2019 Metal ’n’ Heavy Rock/Heavy Music Poll: RESULTS - Top 100 Countdown

My #3. The expectations were absurd and they exceeded em somehow. Incredible band. Saw em on tour with Demilich a couple years ago and they played one of the best live sets I've ever seen.

welp I know the top 4 but not the order

My 3 favorites of the year, right in a row.
The Blood Incantation I probably listened to more than anything else in 2019.

I thought it would be my AOTY when I first heard it and it unfortunately fell down my ladder but it's still a damn fine LP. I hope they dip further into Middle Eastern riff alchemy.

I do admire how they manage to turn tech death into a less forbidding proposition, although 'Awakening From the Dream of Existence to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality (Mirror of the Soul)' doesn't compromise in the least.

Next up: NOT an American band (but some of you assholes might argue there's no difference).

My #6. Also exceeded high expectations. I listened to Starspawn a lot while waiting for this. It's its own thing, and doesn't come off as retro, but it also touches some early Morbid Angel, Death, and Atheist nerves for me. Also has sentimental value as it dropped during a really great week last fall and became the soundtrack to that.

4
Tomb Mold - Planetary Clairvoyance
571 points, 15 votes, 2 #1 votes

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0983660702_16.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/36jc0OIIO16Z6gtwegfBfc
https://listen.20buckspin.com/album/planetary-clairvoyance

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tomb-mold-planetary-clairvoyance/

Last fall, Tomb Mold previewed their third album, the sci-fi opus Planetary Clairvoyance, with a limited edition cassette tape. Featuring early versions of two songs from the upcoming record, the demo felt like an artifact from death metal’s late-80s heyday: murky, xeroxed, with little context for the uninitiated. Both songs hovered around the six-minute mark, blasting like wind tunnels. The accompanying liner notes, which attributed duties like “Void Expansion” and “Nebula Observation” to cryptically initialed band members, featured a statement of cosmic gratitude in the place where other bands might list their ‘thank you’s’ or paste their Bandcamp link: “The azure of the heavens is perfect, beautiful.”

“Perfect” and “beautiful” are not the adjectives you might think to associate with a death metal band called Tomb Mold. But since forming in 2015, the Toronto quartet have evolved from typically morbid fascinations (song titles include “Bereavement of Flesh,” “Valley of Defilement”) into grander, more ambitious compositions. Last year’s Manor of Infinite Forms felt like a breakthrough, with guitarists Derrick Vella and Payson Power cycling through their infinite arsenal of riffs over a churning rhythm section. Death metal tends to thrive on history, and Tomb Mold never shied away from hero worship, particularly forebears like Incantation and Finnish weirdos Demilich. It was their energy that made them stand out, their ability to find new extremes in their old-school sound.

Darker, stranger, and more atmospheric than its predecessor, Planetary Clairvoyance extends their gifts beyond death metal, sounding untied to any particular lineage. It’s their tightest record to date, suite-like in its momentum and thematic coherence. Almost immediately, they gesture toward quiet, eerier textures. The opening track, “Beg for Life,” is interrupted by a passage of classical guitar that echoes over ominous fills from drummer Max Klebanoff. An ambient interlude, “Phosphorene Ultimate,” arrives early in the tracklist as a kind of warning sign. Less than 15 minutes into the record, it’s a purposefully arresting choice, meant to remind you that this is not background music: at every moment, Tomb Mold demand you take stock of the world they create, where passages of silence are as integral as the grinding melodies and chaos.

my dudes!!!!!!

Yay for the Blood Inc and Tomb Mold

Both #1-2 on my ballot, in reverse order

My #1. The metal record I listened to the most last year: while working, while jogging, while chilling, while shitposting on ILX. I absolutely love their previous LPs but this one takes it to the next level: even better songs, even filthier vocals, even more of that suffocating, eponymous atmosphere. Even the interludes do it for me, and I admire how utterly economical this record is: not a single one of its 38 minutes is wasted, which is exactly what I want from the genre.

…and I'm more of a BM guy usually.

This was great. Would've probably been top 5 for me if I didn't play the two track demo from last fall into the ground beforehand. Still put it at like #14. These guys rip live, too. You gotta love a singing drummer.

my #11. Great album. Deserves its high placement.

tomb mold haven't quite made that record for me. i'm always impressed but never end up attached. feel like i always want their riffs to be twistier. i admit it's a problem with me

i wasn't able to spend enough time with the blood incantation to really think anything about it but i think they're a really cool band!

I'm going to have voted for the entire top 8, I guess. Lol.

I put Chelsea Wolfe all the way down my ballot, it’s good but it isn’t even close to metal.

feel like i always want their riffs to be twistier

I've always wanted that too, but in terms of compulsive listenability they're already there for me – took me by surprise, even.

yes, their brand of nasty suffocating DM is weirdly addictive, even alluring. not sure how they manage that.

