On their third album, this Richmond doom band's guitars come together with frontwoman Dorthia Cottrell’s calm, haunting voice to make memorable anthems. Produced by Jack Endino, Grief’s Infernal Flower is filled with fuzzed stoner metal marked by a thick, molasses tone, soulfulness, and hooks as big as they need to be.

Windhand: "Crypt Key" (via SoundCloud)

Danish multi-instrumentalist Amalie Bruun’s debut album is an immersive collection of classic-sounding black metal and Scandinavian folk that features chilly piano, melodic ghost-choir interludes, passages of frozen noise, clamoring industrial bits, and a gong. Bruun writes the music, sings in both a crystal clear and gnarled voice, and also plays piano and guitar. She recorded the album in Oslo, co-producing the 11 songs with prolific musician and producer Krystoffer Rygg, aka Garm, the mind behind Norwegian black metal legends Ulver and one of the genre's important shaping forces.

Myrkur: "Nordlys" (Buy on Bandcamp)

Noisem’s debut, Agony Defined, was an exhilarating mix of old-school whammy bar-rich thrash and death metal with little bits of grind and punk thrown about; people were fair when they brought up Slayer and Napalm Death's Scum. The group’s second album, Blossoming Decay, is burlier. The playing is sturdier, faster, and more hulking. The blazing solos are still there, but the actual riffs pull just as much of your attention. And the singing is freer, gnarlier, and more rabid—it's a nonstop vocal attack that comes off more punk and personal than Agony. And these nine songs are not about horror films, they're about the personal horrors of life and living. Blossoming Decay is a metal record that'll appeal to punk kids—and Trash Talk fans—as much as it'll blow the minds of metalheads.

Noisem: "Cascade of Scars" (Buy on Bandcamp)

Tanner Anderson is the driving force behind Obsequiae (formerly Autumnal Winds), a Minneapolis trio who blend Medieval harp and Medieval lyrical stylings with raw black metal on songs with titles like "Orphic Rites of the Mystic". I first became aware of Anderson a few years ago through his ambient, naturalistic funeral doom project, Celestiial, where he wove field recordings of streams, rustling leaves, and birds into his heavy, often industrial-seeming tones. On Aria of Vernal Tombs, there are church bells, echoing vocals, the sound of a dark forest, and solo harp pieces accompanying the blast beats, and it all works. Someone should honestly book them at a Renaissance Faire. Genre name suggestion: "Black Madrigal."

Obsequiae: "In the Absence of Light" (via Bandcamp)

The Minneapolis band False play swirling, full-speed black metal chaos that features two guitars, bass, drums, keys, and a rabid vocalist named, simply, Rachel. This untitled LP follows a 2011 EP with no name. The songs do have titles, though, and carry a crusty punk naturalism (and nihilism): "The body decays and becomes the Earth/ Death is welcomed, not to be dead, but to feel the Self dying/ To cleanse the idea of self with the deluge of blood from flesh/ This is the rebirth through pain, in which we embrace the sensuality of nothingness." It’s ritualistic and cleansing, its five songs stretching to an hour. The album reminds me of Weakling in some ways, but it’s harder and more warped sounding and less dreamy—this is more war march, less nocturnal dream. It’s like they’re racing to a finish line that never comes.

False: "Saturnalia" (via Bandcamp)

The third and best album from Pinkish Black finds the Fort Worth, Texas duo mixing deathrock with krautrock, analog drone with glimmering melody, and the solitary atmosphere of horror movie soundtracks with the welcoming voice of Daron Beck. Think Christian Death morphing with Tortoise, or Ian Curtis guesting with Goblin. Beck may also bring to mind a goth Mike Patton, Peter Murphy, or Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman: At times he snarls and howls like he’s in hell, but he mostly croons, chants, and pushes his crystalline baritone skyward. All these elements come together in a dense, seven-song collection that’s about as majestic as it is creepy.

Pinkish Black: "The Master Is Away" (Buy on Bandcamp)

San Francisco’s Vastum create suffocating, masochistic, warped death/crust metal that sounds like it was recorded in a wind tunnel (or a sewer). The raging vocals of Daniel Butler and guitarist Leila Abdul-Rauf feels like a gang mugging, but there’s an odd catchiness to the chaos—even with song titles like "Sodomitic Malevolence" and "Hole Below (A Dream of Ritual Abuse)".

Vastum: "Sodomitic Malevolence" (Buy on Bandcamp)

The sludgy Oakland stoner trio High on Fire, fronted by one of our greatest living guitarists, Matt Pike, have been so all-around solid for such a long time that it can be easy to overlook just how flat-out great they’ve become. They’re my generation’s Motörhead, and this relentlessly revved-up collection is one of their strongest offerings.

