Brutalité Sophistiquée – The Art of Extreme Metal

The idea of writing this was simmering for quite a while, but it never came to fruition. I tried several times to launch it, but my inability to properly define what exactly I want to talk about held me back. A couple weeks ago, I started talking to the team of this idea, got some insights and suggestions, and, most importantly, came up with a title. The aforementioned inability to define what I wanted to talk about became something I cherished, and instead of trying to catch the right words to contain my feelings, I’ve listened to a lot of bands and albums which felt right to me considering my mission. Where did it start, though?

It all started with Doldrum, to be honest. This Denver, Colorado-based trio released their album The Knocking, or The Story of the Sound That Preceded Their Disappearance back in 2022, and it became my favorite extreme metal album ever since. I will talk a bit more about that album later, but for now, it defines the starting point of the search which ultimately brought me here. I was always a big fan of bands like Gorguts and all those bands which took inspiration from their style of dissonant, progressive death metal – Ulcerate, Zhrine, Ulsect, Departé, just to name a few – as well as more abrasive avant-garde extreme metal like Portal or Altarage.

Unconsciously, I was drawn to music like that — dark, experimental, layered, and twisted. Whenever I stumbled upon something which fit those descriptors, I was locked in, trying to decipher what was going on, trying to find themes and motifs, and generally unravel the mystique of the music. Unusual chords and melodies, free-flowing song structures, compelling arrangements, and a big emphasis on atmosphere is what a lot of those bands connect, and it always resonated with me quite a bit. Because there was a conflict brewing inside of me with metal in general.

A couple years ago, I saw Ne Obliviscaris and Rivers of Nihil in a local venue. I was excited for the show since I like both bands. While I was standing there and experiencing the show, I felt empty watching the bands perform. The technical prowess was impressive, but there was nothing beyond that, in my perception. This was craftsmanship above else. I can appreciate that, I can find joy in listening to it, but in that very moment, at that very show, watching bands I like, I felt absolutely nothing. Just people doing exercises, performing riffs and noodling and blasting.

Even back then, I was able to contextualize that this was a me-problem. Of course, those bands have tremendous artistic value, the musicians approach what they do with artistic vision, and the overwhelming majority of their fans can feel the artistic message loud and clear. It just felt disconnected to me. Maybe it was just that very day, and I felt cynical for some reason, but this feeling of emptiness stayed with me, and it affected my taste tremendously. I started actively searching for bands who were able to fill said emptiness (not a euphemism, get your mind out of the gutter), and all that laid the groundwork of me trying to convey what I felt about art and extreme metal.

Give me more than just riffs. That’s what I was searching for. And while I’m still not able to be too clearly define what, I’m gonna paraphrase what Justice Potter Stewart said about porn:

‘I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see (hear) it.‘

There are couple albums which scratch that specific itch for me, or are representative of what I’m looking for. Something which is more than just heavy riffs and brutality. I’m searching for elegance and sophistication in the darkness.

I have 20 albums I want to talk about on different levels of ‘weird’, and then randomized my list – turns out, we are starting with probably the weirdest one. Oksennus is a Finnish avant-garde death metal project with elements of doom and tons of other genres. It’s all over the place. Interestingly, though, it’s not too weird. The production is solid and it gives you enough genuinely well-written moments to realize that this is more than just a goofball version of death metal. In a way, this feels like outsider extreme metal.

It feels like something done by theater kids who only have a vague idea about extreme metal, and I mean this in the best possible way. The bass is oftentimes louder than the guitar, and the vocals rely on a monotone growl throughout the whole runtime. For me, this album represents the blurry line of strange before it gets obnoxious, which is very hard to achieve, and for that alone, I applaud them.

On the other side of the spectrum, there is the more atmospheric, ambient, and psychedelic take on extreme metal. One band which is (or more accurately, were) extremely good at this is are CHAOS ECHŒS. Hailing from France, this quartet dabbled with drone, jazz, and a generally experimental approach to death, black, and doom metal. The highlight of their career, spanning from 2011 to 2019, is arguably their second full-length album, Transient. On that, CHAOS ECHŒS broke free from a lot of extreme metal tropes — most prominently, Transient doesn’t have a lot of riffs in a classic sense of the term. The drums do a lot of the heavy lifting, and often times, guitar and bass have more resonance with drone pads and act as textural and atmospheric layers.