Only three more to go, folks…

3
Liturgy - H.A.Q.Q.
615 points, 15 votes, 1 #1 vote

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a2767654837_16.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/4a2XdKkEDVvfniwTu8pSMb
https://liturgy.bandcamp.com/album/h-a-q-q

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/liturgy-haqq/

Liturgy tend to sort listeners into cynics and disciples. The first camp views the group as posers overthinking intentionally atavistic music—de facto trolls, making headlines for diatribes about their music’s transcendental intentions and its philosophical underpinnings. For the second camp, Liturgy are unapologetic radicals, channeling the basic spirit and sounds of black metal into experimental upheaval.

H.A.Q.Q., Liturgy’s fourth album, confirms what must have been right all along: The truth exists somewhere in the middle. Liturgy offer bait for the haters right there on the cover, with the philosophical framework of founder Hunter Hunt-Hendrix—divided, for your convenience, into four categories, like Axiology and Cosmogony—serving as the album’s stark artwork. And Greg Fox, the hyper-precise drummer that even the naysayers respected, is gone. On the other hand, nothing else sounds quite like these nine volatile tracks, where electronic interference interrupts full-metal sprints and where hoarse screams and mutated strings bleed into one. Yes, H.A.Q.Q. cements Liturgy’s try-hard reputation. But it’s kind of thrilling to hear any band try this hard.

For Hunt-Hendrix, Liturgy were always a way to explore his ideas about existence, which could make for an uncomfortable band power balance. Indeed, tensions over their dynamic led to a hiatus after 2011’s high-water mark Aesthethica. Only Hunt-Hendrix and guitarist Bernard Gann remain for H.A.Q.Q, with Fox replaced by ringer Leo Didkovsky and bassist Tyler Dusenbury swapped out for the versatile Tia Vincent-Clark. If you never checked the credits, you may never notice the difference: The rhythm section still flips between sprint and silence with light-switch precision, and the blast beats (yes, Hunt-Hendrix still calls them “burst beats”) continue to expand and contract, like lungs in the middle of a marathon.

their best album yet

I really hope the top 2 are in the correct order lol

Nobody has ever won metal poll twice....

Hunter is our leader

This was my #5 but The Ark Work is all-time imo and this is merely brilliant

My #1! Yeah, it's their best album yet, the one where they manage to make their ideas last for a whole album

my #15

This is some of the better gimmicky faux-metal I've heard. But I didn't vote for it.

Agree that this is their best, even when half the tracks are little interludes. Hunter obviously known for his religiosity, and that’s never been more apparent than on this album, so full of sky-gazing awe, choral build-ups and symphonic summoning. Really beautiful work.

Could use a Large Sad Man tbh.

2
Sunn O))) - Life Metal
657 points, 16 votes, 1 #1 vote

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1353675718_16.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/7A10XxbkAl4hIQRMp4NyKO
https://sunn.bandcamp.com/album/life-metal

Sunn O))) albums have tended to be summits where the luminaries of noise and volume gather for electric communion. Almost as soon as the duo of Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley moved beyond the simple amplifier worship of their early days, they began recruiting peers to help build audacious records, as high on concepts as they were on decibels.

Noise paragon Merzbow added to the early bedlam, while misfit rock demigod Julian Cope read a poem that inserted Sunn O))) into a continuum of pan-cultural myths to begin their awesome if inchoate White volumes in 2003. Anderson and O’Malley infamously locked Xasthur’s Malefic in a coffin for their breakthrough LP, Black One, and recruited a few of their own idols for 2009’s elegantly textured Monoliths & Dimensions. They’ve made records with Boris, Scott Walker, and Ulver and employed black metal icon Attila Csihar of Mayhem as their lead speaker and performance artist in residence for a decade. Sunn O)))’s liner notes scan like the weirdo metal equivalent of some fantasy sports roster.

Sometimes, though, all those guests have clouded out the essence of Sunn O))). Anderson and O’Malley share a rare chemistry; they are able to work through extended riffs at famously testudinal paces and high volumes with absolute control. But Life Metal—the first of two Sunn O))) albums planned for 2019—rectifies the oversight. On four tracks that invoke metaphors about landscapes carved by geologic deep time and references to the music of the spheres, Anderson and O’Malley foreground their seismic relationship and their shared ability to make 12 or 25-minute spans of slow-motion drone feel like a historic religious ritual.

Never heard of these guys.

yesssss

Thank God

Sorry, Satan

I guess we're lucky they made another album this year

(nothing against SunnO))), they'd just be a boring winner)

re: liturgy, glitch nonsense apart; and safer as it may be, catchier liturgy is alltime. ty our leader

my #2

in 3 maybe 4 years time, we all will consider it their best work

It was my #2 also!

I haven't heard every Sunn O))) album (how many people have?) but it's now my de facto favourite after Monoliths & Dimensions.

(how many people have?)

Me

Props. I think unperson has too but he doesn't vote.

Is this really the real #2?

So I assume everyone knows what the #1 will be by this point.

lol tt

Is it cause for concern?

all hail Gloryhammer!!!!!!

very deserving winners