The Best Underground Metal of 2016

2016 is over. The funderground mentality continued spreading forth, infesting metal over the last year just the same as it had in the decades past the genre’s artistic high-point in the early nineties. Rehashes of past greats pandering to a lowest common denominator audience continue to dominate the release schedules of metal labels all too willing to please the lemmings with music fit to safely ignore during drunken socializing. Ever-flowing streams of posers are desperate to be rock stars, pumping out plagiarism, and paying their way to record deals. File sharing and streaming reducing the cost of hearing new music to essentially nothing has led fans to constantly consume whatever is new regardless of quality. However the purging is at last at hand. The day of doom is here. The filth who have lied and corrupted the underground must be cleansed while the commendable elite few will remain.

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Ripper – Experiment of Existence (2016)

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The Americans invented speed metal with Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All, which came out the same year as Slayer’s Show No Mercy and early European projects like Bathory, Sodom and Hellhammer. The European scene fused these together into a speed metal that used proto-death riffing as exemplified by Destruction, Kreator and Merciless.

Ripper picks up in the Merciless vein and keeps that Swedish landmark as its guiding force. This band keeps the attention of listeners however through its spirit and its refusal to adopt clichés. It uses riff forms found before, but keeps them specific to the song so that they relate to the other parts, preventing songs from being “grab-bags” of former ideas.
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The Best Underground Metal of 2014

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William Burroughs often wrote about the “edge,” or the liminal threshold between states. The last real edge year for underground metal was 2009 when strong contenders and new voices united to defend extreme metal against the onslaught of imitators making Potemkin village metal from hipster flair and lite-jazz fireworks but underneath it, nothing but disorganized songwriting and an absence of something to express. As the underground has come back with a vengeance, it has begun to displace the imitators because their music simply does not measure up. This has created a backlash as the hipsters defend their territory with guilt, ostentation, pretense and surface-level novelty. On the other hand, the underground has produced some strong contenders. And so we move forward through the past to the future, remembering that what is true is eternal, and trends, novelties, fads, hipsters and other transient moments pass quickly away…
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