Transient is a ritualistic experience, mirroring the lyrical focus of spirituality and mysticism. There are other bands with a similar idea and means to realize them, but nothing hits quite the same spot as CHAOS ECHŒS did. This album is very tense and unnerving, highlighting a relatively unique artistic approach to extreme metal.

I already pointed out the fact that this album is the main reason this feature exists. When The Knocking, Or The Story of the Sound that Preceded Their Disappearance was released back in 2022, I knew instantly I had something really special, something way beyond your typical borders of extreme metal — even if it doesn’t necessarily appear so right away. Doldrum ticks a lot of boxes other progressive death/black metal bands have as well. Complicated riffs, dynamic variety, you name it. But the more you listen to this album, the more you realize that there is something more. The way those riffs are arranged, how the songs flow — not only in and of itself, but with each other throughout the album — gives The Knocking its indistinguisable taste, and single-handedly created an itch in me which is very hard to scratch ever since.

In fact, I’m having a hard time only listening to one song from this album, or doing something next to it. It’s so incredibly captivating and rich, it demands your full attention, and rewards you with a journey into occultism drenched in some of the best, most forward-thinking, yet catchy metal riffs you can assault your ears with. The balance between abrasive darkness and modern sensibilities is unmatched and impressive, hence my ramblings. This fucks.

To perform some theatrics, which fit the next entry on this list, there is barely any way to lift the veil of mystery which is LVME. Shrouded in the unknown, yadda, yadda, yadda. I have no idea who is behind this project or where it’s based, but both albums in their discography, 2019’s The Blazing Iniquity and 2024’s Of Sinful Nature, are shining examples of black metal’s potential and power. LVME‘s sound is raw and relentless, but gets elevated by Gorguts-ish riffs without getting too proggy. Every time one might think that this is a prog album, LVME starts blasting their asses off.

The sound of The Blazing Iniquity sometimes comes along as glassy, but while this is a flaw for most bands, LVME are utilizing that to a point which makes this production choice crucial to their atmosphere. Typical blackened reverb on the drums, guitars with glassy high-end which sounds like a screeching banshee, but nothing is too much, everything is refined and well-crafted. This album entertains a lot of ideas which are not common in black metal and makes them feel organic to some of the genre’s more acquired ideas, which ends up in a very interesting mix of things and themes.

With sprinkles of sludge and hardcore, Lithuanian band Au-Dessus play a modern take on post-black metal. With riffs similar to what Ulcerate (a band which, surprisingly, won’t appear here because for me, their fascination lies in how they utilize technicality, so not necessarily what I have in mind) are doing, at first glance, this band easily falls into typical, more dissonant-riff-orientated modern black metal, but the more you listen, the more their music opens up. The vibe of End Of Chapter, their first and to this point only full-length, bounces between heavy riffs and unusually beautiful and sophisticated — not achieved through more typical tropes like calm ambience, but through clever texturing and compelling arrangements.

This is one of the picks on this list which are not super on the nose in terms of why they made this list to begin with, but there is something about how the songs flow which makes it feel right to me. When I put this list together, I was about to scratch them pretty early on, gave them one final listen — and then another one. And another one. And now we are here.

With Plebeian Grandstand, we are moving a bit away from the metal realm. Although this band is rooted in black metal, you can feel tons of influences coming from the world of hardcore, like mathcore or powerviolence. The (once again) French band reached their peak with their most recent album, Rien ne suffit, which is not only a masterclass within the aforementioned genres, but goes way beyond that. A breathtaking highlight of this album is the presence of vocalist Adrien Broué, who delivers one of the most expressive and ferocious performances I’ve ever heard in the wider realm of extreme metal. It’s not only about his abilities, but the way he makes his intent known — the energy and raw power is nothing short of electrifying.

