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

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

You misspelled Steel Panther.

I actually don’t know the number 1! Sunn is toooo loooong

well i didn't expect borknagar's true north to make it this far but i'm proud of you ilm

borknagar is my guess for 121

Without further ado…

I give you…

The flabbergastingly unexpected…

Unforeseeable and completely fortuitous…

did gecs win

Unanticipated…

I mean…

This was not in the cards at all…

lol Brad

1
Lingua Ignota - Caligula
806 points, 18 votes, 4 #1 votes

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a3985780561_16.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/2GBJg7nTQs3go1w24ECKvy
https://linguaignota.bandcamp.com/album/caligula

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lingua-ignota-caligula/

Eight minutes into her torrential second album as Lingua Ignota, Kristin Hayter lets out a thundering, apocalyptic scream: “I don’t eat, I don’t sleep [...] I let it consume me,” she cries. Her voice is so ugly and shredded and maniacal and alive that it creates a witness of anyone who hears it. It is the sound of trauma, that which is by definition intolerable, and Hayter traverses its most upsetting depths on behalf of survivors, including herself. With Caligula, she has created a murderous amalgam of opera, metal, and noise that uses her classical training like a Trojan Horse, burning misogyny to ash from its Judeo-Christian roots.

From renaissance paintings to murder ballads and beyond, feminist revenge has charged art to cathartic ends—envisioning a world in which women do not only demand justice but see it through, in their work, by any means necessary. Caligula embodies that insurrectionary fury. Working with members of The Body, Uniform, Full of Hell, and others, Hayter crafts a 66-minute world ablaze with contempt for man, which, though divided into 11 all-caps tracks—with such imposing titles as “I AM THE BEAST,” “IF THE POISON WON’T TAKE YOU MY DOGS WILL,” and “SPITE ALONE HOLDS ME ALOFT”—plays out like one continuous, epic composition. More than songs, they feel like a succession of enraged suites, each one a threat, an intervention, an act of solidarity.

Lingua Ignota sparks fantasies of demonic avant-opera icon Diamanda Galás joining with industrial-metal titans Godflesh to create a horror soundtrack, or Maria Callas in hell. Her goal seems to be to deconstruct and destabilize, to discomfit. She situates death growls and strangulated vocalizations amidst orchestral strings, choral singing, and chimes—like a hex on the whole social order. “Everything burns down around me,” she sings with incantatory grandeur on “MAY FAILURE BE YOUR NOOSE,” atop the incendiary counterpoint of Uniform’s Michael Berdan.

ALL HAIL QUEEN LINGUA

Didn't vote for it because lol purism but this is of course very much deserved.

pretty sweet that this won even though i still haven't listened to it

Bonus reviews of our top 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMsEzAg_E7o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaEQeb1pOuE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOwE58DvVQ8