Headline : The 20 Best Metal Albums of 2024

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Aggression can be healing — that’s a fact that fans of metal, hardcore punk, and extreme music know all too well. No matter what you worried about over the past year, there was plenty of great deafening music to serve as your crucible, an artful rage with the power to transform your agony into something greater, something better than it was. That healing anger fueled Kerry King’s post-Slayer masterpiece From Hell I Rise, Sumac’s avant-garde The Healer, and Knocked Loose’s You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To. And it pulsed through great records by High on Fire, Blood Incantation, Unholy Altar, Chat Pile, and Huntsmen. So here’s a “Crown of Horns,” to use a Judas Priest song title, for the 20 best and loudest albums of 2024.

Produced by Will Putney (Fit for an Autopsy), Body Count’s eighth album features cameos from metal luminaries such as Corpsegrinder, Max Cavalera, and Howard Jones — but the main attraction as always is rapper Ice-T, who at the age of 66 is still spitting rhymes with the same unflinching attitude and gleefully twisted sense of humor that he’s been bringing to the game for more than four decades now. Hard-crunching tracks like “The Purge,” “Psychopath,” and “Drug Lords” offer up cartoonishly lurid tales, but the emotional centerpiece of Merciless is the band’s jaw-dropping reinterpretation of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” wherein Ice casts a cold eye on the current state of humanity while guest guitarist David Gilmour wails away as if our very future depends on every string bend. —Dan Epstein

From the shrieking Mexica death whistle on opening war cry “Tetzahuitl,” Tzompantli’s Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force immediately distinguishes itself from the death-metal pack. The California-based indigenous death-doom project is a 10-musician effort helmed by Brian “Bigg o)))” Ortiz. He also plays in hardcore heavyweights Xibalba, but Tzompantli is much more personal. Inspired by Ortiz’s indigenous heritage, many of the lyrics on the album are delivered in roars of Nahuatl, and traditional instruments elevate the death-doom compositions’ otherwise cavernous gloom of monstrous bangers like “Chichimecatl.” Otherwise, Ortiz and Co. hew closely to the gruesome blueprint laid out by the likes of Evoken or Coffins, with murderously slow, percussion-heavy salvos that bridge the depths of death metal and funeral doom. Dark, brutal, and ominous, Beating the Drums of Ancestral Force redefines American folk metal with maximum brutality. —Kim Kelly

Aussie headbangers Battlesnake resurrect fantasy metal on The Rise and Demise of the Motorsteeple, a short but hard-hitting eight-song record full of chainsaw guitars, brontosaurus-heavy drums, and outsize vocals. Singer Sam Frank toggles between Rob Halford shrieks and Alice Cooper growls on tracks like “Alpha & Omega” and “I Speak Tongues,” while singing lyrics that would make Manowar’s Eric Adams seem grounded in reality. “Hear the engine as it howls and roars/Feed the flame upon the cross!” Frank bellows on the title track, an apocalyptic road song that drives home the album’s motorbike theme. The highway to hell just found its new soundtrack. —Joseph Hudak

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