Our Annual Report keeps rolling with the Best Underground Metal Albums of 2023, courtesy of “Mining Metal” writers Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey. As the year winds down, keep it tuned here for more awards, lists, and exclusive features about the best in music, film, and TV of 2023. You can find it all in one place here.
It’s year-end time, which means, as you have likely seen, it’s list season. We come near the end of the lists here at Consequence, which gives us a couple unique vantage points. First, we are able to excise from our own lists things that are already covered on the bigger hard rock and heavy metal albums list. That means if you are looking for more blurbs on Tomb Mold and Godflesh — both written by Colin and me on that main list, by the way — you are out of luck. This is because while the records on the main list are obviously great, hence the strong recommendation, we think it’s both in keeping with the spirit of an underground metal column to showcase albums not otherwise accounted for during end-of-year coverage as well as a way to just maximize bang for your buck as readers, so to speak. After all, the cutoff for the amount of albums any given publication includes is already somewhat arbitrary; you listen to as much music as us types do during a year and your list of albums you wish you could tell people about gets pretty long come December. It’s already a trial to trim it down to something manageable.
I’d be a bit more ruminative, but I expended my year-end fixations on last month’s intro. The passing of time, marked so rigidly by events in our publication calendars and lives, the birthdays and deadlines of adult life, create the strange illusion of demarcation that doesn’t really exist in the flesh of our days. The clock’s hands sweep numb and blind past our casually-strewn numbers, and suddenly I’m 35. This sense, the meaninglessness of numbers, feels at first like a casual nihilism until suddenly it inverts itself; time is, of course, quite real, and quite finite, and so suddenly this passing feels something between a mourning and a celebration (as though one could ever hope to be anything but the other). What’s more, things mutate over time, refuse to stay static, and so these structured mourning celebrations are as much to fix a perspective in time as a moment. The clock ticks and things we once loved we come to revile, memories we once detested and were ashamed of we come to view with peace and insight. It is as much the material fundament of memory that erodes as the noumenal emotional aura that surrounds it, the very reason why the memory — or in this case, records — sticks in our minds.
Having written quite a bit and thus mined this world of memory a hell of a lot, it’s also curious to see what winds up burrowing itself deep into your memory. I go back over our column every year to see if there’s something I loved that I may have forgotten; as years tick on, I see my own writing about an album I’ve totally forgotten that feels like an arrow fired in circuitous loops to arrive back at myself sometime later, a reminder of something of value. Other records, meanwhile, burn themselves into my brain despite seeming perhaps minor at first blush, be it because they become inevitably bound up in the flesh of my life or that they simply reveal in subtlety something of value that takes time to truly unearth. The older I get, the more humbling and strange this process becomes. My mother, in her mid-70s, tells me this feeling only grows in strangeness with age. What a pleasant thought.
– Langdon Hickman