Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence contributing writers Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts.
Calling June a “big month for underground metal” is like calling a night out with your boys a “legendary event.” The scope of the statement is immediately dwarfed by the reality that it’s insignificant to nearly everyone outside a select bubble. It’s cool that a handful of metal’s most forward-thinking bands and exciting artists all dropped an album within the same 30-day period, just like it’s cool that your buddy Kyle shoved four Zyn pouches into his gums at once. The world still spins, you still have to work the next morning, and housing isn’t getting any cheaper.
Yet, if we do not cherish these moments, then all we have is the endless spinning of the globe and the ever-rising price of houses. So yes, congratulate Kyle on not puking or passing out in the bar, and celebrate all that June brought us. Its lineup was headlined by the not-quite-underground-but-still-underground Alcest, signed to Nuclear Blast and thus ineligible for this column. However, their latest record Les Chants de L’Aurore is wonderful (and mentioned on Heavy Consequence‘s mid-year list of the Best Metal & Hard Rock Albums of 2024 So Far). It’s the endgame to their decade-plus pursuit of a celestial sound, where all they’ve worked towards comes together in a new light that, while obvious in hindsight, was yet unheard.
June’s release schedule was stacked beyond its headliner and, for some, even more titillating. Ulcerate returned after their extremely contextual-relevant Stare into Death and Be Still, released right at the start of the COVID pandemic and bottling the early anxiety of those first months better than any album released during the lockdowns. The 2000s post-metal giants continue to lord over their domains as both SUMAC and Julie Christmas dropped new music, the latter being particularly surprising considering it’s been over a decade since her last album. The Converge and Hatebreed supergroup that is Umbra Vitae also released their second record, showing how death metal and hardcore would interact in a perfect world. Finally, there was Thou’s stellar return to solo LPs, Umbilical, that strengthened the bond between sludge metal and grunge.
These are by no means the only worthwhile records that came from metal’s underground this month. They are just the biggest acts, all of whom have awoken after a long slumber of at least four years (with some caveats in the case of Thou and Jacob Bannon). Somehow, someway, daddy delivered this past Father’s Day. And he didn’t just bring back the milk, he also brought the eggs, flour, and sugar. June would be a gift even if those releases stood alone, but of course, metal burrows as deep as Lost Izalith, and there are other projects also deserving a spot in your ears.
– Colin Dempsey
Dysrhythmia – Coffin of Conviction
Fun fact: This was the band that introduced me to the work of Colin Marston and through him an entire universe of underground extreme and progressive music, earning them a lifetime pass to make me check out whatever they drop. This time, notable mathy abstruse instrumental rockers Dysrhythmia largely ditch their most abstract and impenetrable stylings that would occasionally crop up (admittedly also contextualized by hooky and groove-laden playing) with something much closer to modern Cynic, marrying a precise and beautiful shimmering tone against sharply defined rhythmic attacks. One can hear Atheist and Watchtower in the mix as well, all the greats of that era of progressive heavy metal, making for their best record since 2012’s Test of Submission. It is immediately obvious why the string players of this band were handpicked to help continue Gorguts. Simply a wonderfully toothsome instrumental group. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Langdon Hickman
EDO – Radiant Structures and Vivid Dreams
Black metal and post-punk should hang out more. Musically they typically stand in opposition to one another, yet they congeal well if you stretch the “goth” descriptor wide enough. The latest EP from EDO, Radiant Structures and Vivid Dreams, finds the dreamy core between the two and lapses into a lucid dream of intertwining, jangly drums and guitars smothered in reverb. There are only four tracks on this bad boy and three of them run for over 8 minutes. The outlier is “Running Towards the Night,” the clear single and the track you should dip into first if any of this tickles you, though it’s far from the best. So much of Radiant Structures and Vivid Dreams isn’t strictly metal but flirts dangerously close with it, as if winking that it could get darker at any moment. Goth can be many things, usually romantic or dramatic, but rarely is it spectral like EDO. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Dempsey
Fractal Generator – Convergence
Convergence is what modern death metal should be. It’s techy and slickly produced — and it needs to be. Both these traits are vital to Fractal Generator’s shtick, which is a long-running series of concept albums that explore sci-fi horrors through riff-worshipping death metal. The Canadian trio’s strongest trait has always been that no matter where they are in the universe, whether in a parallel dimension, a simulation, or on some of the new planets documented in Convergence, caveman riffs are deities. There are synthy gimmicks that remind you of the sci-fi theme, and they are gimmicks, but gimmicks aren’t necessarily bad. They just don’t lead anywhere they shouldn’t. They merely deepen the atmosphere. Look at them as a microcosm of Fractal Generator’s aversion to bloat. Convergence is a lean record. There is no free space on it for anything outside of death metal. This is not to disparage its lack of experimentation but to champion Fractal Generator’s ability to mine death metal’s nuances. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Dempsey
Inherits the Void – Scars of Yesteryears
Antoine Scholtès, the lone entity behind Inherits the Void, has peered deeply into the well of melodic death metal and extracted the joys that so many others did during the subgenre’s halcyon days. Thankfully, his latest album Scars of Yesteryears doesn’t feel like a throwback despite honoring the Swedish scene’s roots and Dan Swanö’s mastering. It implements more than a meager amount of early melodeath influence into an atmospheric black metal framework. That atmosphere is entirely constructed by what occurs outside of the riffs rather than the riffs themselves. Synths swirl around them and fill them with purpose, lending each track a sense of scale beyond their collar-grabbing immediacy. Most importantly, beneath everything, this is goofy metal delivered with the sincerity of a eulogy. There are fantastical synths in the back half of “The Endless Glow of Twilight” that should be farcical, but Scholtès plays them as if they’re saving his life. All metal, regardless of style, needs this same commitment. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Dempsey
Julie Christmas – Ridiculous and Full of Blood
It’s been eight years since Julie Christmas’ last record (Mariner with Cult of Luna) and 14 since her last solo album. Such time away could’ve neutered her. Yet, somehow, through some arcane ritual, she remains as terrifying as ever on Ridiculous and Full of Blood. She infects every tendril in her domain as “Not Enough” shows by crawling to life like a roach skittering across the ground. Her presence reverberates through the backing tracks, which are noise-rock and post-metal canvases that, while punchy, act in her service. A large part of the synchronization between Christmas’ voice and the instrumentals is that she stacked her band with either past collaborators (i.e. Cult of Luna’s Johannes Persson) or those comfortable in similar lanes (like KEN Mode’s Andrew Schneider). That being said, this is Christmas’ album. She does the heavy lifting here, as she damn well should. While some may miss her glacial pace found on A Day of Nights, Ridiculous and Full of Blood replaces it with some of her most hellish vocal contortions. Buy it on Bandcamp. – Colin Dempsey
