Fresh off the release of Grief Ritual’s brutal new single “Recursion,” featuring Rachel Aspe of Cage Fight, comes vocalist Jamie Waggett’s look ahead at some of the heaviest albums hitting 2024.
“Recursion” is the third track unveiled from Grief Ritual’s debut album “Collapse,” set for release on January 31st.
According to Grief Ritual, “Recursion” centers on the crushing pressures and systemic neglect that force people into subservience and apathy.
They describe it as feeling “completely drained and exhausted by suffering all around you,” trapped in a cycle of misery with no relief from war, disaster, and poverty. It addresses the “generational rise in mental and physical health issues” and how events seem “deliberately manufactured or inflicted on the poorest” to deepen societal divides.
The band highlights a world where many “pay their life away” to profiteers while the wealthy grow richer, insisting that everyone should have access to shelter, food, care, and the support needed for a progressive, fulfilling life.
“Collapse” follows their self-released debut EP “Spiritual Disease,” which garnered attention from major publications such as Kerrang, Knotfest, Rock Sound, and was shortlisted for Metal Hammer’s albums of the year 2022.
On “Collapse,” the anger, frustration, and disenfranchisement they feel about the UK and the wider world are fully laid bare. Themes of human extinction, capitalism, genocide, ecocide, and the rise of populist right authoritarianism are all explored in detail.
There are ample riffs, breakdowns, and a bass tone fit to tear down the establishment, while dual vocals draw from a wide spectrum of extreme metal influences.
Alongside the band’s own progress, Jamie Waggett has selected some of the heaviest, most forward-thinking releases of 2024 worth exploring.
Check it out below.
Favourite heavy albums of 2024
by Jamie Waggett, vocalist in Grief Ritual
Candy – It’s Inside You
Relapse Records
This year we’ve been lucky enough to be treated to not one, but two Candy releases with June’s Relapse Records released ‘It’s Inside You’, and the six-track EP ‘Flipping’ in October on Triple B Records. Both are essential listens if you love your hardcore with a twist.
On ‘It’s Inside You’ the Richmond, VA based band continue to expand and push their all-embracing sound to the nth degree of punishment, fury, and emotion.
There’s a three track run towards the start of the album ‘Short-Circuit’, old school death metal riffs that will have you gurning, ‘You Will Never Get Me’, Ministry-esque goth electronics and syncopation mixes with a hard vocal side helping of the guesting TUI’s Justice Tripp, and title track ‘It’s Inside You’, ft Trash Talk’s David Gagliardi, that’s as good as anything I’ve heard this year.
Lighter tracks like ‘Love Like Snow’ remind me of darkwave bands akin to older Covenant of Thorns, but don’t feel out of place, such is the breadth of electronic experimentation that laces through the album. Another stand-out track is ‘Dehumanize Me’, an absolutely brutal earworm that heralds a run of more powerviolence inspired modern metallic-hardcore, before the album descends into an abyss of ‘Board Up the House’ era Ghengis Tron-like cybergrind.
You need this album in your life.
Tzompantli – Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force
20 Buck Spin
A ‘Tzompantil’ is Nahuatl for “skull rack”, a wooden structure that was used to display the human skulls of war captives and sacrifices in Mesoamerican civilization.
Taking inspiration and weaving indigenous history, ritual and spirituality throughout their massive death-doom sound the Pomona, California, band have created an album that is as viscerally pummelling as it is atmospheric.
Founded as a one-man project by Brian Ortiz, they are now a strong collective of California-based musicians featuring members Xibalba, Teeth, and Civerous.
Debut album ‘Tlazcaltiliztli’ was one of my favourite albums of 2020 but on ‘Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force’ rises higher as chainsaw riffs give way to indigenous instrumentation and droning serenity.
The second track on the album ‘Tlayohualli’ feels like an intense summoning of some ancient deity before a battle, as crushing swells of guitar and drums compete with gutteral vocals. ‘Tlaloc Icuic’ showcases the slower denser post-sound within this album as hushed vocals mutter before becoming enveloped in waves of foreboding drones. Standout track ‘Tetzaviztli’ slow-burns and shifts like the smouldering embers of a fire.