This power radiates through the whole album. From the excurses into borderline-Nine-Inch-Nails-industrial territories, which are a stylistic staple of Rien ne suffit, Plebeian Grandstand utilizes sound design choices like glitches or different levels of volumes to amplify their artistic range beyond what a band should be capable of, realizing beauty through pure, unhinged chaos.

On the other end of the spectrum, meaning avant-garde death metal, we find Berlin duo Ingurgitating Oblivion. Known as a hidden gem in the extreme metal world for many years, this band are known for their unusual approach to death metal. Inspired by legends of the game like Gorguts or Atheist, IO seemingly create their artistic energy through their technical abilities, but the more time you spend with their work, especially third album Vision Wallows In Symphonies Of Light, you realize how much of the quality within this album comes from their sense of scaling stuff back. Most of the time, you are conditioned to expect a whirlwind of complicated parts with this kind of music, but then Ingurgitating Oblivion hit you with a comparatively simple groove which is just fun.

That’s what makes this band, and this album in particular, so great. It’s kinda crazy all the time, but there are moments of simple fun which are so purposefully placed among the more insane parts that it cracks open the mold of avant-garde — being weird and over-the-top for the sake of it is something you never think about when listening to Vision Wallows In Symphonies Of Light, and that’s a very rare treat.

We are staying on the European continent, and once again return to a bunch of people who primarily speak French. A pattern once should look into? Maybe, but apparently, a lot of bands on this list are at least French-adjacent. Rorcal from Switzerland have been roaming the continent for 20 years by now, and they cemented their position as one of the best post-metal bands of this generation with 2019 album Muladona.

Muladona is a seemingly cursed being based in Catalan mythology. According to Wikipedia, it describes a female mule with a woman’s head, apparently cursed by townspeople for being irreverent and irreligious. A book of the same name by author Eric Stener Carlson, a bleak horror story imagining the aforementioned mythical being as a symbol of the devil. Said book is the main inspiration of this album, and the ominous horror is omnipresent throughout its runtime.

While being categorized as extreme metal to some extent, Rorcal is more focused on the narrative of Muladona, and uses abrasive sparks of post-metal and sludge to serve that narrative. A record you can easily get dissolved into if you are listening too closely, Muladona is an impalpable experience from start to finish.

Being all mysterious seems to be the thing in extreme metal. Oftentimes, all you get are initials from the people involved because, in the end, it doesn’t really matter who the people behind art are — what matters is what art does to you. The first time I listened to I Have Seen The Light, And It Was Repulsive (dope-ass title, by the way), it simply washed over me. It was an assault on my senses, a never-ending pressure, tidal waves of noise — but it’s never mindless. Irish duo Sermon Of Flames unleash their borderline cacophonic music, and in its relentlessness lies deep and haunting beauty.

I really want to have more material from this project, since I often return to I Have Seen The Light, And It Was Repulsive to bask in its formidable, utterly disgusting heaviness. The sophistication and elegance, two traits I’m mostly searching for when picking albums for that feature, may lay in the ear of the beholder, but there is no scenario in which I will never not feel it on this album.

When people with prolific backgrounds come together to form a band or a project, we are talking about a supergroup. Sometimes, that’s done by high-profile rock stars (I would like to have a new Them Crooked Vultures album at some point), and sometimes, it happens in a niche, by very niche people. Labyrinth of Stars only produced one album so far, but the personnel behind it and the album itself created quite the buzz in the world of extreme metal. Formed under aliases, the band consists of Dirk Stark (who apparently is the only blank page in the band), Markus Siegenhort (the mastermind behind Lantlôs), and Christian Kolf, who runs the hidden gem Owl, and is also part of Valborg and Nightmarer, among a myriad of other projects. I’m listing this to give you a scope of the creative forces which come together here, and it shows with Labyrinth of Stars‘ Spectrum Xenomorph.

As a more modern take on extreme metal compared to many of its peers throughout this list, Spectrum Xenomorph incorporates elements of deathcore and blackgaze, but highlights a more cosmic, industrial approach to their abrasive death/black metal. Deeply atmospheric and full of tension-creating dynamic changes, this was a no brainer to get featured in this article, and I would get hyped for a second album someday. One can hope.

