6 Great New Metal Albums That Blur Genre Lines

Metal is nothing if not malleable. Bands throughout the past four decades have found ways to fuse it with electronic music, jazz, folk, even—against better judgment perhaps—ska. But it’s not because of any passivity on the part of metal musicians, fans or the sound of the music itself. Metal is imposing, intimidating, aggressive—it doesn’t take the flavor of whatever it touches, like tofu, but rather the opposite. Metal is almost always the dominant half of any hybrid, but it’s nonetheless easily adaptable, and for all its intensity and volume, more often than not, it just works.

It also happens often enough that around once a year, I’ll dedicate a month in this column to highlighting the best examples of new metal records that stretch their limits much farther than one solitary genre. Sometimes to the point that it’s arguably not even metal at all! (Thanks for humoring me on that one, gotta shake things up every now and then.)

This is one of those months. At first glance, my monthly picks were starting to look like a batch of ringers and MVPs—what else can you call it when Deafheaven is in the mix (and how could I not talk about Deafheaven this month?). But more than that, the best metal records that came across my desk all looked beyond the riffs—or perhaps those riffs were just played on a saxophone, for instance. Sometimes the best metal isn’t exclusively metal, and that—counterintuitive as it might sound—is part of why I continue to be so excited about a genre that’s going strong despite being around longer than I’ve been alive. Even when it’s something else, it’s still metal.

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Sarmat – Upgrade

The always interesting I, Voidhanger label is a reliably fascinating source of non-traditional takes on metal—the number of releases they’ve issued that are just black metal or just death metal are pretty clearly in the minority, eclipsed by more cosmic, progressive takes on brutal sounds or much more alien encounters altogether (see: Neptunian Maximalism). Sarmat, featuring members of Artificial Brain and Imperial Triumphant, made their debut in 2023 with a set of technical and prog-minded avant garde creations, which they’ve followed with as incredible a two-song set of jazz-death as I’ve heard all year. (Full disclosure: I haven’t heard that many, but I feel confident enough to let this one stand.) The title track of Upgrade alone is worth exploring, its 13-plus minutes of intricate, space-age terror that takes shape through various time-signature shifts, a wild streak of trumpet and eventually some nasty grooves and indecipherable, from-the-bowels growling. The second track, “Serum Visions,” is even more dizzying in its prog-jazz spiral, suggesting that we haven’t yet heard just how weird this group can get.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Ainsoph – Affection & Vengeance

Shout out to Treble’s own Colin Dempsey for putting this one on my radar. Much like the outstanding Vuur & Zijde, whose most recent album Boezem made my best metal albums of 2024 list, Dutch group Ainsoph pair metal with shimmering gothic rock and post-punk in a way that feels both seamless and inevitable. It’s not exactly news that goth-rock and metal make a good pairing—see: Tribulation, Unto Others, Cloak, etc.—but Ainsoph view such a hybrid from the reverse angle, their approach rooted more in post-punk than metal, but with surging post-metal flourishes, eruptions of blast beats, and a muscularity that you don’t often find in vintage 4AD material (outside of, say, The Birthday Party). To hear a song like “Affection” is to witness a whirlwind of power and beauty, a dark and seductive swirl that will almost always work on me regardless, but even so, Ainsoph are exceptionally good at it.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Spiritworld – Helldorado

The western backdrop of Spiritworld’s thrashy hardcore set them apart from the beginning, infusing their bruising mosh-pit anthems with a cowboy grit that makes their fiery surge all the more fun. But it’s never been country per se—not until now anyway. From the opening of “Abilene Grime,” the group embrace a cowpunk gallop on Helldorado that more explicitly emphasizes the yeehaw in their ornery outlaw sensibility. Which, it seems, might already be testing how far some fans of their previous album, Deathwestern, are willing to go with this motif, particularly on the alt-country growler “Bird Song of Death,” or the moodier twang of “Prayer Lips.” But it takes only the opening riff of “Waiting on the Reaper” or “No Vacancy in Heaven” to hear that their singular menace and fury are still right where we left them, wasting varmints with a six-shooter.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

Imperial Triumphant – Goldstar

Imperial Triumphant are, like several other bands on this list, a complex web of sounds at their absolute baseline. On their earliest releases, they constructed plenty of prog architecture beneath their black metal cloaks, and since 2018’s Vile Luxury they’ve openly embraced jazz and a noir aesthetic that set them apart even from their nearest sonic neighbors, which at the time was probably Krallice. That, coupled with their art-deco design, gold masks and branded black tea soured some metal fans on them quickly by virtue of their being pretentious. Which they absolutely are. But then again, what do I care? I’m here to be entertained and challenged as a listener. Goldstar, the band’s latest, delivers on both fronts, showcasing the group’s penchant for technical black metal chaos with elements of avant garde jazz and prog, a bit of noisecore and even a bit of a pisstake on a vintage 78 RPM Victrola vocal pop on the title track, which is arguably more of a skit than anything. But then again, given the band’s Rockefeller Plaza death cult aesthetic, maybe it works? While I agree with vocalist/guitarist Zachary Ezrin when he described the album as “a great ‘first album’ for anyone looking to get into Imperial Triumphant’s music,” as he put it in our recent interview with the band, it’s also anything but straightforward—if they ever even sat comfortably in one genre space in the first place.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)

Rwake – The Return of Magik

I was caught off guard by the delicate beauty in the opening of “You Swore We’d Always Be Together,” the first song on the first new album from Arkansas sludge metal icons Rwake in 14 years. Their long-awaited follow-up to Rest is, much like its predecessors, massive and overwhelming, equally big on riffs and melody, continuing their pursuit of taking Southern sludge to higher realms, with a greater attention to space and arrangements that allow for as much space as pummel. Monoliths like the 11-plus-minute title track prove fairly decisively that Rwake’s uniquely graceful approach to a decidedly less-than-graceful style of metal remains as potent as ever, but there’s even more subdued beauty throughout The Return of Magik, with passages that delve into folk and blues, prog and psychedelia, spoken word and even a touch of ambient Americana with its recurring use of slide guitar. It all just works together so beautifully, a mystical and melancholy return that was more than worth the wait.

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Deafheaven – Lonely People With Power

It’s funny—the last Deafheaven album that could have shown up in this column was 2018’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (not counting the live-in-studio album from 2020), which is long enough to question whether or not their full-blown shoegaze/dream pop transformation on 2021’s Infinite Granite was where they’d ultimately settle. So imagine my surprise when the first single they released from Lonely People With Power was “Magnolia,” the most straightforward metal song they’ve released to date, and a phenomenal one at that. As it turns out, when you give them a chance to just make a straight-up ripper, they stick the landing. Lonely People With Power is a more concise and more focused Deafheaven album, but not necessarily a less exploratory one. “The Garden Route,” for instance, is Cure-style post-punk with George Clarke’s screeching vocals rather than black metal, and there’s likewise a gothic shimmer to standout single “Heathen,” while Interpol’s Paul Banks shows up on the interlude “Incidental III.” To call this a return to form isn’t entirely correct—they’re back to playing metal, but Deafheaven are continuing to evolve, continuing to move forward, and doing so with a swirl of outside influences that, at just the right balance, feels entirely their own. I’m not sure if anyone reading this hasn’t heard this yet, or for that matter, haven’t formed an opinion on it. But if you’re wondering to yourself, “Am I the only one thinking this is Deafheaven at their best?” No, absolutely not. I’m right there with you.

Listen/Buy: Spotify | Rough Trade (vinyl)

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