at vocals, but that's not actually news since Northern Chaos Gods was the first album after his ejection from the band anyway. The player who took over on vocals does a phenomenal job filling the void, and nothing feels lost minus Abbath's cute personality. This is the first released track from the upcoming album, which funny enough comes out on my birthday, May 26th! Nice gift, I'll say! This track sounds absolutely killer! Can't wait to hear the rest!

[stringypoo]

I'm recently starting to drown in excellent Black Metal releases that will surely have me returning to this thread more frequently soon to share. For today, I simply couldn't resist talking about...

Blaze of Sorrow: Italian Black Metal band that also deals in the atmospherics a bit. If you want a Black Metal album that screams "balanced," this is it. The songwriting is so effective and efficient, with 8 tracks only reaching 43 minutes. The writing sometimes explores sounds in common with epic heavy metal, but that never dominates the sound at all. Given the particularly high ratings other releases from Blaze of Sorrow got, I wasn't sure what to expect but it lives up to the expectations of other albums very well. Best of all, this album is quite dynamic, never feeling repetitive or too same-y, such as many Black Metal albums tend to do (Looking at you, Darkthrone!).

Also, THAT ARTWORK!!!