Disclaimer: As some of you may have noticed, we usually don’t cover releases by bands on Season of Mist. The reason is the label’s history of working with questionable bands and the comments its founder has made about them. Dodecahedron is no longer active, but I still wanted to make this clear. I’m making an exception here to highlight this music. However, I recommend avoiding buying anything that could generate profit for the label in case you share our concerns.

If there are any modern cult classics in the realm of extreme metal, Dodecahedron‘s kwintssens is undoubtedly number one in my book. Hailing from Tilburg, the Netherlands (home of Roadburn and fantastic extreme metal projects like Ulsect, which coincidentally shares some members with Dodecahedron), the band is revered by those who know it, especially for this album, which is still spoken of in glorious awe to this day. It’s a relentless stream of rage and anger arrangements, full of creativity and unusual ideas that I can’t compare to anything else. In my opinion, there is no other album like kwintessens.

Drawing from a specific palette of melodies and harmonies and backed by one of the most impressive drummers in modern metal, Jasper Barendregt, this album is a beacon of artistry within extreme metal. The lyrics guide us through the abyss of humanity, yet every time I listen to it, I feel renewed hope for us.

Honestly, I was never a big fan of Thantifaxath. There was just something about them that never sat right with me. While compiling this list, several people recommended their first album, Sacred White Noise, so I added it to my ever-growing shortlist and gave the band a second chance.

It clicked. I don’t know what went wrong the first time I checked them out, and I still wouldn’t name them my favorite in this feature, but they earned their spot. Their biggest musical selling point for me is their very prominent, highly melodic bass. Often, the bass carries a lot of motif work, which is not very common in extreme metal. Sacred White Noise is generally a very melodic album, which creates an awesome dynamic with its overwhelming wall-of-sound moments. They also don’t shy away from the psychedelic moments usually found in the music of bands like Oranssi Pazuzu. This gives Thantifaxath an impressive artistic range in sound design and emotive movement.

Flourishing was only a band for five years, during which they produced two EPs and one full-length album. Afterward, two of the members went on to form Aeviterne, a project that may or may not make an appearance later on. If those people were able to score two spots on this feature, you can be sure they have some serious mojo. This mojo burst forth like magic with Flourishing‘s The Sum of All Fossils.

It is one of those ‘criminally underrated’ albums, held in high regard by some people who were on a similar search as I was. I can only wholeheartedly agree that it is one of the finest modern extreme metal albums. The flow of this album is astonishingly elegant, transcending any genre trope or listener expectation. The Sum of All Fossils never feels artificial or overly constructed; it’s a genuine artistic statement and a labor of love from the people who made it. Moments of krautrock are followed by the nastiest dissonant death metal riffs imaginable, yet it never feels forced or gimmicky. It just feels natural.

This Italy-based one-man project found its home at I, The Voidhanger Records, the always wonderfully weird and top-notch address for all sorts of strange extreme metal. I’m going to steal some thunder from Bekor Qilish to praise the label. Not all of their releases are amazing or revolutionary, but the label seems to be an endless source of boundary-pushing metal, like an artery pumping fresh blood into the heart. Follow I, The Voidhanger Records!

Labels like this one, with bands like Bekor Qilish, keep the curiosity alive in a genre that relies too heavily on playing it safe and reworking old aesthetics and formulas. They all have their place, but albums like the fantastic, synth-laden Throes of Death from the Dreamed Nihilism show how adventurous people can be with those aesthetics and formulas. The Bekor Qilish debut album feels quite metal in a ’90s kind of way, but has so many clever ideas that it remains interesting and compelling throughout.

Many of the bands featured here tend to be relatively short-lived. Maybe two albums, sometimes one. New York City–based progressive death metal quartet Pyrrhon is not that kind of band. Active since 2008, they have released five mind-twisting death metal albums and have numerous interesting side projects, such as Seputus, Scarcity, and Weeping Sores. While doing all that, Pyrrhon has created a distinct sound by mixing death metal with prog and elements of mathcore.

