4) Desolate Shrine – The Heart of the Netherworld
Finland is known for their incorporation of melody in their extreme metal. Think about it, many of your favorite extreme metal bands have some sense of melody, even when they are trying to be raw and obscure and their death metal is no exception. Desolate Shrine is one of the few that can properly create this kind of dark death metal and still have some easy-to-follow melody without relying on the appreciation of an avid death metal fan. The Heart of The Netherworld is the summoning of blackness, misanthropy and skilled musicianship in the form of death metal and an album that should be part of every death metal fan out there.
Recommended Track: Desolate Shrine
3) Tod Huetet Uebel – Malicia
This band caught me with my pants down as I didn’t even know they existed until I stumbled across their album somewhere in the vast cyberspace. Tod Huetet Uebel (which means “Death bewares evil” in German) is a duo hailing from Portugal and, as many of the bands here, just released their debut album this year and it happens to be a brilliant piece of black metal. Every aspect of this album is superb, from the songwriting and performance to the production quality, something where many bands either fail on meeting some of them if not all. The dynamic of each song is harmonious with a perfect flow and continuity, despite the fact that the name of the songs are numbers differently positioned than its track listing number. One of the best discoveries I did this year and well deserving of this position.
Recommended Track: XIII
2) Akhlys – The Dreaming I
If you’re starting to notice a trend on the last few bands on the list, we should be friends and hang out. Making music with the right ambiance and bleakness without sounding like a copy-cat of the guy before is tough and it requires a great amount of skill to succeed on such task. Akhlys is one of the many projects by Naas Alcameth, a genius who’s also involved in Nightbringer, Bestia Arcana and Excommunion, bands with the same ideal of bringing utter darkness in the form of black metal in ways a handful of bands can ever do. Akhlys sophomore album The Dreaming I is a remarkable abstraction of chaos and obscurity with a complex instrumentation and agonizing vocals that will only grasp your soul and crush it into a million pieces that will float around this record for years to come.
Recommended Track: Breathe and Levitation
