Best LPs of 2023 #15-11

I think this might be the first year in the last few where I truly felt like I couldn't keep up with the sheer number of quality releases that were dropping each and every week. As such, there will likely be some possible omissions here from material I simply didn't get to listen to enough --or at all. I'm fortunate, however, that 2023 still managed to be a year of discovery. There are several additions to this year end list of LPs that are from artists I've simply never heard of (or listened to before). There are few better feelings than the discovery of an artist you know in your bones will become a new lifelong favorite. This year was a revelatory one in that regard. But there is just as much joy to be found in familiar favorites putting out a release that end up exceeding even your loftiest expectations. There were several artists that managed to do exactly that in 2023. It wasn't hard to find 15 releases this year--but it's been a real task trying to sort out just WHERE they fit. Each of these albums helped get me through 2023 in different ways, and I'm thankful for every artist involved that contributed to that. As always, music is the great leveler.

Runners Up:

Lamp of Murmmur - Saturnian Bloodstorm

A wicked slab of melodic black'n roll, 'Saturnian Bloodstorm' bathes in the waters of genre progenitors, Immortal, Bathory, and Satyricon. Killer fucking riffs.

End - The Sin of Human Frailty.

I'm still picking out pieces of glass and debris from the walls after hearing End's pipebomb of a debut LP, 'Splinters From an Ever Changing Face'. This shit is equally explosive. Wear a blast helmet.

Tribunal - The Weight of Remembrance

A tremendous debut. If these Vancouver gothic doom metallers are coming out of the cemetery gates this strong for their first album, you can expect their sophomore effort to fully nail the lid to your coffin.

Aetherian - At Storms Edge

A more than worthy follow-up to 2017's 'The Untamed Wilderness' At Storms Edge is more wonderfully composed melo-death that wanders a musical realm somewhere between Amorphis and Be'lakor. Beware of the earworms in this one.

Witching - Incendium

On first listen of title track "Incendium", I thought I'd stumbled across a B-Side from New Zealanders Dark Divinity. Witching is so much more than that. A bubbling cauldron of doom and searing (melo) death metal.

15. Final Gasp - Mourning Moon

Some would have you believe that this debut LP from Boston, Massachusetts act Final Gasp is the second coming of Type O Negative. Sure, there's a gloomy, gothic atmosphere draped over its proceedings, but that's pretty much where the comparison should stop. Final Gasp shares more in common with genre counterparts, Unto Others, as Mourning Moon peddles in a faster tempo style of "deathrock"--a brooding mix of hardcore, alternative, metal and goth. If mid-80s era T.S.O.L and Die Kreuzen were stripped and then given a fresh coat of 21st-century paint, it might sound a little something like Mourning Moon.

Standout Tracks: "Blood and Sulphur", "Mourning Moon", "Unnatural Law"

14. Embrace Your Punishment - Made of Stone

Like the mountainous, chain breaking figure gracing it's album cover, Embrace Your Punishment's latest slam-opus, Made of Stone, will make you feel like a hulking colossus that's capable of kicking down buildings. Marrying the sounds of bands like Dying Fetus, Misery Index (who's own Jason Netherton makes an appearance on the incendiary, carpet bombing Unconquered) and Dyscarnate, Made of Stone is an absolute skull cracker of an album. It's neck snapping groove(s) and King Kong sized breakdowns (that 1:47 mark of Above Creation....ooof) helped it shatter the bones of its competition to land a spot on this list, despite only being released less than a month ago. Slam isn't generally my thing, but Made of Stone had me at first blegggghhh.

Standout Tracks: "Nemesis", "Unconquered", "Above Creation"

13. Contra Code - Friday Junior

I'm sending Contra Code a bill for all the clothing I went through listening to Friday Junior this year. A scorching follow-up to 2015's Wasted Already, Friday Junior outclassed every other punk release in 2023 and left several of my garments either singed or outright burnt. And don't even get me started on the living room repairs. I'm still buying flooring to replace the rutted laminate planks that encircle my coffee table. Front to back, Friday Junior is full of thrashy, can-cracking riffs, soaring dual guitar leads, neck-bending baselines, drum rhythms that'll melt the rubber off your shoes and some of the best collective vocal work you're likely to hear in the genre. This was my fix for punk rock in 2023.

All hail The Code.

Standout Tracks: "No Friends Here", "Put Some Flames On It", "The Best Defense"

12. Theophonos - Nightmare Visions

I was wondering where Serpent Column had disappeared to over the last couple of years. Turns out that dissonant/black-metal mastermind Jimmy Hamzey was just trying on lab coats and playing mad scientist with a new extreme metal project, Theophonos. The result, Nightmare Visions, is exactly the deformed, ungodly, Frankenstein of an album you'd expect. It's stitched together using the flesh of several disparate genres and sub-genres, and animated to sickening life by a few drops of Serpent Column's leftover DNA. Nightmare Visions spends the next 30 minutes lurching through influences of dissonant, thrash, black-metal, post-hardcore, post-rock and even straight-up hard rock, culminating into an experience that almost defies description, much like the release from Malokarpatan this year. Like his Serpent Column project before, Hamzey apparently has no intention of slowing down, with another Theophonos LP slated for a February release. If it's even half as good as this one, you'll likely be reading about it come the end of next year.

Standout Tracks: "Maps of the Future", "Go on to Your Gallows", Thousand Imaginary Swords

11. Krigsgrav - Fires in the Fall

What a year for doom-influenced death metal. I've always been stubborn and found it challenging to find a doom album that 'clicks' with me, but between the absolutely genre-defining releases from Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean's (what a fucking band name) Obsession Destruction and Fires in the Distance's Air Not Meant for Us (which, spoiler alert, you'll be reading about later), 2023 is a year that finally convinced me to buy a damn ticket and hop on the doom-train. Admittedly, Dallas, TX's Krigsgrav borrows more liberally from the realms of black-metal and melodic death metal (which is probably what drew me in at first) but it's the doomy dynamism that elevates Fires in the Fall into something truly special. Seven albums into their career, Krigsgrav are master artisans. They know exactly which pieces to use and where those peices fit. 2023 was a great year for melodic metal as a whole, but these Texans have crafted something special. FFO: Enslaved, Insomnium, Fires in the Distance

Standout Tracks: 'An Everflowing Vessel', 'The Black Oak', 'In Seas of Perdition'