Our annual report continues with the best underground metal albums of 2023, courtesy of “Mining Metal” writers Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey. As the year winds down, stay tuned here for more awards, lists and exclusive articles on the best of music, film and TV of 2023. You can find it all in one place here.
It's the end of the year, which means, as you've probably seen, it's list season. We are nearing the end of the lists here at Consequence, which gives us a couple of unique points of view. First, we can remove from our own lists things that are already covered on the larger list of hard rock and heavy metal albums. That means if you're looking for more announcements about Tomb Mold and Godflesh (both written by Colin and I on that main list, by the way), you're out of luck. This is because while the albums on the main list are obviously great, hence the strong recommendation, we think it's in keeping with the spirit of an underground metal column to showcase albums that otherwise wouldn't be counted during the year-end coverage, as well as a way to maximize the return on your investment as readers, so to speak. After all, the limit for the number of albums included in a given publication is already somewhat arbitrary; You listen to as much music as we do in a year and your list of albums you wish you could tell people about gets pretty long in December. It is already a test to reduce it to something manageable.
It would be a bit more thoughtful, but I spent my end-of-year obsessions on last month's introduction. The passage of time, marked so rigidly by the events of our publishing calendars and our lives, the birthdays and deadlines of adulthood, creates the strange illusion of a demarcation that does not really exist in the flesh of our days. The hands of the clock pass numbly and blindly through our casually scattered numbers, and suddenly I am 35 years old. This sensation, the meaninglessness of numbers, feels at first like casual nihilism until it is suddenly reversed; time is, of course, quite real and quite finite, and suddenly this passage feels like something between mourning and celebration (as if one could ever aspire to be anything but the other). What's more, things mutate over time, they refuse to remain static, which is why these structured celebrations of mourning serve both to mend a perspective in time as a moment. The clock is ticking and the things we once loved we come to vilify, the memories we once loathed and were ashamed of we come to see with peace and insight. What is eroded is both the material foundation of memory and the noumenal emotional aura that surrounds it, the very reason why memory (or in this case, records) remains in our minds.
After having written quite a bit and, therefore, having mined a lot of this world of memory, it is also curious to see what ends up sinking deep into your memory. I review our column every year to see if there's anything I loved that I may have forgotten; As the years go by, I see my own writings about an album I've completely forgotten feel like an arrow shot in tortuous loops only to return to me some time later, a reminder of something of value. Other albums, meanwhile, burn themselves into my brain despite perhaps seeming minor at first glance, either because they become inevitably tied to the flesh of my life or because they simply subtly reveal something of value that takes time to truly discover. The older I get, the more humiliating and strange this process becomes. My mother, in her 70s, tells me that this feeling only becomes strange with age. What a nice thought.
– Langdon Hickman
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