High on Fire: "Carcosa"

The San Francisco four-piece Kowloon Walled City slow things down on their third album, Grievances, which blends post-rock, sludge, and references to Unwound with tons of space. They take their time with each of the record's seven tracks and aren’t afraid to grow nearly silent before exploding into another tortured howl from vocalist/guitarist Scott Evans, who will remind you of your favorite '90s noise rock or floor-punching hardcore frontman. The songs are heavy, distraught, and, in the end, very beautiful.

Kowloon Walled City: "Grievances" (via Bandcamp)

This knockout band features John Cobbett and Sigrid Sheie from folk-inflected progressive metal heroes Hammers of Fortune, YOB frontman/doom legend Mike Scheidt, and kvlt punk Aesop Dekker, the drummer for one-time SF black metal legends Ludicra and currently of Agalloch. Deeper Than Sky is a tour through classic metal with everything slightly cracked. You get twisted, ebullient thrash metal and power metal folding in on itself; impressionistic guitar solos alongside vocal parts that make me think of Queen; and a piano piece set to d-beat drums. Scheidt’s vocal performance is a revelation, as are the colorful acrobatics of the band tearing things up around him.

VHÖL: "Deeper Than Sky" (via Bandcamp)

The Finnish funeral doom band’s first album since 2008 is an eight-song, 78-minute evisceration of the soul in slow motion. Vocalist Matti’s growls are deep and gnarled; the music around him is often light, precise, almost gentle. (It can also get fittingly theatrical when the keyboards and strings reach for the sky.) Featuring six new tracks along with two old ones, Ordeal was recorded live in front of an audience in Turku, Finland, and the setting gives these elegantly crushing excursions an especially vibrant life force.

Skepticism: "March Incomplete" (Buy on Bandcamp)

The seminal gothic metal/doom band Paradise Lost have been around since 1988. Their 14th studio album, The Plague Within, continues a run of amazing mid- or late- or whatever-career offerings that started with 2009’s Faith Divides Us—Death Unites Us, a personal favorite, and continued with 2012’s Tragic Idol. This is heavier and harsher than those two albums and finds them shifting back to their earlier death/doom days, with Nick Holmes shredding his voice. But don’t worry, there’s still plenty of stately gothic metal, too. Like Swans, Paradise Lost prove that some bands get even better with age.

Paradise Lost: "No Hope in Sight"

The Bay Area duo Bosse-de-Nage create hyperactive post-black metal punk with Slint moments and highly sexual lyrics along the lines of: "At night she reenacts scenes from her passion/ She kicks and screams on all fours." Their latest album follows their 2012 split 12” with Deafheaven and travels to a much creepier place. Bryn Manning’s lyrics read like short stories—like Pig Destroyer’s best work, or Calvino or Borges penning pornographic parables. "I come from the City of Hair beyond the Wrinkled Mountain," one character notes, "and I will not rest until I’ve washed every penis in this room." It wouldn’t be wrong to think of a twisted version of Sunbather penned by a Bataille fanatic and released by AmRep.

Bosse-de-Nage: "In a Yard Somewhere" (via Bandcamp)

Dominick Fernow’s Prurient discography is extensive—I’d venture to say there are more than 150 releases of some size or another with his name on it—so it feels stupid to call any single release his "best." But the sprawling, 90-minute Frozen Niagara Falls has made me consider it. It’s a record that ties together Fernow’s rawer past and points toward something new. There are meditative moments followed by industrial implosions, moments that will make you want to dance, and stretches that will make you want to smash your head against a wall. It is pained and also ecstatic; cinematic and very personal. It’s also maybe the most romantic harsh noise album ever made.

Prurient: "Greenpoint" (via SoundCloud)

Over the last 10 years, the music made by prolific Chicago/Baltimore trio Locrian has always been tough to categorize: Is it noise? Black metal? Dark ambient? Industrial? Drone? Things get especially complicated on Infinite Dissolution, where they manage to be more triumphant and bigger than before. The nine-song effort, recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio and produced by Greg Norman (Russian Circles, Pelican), is a concept album about the extinction of the human race, but you’ll find yourself pumping your fist as frontman Terence Hannum’s haunting black-metal vocals slither through a melancholic, melodic mix of fuzz, hiss, and riffs. Stitched together by woozy instrumentals that feature birds chirping and iron scraping, the album marks a new peak for the creatively restless group.

Locrian: "Heavy Water" (via SoundCloud)

Sannhet, the instrumental Brooklyn trio of bassist AJ Annunziata, drummer Christopher Todd, and guitarist John Refano, are one of the best live bands going. Onstage, they’re a marvel; Todd in the middle and up front, a drummer nobody can stop watching; Annunziata manning an intense light show with his foot. Then, when you listen to their excellent second album, you wonder how all this noise could come from just three guys. They make soaring-but-concise post-rock anthems that will make you punch the air and maybe (probably) cry.