For me, the energy they draw from hardcore and mathcore is what makes them so special. Some moments in their most recent album, Exhaust, could be straight from Ion Dissonance. Their music is always frantic and on the edge. There are no moments of calm; it’s a constant assault on the senses. When Exhaust closes, your mind will finally be allowed to breathe and recalibrate after the whirlwind it just experienced. Pyrrhon does all this with expertise and care, bringing beauty to their chaos.

Here’s another recent example of a one-man project. The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion offers a modern, dark, and opulent take on dissonant death/black metal, a genre that I find unpleasant. Naturally, bands like Ulcerate should be included, but they just don’t vibe with me, even though I love them. The Greek project Kvadrat has mighty and nasty riffs, but for me, the main focus lies in the ominous atmosphere omnipresent throughout its runtime. With a vocal performance straight from hell, this album is massive.

The epic quality of The Horrible Dissonance of Oblivion never feels forced, but earned. It’s an impressive album, especially considering it was made by only one person. There are moments when the album takes a breath, like a hunter before taking the final leap on its prey. The tension is high, and the anticipation creates images in your head. Impeccable.

With just four songs and a runtime of around 45 minutes, Spectral Voice‘s second album is one of my favorite extreme metal albums of 2024. You could argue that their first album, Eroded Corridors of Unbeing, deserves a spot on the list more than their second album, Sparagmos, but I don’t really care. In the end, I’ve listened to Sparagmos more. It’s the soundtrack to a horror film I never want to see because it would scare me to death. Spectral Voice‘s beauty lies in their ability to work with overwhelming darkness. It’s mean and nasty but also elegant and rich.

Researching this feature introduced me to a variety of music, and doom metal was not my first choice. Nevertheless, Spectral Voice convinced me that they belong here.

The album doesn’t matter. It could be something else. What’s important is that Gorguts are the grandfathers of most of the music featured here. While there are other bands that have taken extreme metal to more experimental and progressive heights, I would argue that no band has been more influential than Gorguts to the bands featured on this list. Personally, I love Colored Sands the most because I prefer its more modern sound compared to the obvious choice, Obscura. The way this band layers its riffs, incorporates technicality, and influences other bands cannot be overstated.

They might not be the band that sent me on this journey, but they were one of the first names that popped into my mind. They had to be included. If you like forward-thinking metal and have never checked out Gorguts, now is the time. No excuses. Gorguts are non-negotiable.

I first learned about this record shortly after its release when it was sent to me with a note that read, ‘Jamie Saint Merat from Ulcerate plays drums for this project.‘ So, I did what any sane person would do: I dropped whatever I was doing and listened to it. And it was worth it. Although Verberis sounds modern on this record, it has a classic ’90s extreme metal vibe, ranging from death/doom to black metal. Thunderous blast beats are sprinkled with slowly moving guitar motifs, giving Adumbration of the Veiled Logos an interesting vibe and dynamic.

Unsurprisingly, the drums are an absolute highlight of this album. There is so much blasting percussion that it acts more as a texture than anything else, making this album incredibly unique. Despite that, the record itself feels leisurely, flowing through the complex cascades of each element.

The last entry in this series is a band that I have mentioned before. With Eric Rizk and Garrett Bussanick from Flourishing, as well as Samuel Smith from Artificial Brain, Aeviterne boasts some high-profile members. Their debut album, The Ailing Facade, showcases all that experience and expertise. The album is bleak but has Castlevania-esque moments of grandeur, giving it a rather unusual feel. There are a lot of surprising choices in terms of songwriting and arrangement: dark synth pads swell beneath harsh black metal riffs; sometimes, everything collapses, and segments of ritualistic ambient music take over. It’s wild.

You may have noticed a certain recency bias in this list. However, quite a few of the picks, including The Ailing Facade, feel old-school. I love this kind of contrast.

And with that, we’ve come to an end. This list is by no means trying to be complete or universal. It’s a very subjective thing I was searching for, something I still can’t properly explain. There are definitly other albums and projects which would deserve a spot here. Maybe there will be a continuation of this format. It was a fun ride.

‘There is a real beauty to brutality. Even the most graphic violence can be beautiful if it’s presented in an artistic way.‘

-Justin Broadrick