2024 was a banger of a year for heavy music. The past 12 months were full of unexpected comebacks from some of the genre’s most iconic players. A gang of underground favorites likewise elevated both themselves and their scene to new levels of attention, while the next generation of heavy musicmakers came out swinging with impressive sonic feats, too.
Earlier this month Revolver asked our readers to pick both the Top 5 Artists and the Top 5 Songs of 2024. Now we’re going out with a bang with the results of our poll asking the fans to cast their ballots for the single best album of the year.
Here are the top 5 vote-getters, as ranked by you.
Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere
The monoliths return — again!
Blood Incantation took a spot on your top five best songs of the year with Absolute Elsewhere’s multi-chambered “The Stargate,” but truth be told, the whole of the Colorado death-metal expressionists’ fourth full-length album is best experienced as an epic, unbroken tone-quest of quixotic prog, ludicrous-speed blasting, interstellar new age synth-scaping and more.
Blood Incantation had dropped our jaws in the past, but “The Stargate” and the just-as-adventurous “The Message” may well be their magnum opuses — brutal but beautiful compositions that reshaped the “nature of consciousness” one intense Tablet at a time.
Bring Me the Horizon – POST HUMAN: NeX GEn
Bring Me the Horizon’s NeX GEn era came later than fans had expected — the U.K. veterans missed a fall 2023 release date by about eight months and likewise endured the departure of longtime keyboardist-producer Jordan Fish during the making of the record.
While fraught with delays and inter-band tension, BMTH came out the other side with a collection that often lands oddly jubilant, despite the conditions. Take the exhaling euphoria of “YOUtopia” or the cheeky grunge-pop flavor of “n/A,” where vocalist Oli Sykes pokes at dark thoughts addiction with a double dose of humor.
It still sports moments of metalcore heaviness, but POST HUMAN mostly goes post-genre as BMTH dip their toes in a heady soup of hardcore, nu-grooves, pop, electronic twitchiness and more.
Opeth – The Last Will and Testament
For a lot of Opeth fans, the triumph of this year’s The Last Will and Testament might boil down to a single factor: the return of the growl.
Vocalist-guitarist Mikael Åkerfeldt did indeed pepper the Swedish band’s 14th album with a throwback snarliness that we’d thought he’d abandoned long ago. And while those death roars sound great, there’s an embarrassment of other riches on display throughout the band’s concept album about a World War I patriarch bestowing fortunes and family secrets upon his progeny.
As for the music, The Last Will and Testament is a wild-spindling doom, death and prog journey that finds Åkerfeldt’s newly rediscovered gruffness complimented by Europe vocal powerhouse Joey Tempest and the grand flautistry of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson.
Wholly epic in concept and mind-blowing in execution. Opeth bequeathed us another all-timer with this one.
Knocked Loose – You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To
If there’s one hardcore record heavy music fans reached out for in 2024, it’s Knocked Loose’s You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To. It’s not hard to understand why — the band’s third full-length statement is a towering achievement that seemingly leveled-up the already much-loved Kentucky unit’s fanbase 10-thousandfold in 2024.
Piece by piece, You Won’t Go… is a precision-punishment juggernaut that brings together death-tastic guitar trilling with feral and fast-as-fuck hardcore pacing and breakdowns that positively pulverize every bone in your body. Bryan Garris’ unique, high-tenor shriek is in magnificent and ultra-menacing form, whether he takes the lead or tag-teams the mic with big-time guests Poppy and Chris Motionless.
One thing Revolver readers can agree on is that between the music, the Grammy nomination and their instantly iconic Jimmy Kimmel Live! performance, Knocked Loose were officially coronated major players this year.
Marilyn Manson – One Assassination Under God – Chapter 1
The return of Marilyn Manson in 2024 was polarizing and controversial, to say the least — but that only seemed fitting for the shock rocker’s career arc thus far.
One Assassination Under God – Chapter 1 is Manson’s first album in four years, and likewise the first to be released following multiple abuse allegations and court battles, most of which have been dropped or settled. It’s a record the artist said was “conjured from purgatory” as he dealt with the public fallout. Its lyrics reflect a need to — as he puts it in “Raise the Red Flag” — “wash the bullseye off my back.”
While the album is unlikely to achieve that goal, for the many fans who believe Manson’s staunch denial of the accusations against him, as well as for those listeners who choose to separate the art from the artist, the record marks a triumphant comeback. Lyrically defiant, One Assassination Under God pivots musically from brooding goth rock to dance-floor-stomping industrialism to glammy grandeur, and showcases the singer’s newly trained-up and cleaned-up vocals.
Devoted Mansonites loved every twist and turn, and they came out in force to vote One Assassination Under God – Chapter 1 the top album of the year.
Shocking? Not really. As Manson has said himself: “There’s nothing you can do anymore to be shocking.”