This band is unique and the forty-three minute album ebbs and flows through seven tracks that will take you back in time to 900 CE. I recommend listening to this in one in one sitting.
Terminal Nation- Echoes of the Devil’s Den
20 Buck Spin
Another band, like Candy, who put out two records this year with Echoes of the Devil’s Den in May, and then a collection tracks in September’s ‘How Will You Be Remembered?’.
May’s ‘Echoes of the Devil’s Den’ brings down sledgehammer after sledgehammer on the listener. It’s unrelenting death metal infused hardcore spreading rage and heavy hatred across each track. ‘Written By The Victor’, featuring Todd Jones of Nails, feels as claustrophobic as it is vicious.
Fourth track ‘No Reform (New Age Slave Patrol)’ is a tomb of bleak blunt force trauma about the US Police, with it’s bludgenoning vocal hook “Fuck every cop that’s ever fucking lived”. Jesse Leach of Killswitch Engage features on single ‘Merchants of Bloodshed’, with further features by Sex Prisoner’s K. Kennedy ‘Cemetary of Imposters’, and Dwid Hellion of Integrity ‘Release The Serpents’. All add their own unique venom and guile to the songs they feature on an age where vocal features can often feel like a glib advertising gimmick.
This is right up there with some of the most vital and brilliant metal of the last few years. Every second of this album feels as punishing and bleak as the state of the world that serves as the inspiration for this release.
156/Silence – People Watching
SharpTone Records
September’s ‘People Watching’ continues to grow the expansive yet incendiary thrall of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s 156/Silence. Prior albums and EPS have shown that this band has real talent and potential but on ‘People Watching’, they have created a masterpiece.
Featuring some of the most throat-splitting vocals, and dismally bleak lyrics you will ever hear, combined with brutish slabs of dense modern metalcore, nu-metal pique, brooding electronica, and frenetic post-hardcore.
Vocalist Jack Murray perfectly weaves his way in and out of these tracks, showcasing a vocal mastery that most can only dream of as he combines climatic cleans with aforementioned harshness.
In places 156/Silence remind me of another favourite of mine ‘Orthodox’, but it takes their unsettling chaotic style into vastly different places and I’m all for it. If you like your modern-metalcore with a dose of post-hardcore, the anthemic altness of BMTH and Bad Omens, then you will love this.
Temple Guard – Morbid Sacrament
Self-Released
Vegan metallic-hardcore doesn’t come much better than Nottingham, UK’s Temple Guard.
Debut LP ‘Spear of the Revenant’ in 2022 was great but, ‘Morbid Sacrament’ pushes their overall sound up another few levels as they continue their assault on the spirit with five blistering tracks in the vein of All Out War, Day of Suffering, and xRepentancex.
You will pit, and you will pit hard.
Notable mentions:
- Sex Prisoner – Tannhauser Gate (A389)
- Gatecreeper – Dark Superstition (Nuclear Blast)
- Full of Hell – Coagulated Bliss (Closed Casket Activities)
- Black Curse – Burning in Celestial Poison (Sepulchral Voice)
- Antichrist Siege Machine – Vengeance of Eternal Fire (Profound Lore)
- Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere (Century Media)
- Glacial Tomb – Lightless Expanse (Prosthetic Records)
- Pharmakon – Maggot Mass (Sacred Bones Records)
- Lowen – Do Not Go To War With The Demons Of Mazandaran (Church Road Records)
- Chat Pile – Cool World (The Flenser)
- Agriculture – Living Is Easy (The Flenser)
- Inter Arma – New Heaven (Relapse Records)
- Sect – Plague Upon Plagues (Southern Lord)
- Uniform – American Standard (Sacred Bones Records)
- Emasculator – The Disfigured and the Divine (NSE Records)
- Ulcerate – Cutting the Throat of God (Debemur Morti Records)