Sannhet: "Lost Crown" (via SoundCloud)

Horrendous honor old school death metal by taking it apart and putting it back together again as something entirely new. The eight songs on their third album are mournful, mathy, anthemic, pristine. You’ll hear Swedish death metal, American thrash, majestic doom, bits of gnarled black metal, and even a stirring post-rock outro. They’re technical but soulful players, and though the solos and time shifts can make you gasp, it’s the music’s emotion and guts that stay with you.

Horrendous: "Polaris" (via Bandcamp)

On their third album, the Polish black metal duo Mgła offer up six perfectly paced tracks—the efficiently titled "Exercises in Futility I" through "Exercises in Futility VI"—that respect the black metal template but push things subtly, capably forward. There’s nothing especially fancy here; Mgła make perfect use of the ingredients of basic, raw, melodic black metal. The tracks are imposing and blistering, but approachable: If you’re someone who can also hear hooks in Watain and old-school Burzum, this will come off like nihilistic pop.

Mgła: "Exercises in Futility I" (via Bandcamp)

The Dallas, Texas collective Dead to a Dying World’s second album moves through apocalyptic crust punk, post-rock, black metal, doom, and exultant stringed soundscapes to create an album focusing on our failing environment and earth and that feels like Godspeed fully giving into their metal tendencies. Here, the seven-piece group, which features multiple male and female voices along with guitars and orchestra bells, is supplemented by guest vocals from Pallbearer’s Brett Campbell, Pinkish Black’s Daron Beck, and Jamie Myers-Waits of Sabbath Assembly, among others.

Dead to a Dying World: "Cicatrix" (via Bandcamp)

Purple is the first album since Baroness’ near-fatal van accident, and the first to feature the new lineup that came together after two members left the group following the crash. It’s shorter and more precise than 2012’s Yellow & Green, and they left Relapse to release it on their own imprint, Abraxan Hymns. These are some of the biggest, strongest songs Baroness have written; it's rock music that folds in their more metal leanings, along with something more delicate and spare. The choruses are their best—maybe because each and every one of them is life-affirming. (Watch the in-studio video for "Chlorine & Wine" to get a sense of this jubilation.)

Baroness: "Chlorine & Wine"

The Denver quartet Khemmis’ excellent debut LP features six muscular, melodic songs that flash between vintage doom, heavy blues, and classic rock’n’roll. Their two vocalists overlay clean and gnarled vocals—you hear Candlemass one moment, a floor-punching hardcore sermon the next. Like fellow modern purveyors of the old guard Pallbearer, Khemmis nod to the classics just enough to remain pure and update them enough to be your new favorite band.

Khemmis: "Serpentine" (via Bandcamp)

Autumn Eternal concludes a trilogy by Minnesota-via-Kentucky multi-instrumentalist Austin Lunn, aka Panopticon, who plays everything here outside of a violin. He powers into more traditional atmospheric black metal and dark folk-inflected naturalist metal featuring subtler banjo/fiddle accents than before. There are acoustic guitars and nocturnal field recordings, but the real draw is the rich, gorgeous guitar tone, amazing drumming, and melancholic (and, at times, vicious) atmosphere. You may think of vintage Katatonia, but, like Agalloch, this music was pulled directly from the American landscape.

Panopticon: "Sleep to the Sound of the Waves Crashing" (Buy on Bandcamp)

If someone close to you has died, you know that mourning can be a lonely and suffocating experience: Bell Witch, who named themselves after a poltergeist from Southern folklore, evoke these sorts of feelings. The Seattle duo's haunting take on funeral doom is melancholic, heavy, slow, and beyond minimal. It evokes burial. Four Phantoms is gut-wrenching and cathartic in the way the saddest things can be.

Bell Witch: "Judgement, In Fire: I – Garden (Of Blooming Ash)"

Tribulation’s 2013 collection The Formulas of Death added progressive rock, clean guitars, piano interludes, and flanged Eastern elements to the group’s thrashing Swedish death metal. Children of the Night is more focused, nailing a vintage heavy rock feel—think Mercyful Fate with a gnarlier vocalist. The songwriting is mind-blowingly on point, the hooks hummable after one listen. Though they're quite different than recent tourmates Deafheaven, they share an ability to make "extreme" music catchy. And unlike a lot of forced kvlt stuff these days, you could actually start a cult around this music.

Tribulation: "The Motherhood of God"

Somehow, the Los Angeles band made an album that’s even better than their classic-seeming Sunbather. New Bermuda’s heavy parts are heavier, the quiet moments prettier, the push and pull of its overall sequencing perfect. It’s the first proper full-length recording from a lineup that’s been touring together for the past couple of years, and they really gel here, each player striving to reach their limit. The album is moving, romantic, and powerful, and sounds great in a large room or when you’re just lost in your own head.

Deafheaven: "Baby Blue" (via Bandcamp)