Best Underground Metal Albums of October 2024

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.

Blood Incantation? Absolute Everywhere? If it weren’t for the fact that it’s on Century Media, it would’ve made our list. Hell, we could’ve written four entries about it. It is that good, as you’ve no doubt heard ad nauseam over the past month. Moreso than God’s Country, The Enduring Spirit, or even Loathe’s I Let It In and It Took Everything, it feels like the biggest unifying metal album of the decade, which is not to say that it’s the best metal album of the decade, but that everyone heard it and had immediate thoughts upon its release. That type of wide-ranging discussion and enthusiasm (or criticism) doesn’t happen much in metal, and rarely with as much fervor as it did with Absolute Elsewhere.

Perhaps it’s because Blood Incantation are still big fish in small ponds (at the time of writing, Absolute Elsewhere’s most popular track “The Stargate [Tablet I]” has just over 700,000 plays on Spotify and “The Stargate” music video has more than 250,000 views on YouTube. The latter has a phenomenal comment section, by the way) but this positive reception doesn’t feel put-on or trigger the inherent contrarian in me. There hasn’t been any larger push for the band’s music aside from their label’s promotion and word-of-mouth. Some people are mad that Blood Incantation continue to play music other than death metal, but their grievances come with the territory.

Absolute Elsewhere’s exceedingly warm reception among everyone but Profanica diehards should have turned me off because everyone liked it and wouldn’t shut up about it. That sort of communal adoration reeks to me. It’s my durian. But, for the first time in a long time, I was happy that Absolute Elsewhere earned so much attention and affection, almost happier than when I was listening to it.

Nobody gets into death metal for cool points, neither do they get into progressive rock, and even further, kosmiche, for those reasons. That may have played into why I was so enthralled by how people received Absolute Elsewhere. It is weird and people wanted it weird. I’m not projecting myself onto the album so much as I am ecstatic to want to be part of the in-crowd here. I want to be in on the hype because there doesn’t seem to be any second-guessing this on my end; to commune with others who hear the same qualities that I do, and praise them for the same reasons I do, about such deserving work.

Furthermore, the lion’s share of people I turn to for music recommendations and intelligent insights enjoy it. My well-educated musical friends love it. My mate who only messaged me to check if I dislike Sleep Token vibes with it. I’m rarely swept up in moments, and over a year into the ongoing horrors occurring elsewhere, this feels comfortable and habitable. Individual people, not a mob, laud Absolute Elsewhere, thus feeling like a unity of persons rather than a faceless entity of yes-men. It’s through this that I feel good about congratulating Absolute Elsewhere further, even without having to mention a single moment of its music.

But, let’s not forget, it came out via Century Media. So let’s move onto the underground albums that you actually came to read about.

– Colin Dempsey

Psst. It’s Langdon. Thanks for reading the intro. As a treat, here are some honorable mentions, records that were stellar and still deserve your time. Should be about a month’s worth of underground thunder! First we have Gigan‘s superb new technical/progressive death metal record, the shockingly strong heavy metal of Aether Void, the surprisingly extreme and progressive doom of The Mountain King, the very dreamlike and Formless Body-adjacent alt-rock/raw black metal of Coffret de Bijoux and the always-impressive new record from Dawnwalker who I’ve written up before. Enjoy!

– Langdon Hickman