Best Underground Metal Albums of April 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.

As of this writing, I am getting married in just over a week; I wake up nearly every morning into a throttling panic attack, like a safe was laid directly on my guilt chest, pressing me clean of air. These facts are, as far as I can tell, unrelated. There is a brutishness to life, not so much a randomness, which would imply a blunt and opaque acausality, but instead something substantially more opaque, a causal web of contingency and relation that exponentiates beyond comprehension so that, when we catch glinting glimmers of it in our days and lives, it feels random, devoid of meaning or important.

If I had to thread a simple line through these two fact-sensations, it would be that: On the precipice of marriage at 35, I have become more reflective of a life that had for a long period been lived sincerely with an understanding that I might die. You lose friends sometimes, often to idiot causes, the bleakly inhumane way addicts and the undercarriage of society are scraped clean from the wheels of the world. I am not enmeshed in those machines anymore, or at least not on those levels, but there is ever a lingering terror, a carpe diemic impulse. Days, by their nature, are numbered. This is mere fact.

But I have always been reflective. It is a curse of both my general manner as well as, I’ve learned in adulthood, an artifact of autism. Not to say that those not on the spectrum don’t have rich inner worlds (that would be insane!), but more that life where any outward projection feels suffocated by sheets of meaningless distorting noise (god I wonder why I grew to like extreme metal and jazz) necessitates at some point that that same energy turn inward. I brood; I roil in my juices. It is my way, learned from my father who learned it from his father, on and on. So such a brutish tie between these two juxtapositional fact-sensations feels inaccurate or, worse, something I loathe greatly: an oversimplification meant for expediency but replacing a real insight as to the connection between things.

And anyway, this is assuaged by the genuine and deep peace I feel with my soon-to-be spouse. We’ve been together for eight years, twice as long as my longest lasting relationship before this. I feel a patience and acceptance but also a challenge and motivation naturally effervescing from them that I struggle to feel I deserve but that they give freely and without hesitation. They are my rock. I talked a big game against the misogynistic roots of both traditional Western monogamy and the artificial construction of marriage and while certain aspects of those critiques still bear out in how me and my partner comport our lives, the desire to marry came as natural as: I love you. I am better with you and for you. Be with me. Peace of this profundity is eerie in how logic-bending and concrete it seems. At times, the only solid thing in the world. This is perhaps the second thing I’ve ever been truly certain of, after only my desire to write.

– Langdon Hickman