Like its namesake, Nile is never still. The Underworld Awaits Us All — the forthcoming 10th album from the South Carolina death metal institution, out August 23 via Napalm Records — is another new phase for the band. Like the preceding nine entries in the Nile discography, it’s a unique offering that sets itself apart from its siblings. Indeed, no album from the group led by Karl Sanders, Nile’s lone constant and driving force, sounds the same, and that trend of artistic renovation continues on this 11-track outing. With the proven regularity of the sun rising, the band has once again taken what it learned from previous releases and poured that hard-won experience into a sturdy foundation to help it renovate and rebuild. And yet, despite its freshness, The Underworld Awaits Us All is undeniably a Nile album, burnished with the band’s unmistakable characteristics that make it instantly recognizable. The Egyptology and ancient histories are there. The riffs are there. The blazing tempos and bone-crunching slowdowns are there. In a scene where most bands are content to continually limbo the baseline, that’s a feat of death metal ingenuity that has only gotten more impressive since Nile released its debut demo in 1994.

Welcome to the first annual Heavy Metal Roundtable, a symposium of sickness inviting some of heavy metal’s brightest minds to help me, an idiot, dissect a metallic topic.

Some bands build worlds. REZN hope you explore their universe. “We do leave quite a bit up for interpretation,” bassist Phil Cangelosi, accompanied by the three other members of the Chicago quartet, says over Zoom. “We don’t have anything that’s super on the nose. Our goal is to bring you to a place and not necessarily tell you what to do once you’re there.” Guitarist and vocalist Rob McWilliams chimes in: “It’s definitely just setting a scene for someone.”

While watching the music video for “Metal Queen,” Lee Aaron reveals that being set on fire somehow wasn’t her biggest concern on the day it was filmed. “The funny thing is I was more nervous about the snake,” the legendary Canadian rocker says over Zoom regarding the various perils that popped up during that 1984 shoot. “The thing about being 21 years old is you are kind of scared but you’re kind of fearless. You’re like, ‘I can’t die.'”

Imagine: You’re on tour and you hear a song that gets its hooks into you. When you’re in the van singing it with bandmates, does that song connect a little deeper? When you play that song before concerts, does it feel more important? Do the new stimuli, the new towns, the new people, and the spark of new experiences, the charged romanticism and trauma bonding of bouncing from place to place, playing music, and rocking faces turn a song you might’ve previously dismissed into something significant? Does it all make that song sweeter? What happens when you find a song you love on the road?

Álvaro Domene has made a home on the frontier of sound. For over a decade, one of the underground’s most creative forces has constructed compositions that sound unlike anything else, a unique amalgam of guitar-centric jazz, metal, modern classical, and electronic influences that evades easy categorization and often doesn’t sound like traditional guitar-centric music. Those lucky enough to find those solo and collaborative releases discover works that rewrite the books on the possibilities of the guitar and the genres Domene chooses to delve into. And for those few souls brave enough to stick around, it often seems like he’s rewiring multiple styles at once, flipping the off switches on tropes and cliches while patching together something new. That said, since Domene is making the music he wants to listen to, the music isn’t “experimental” in the overused music critic sense. This isn’t an experiment. No, Álvaro Domene is letting you into his home to hear Álvaro Domene.

Welcome back. With the world in great shape and no potentially life-changing national decisions looming on the horizon, I thought we could use this stress-free stretch of placidity to answer an essential question I’ve had boiling on the back burner since the last time I saw you: Will 2024 be the best year for metal this decade?

Huzzah, the listpocalypse is upon us. Behold, the Black Market is here to confuse and annoy you with the annual list of our favorite metal albums. Column writers, past and present, once again voted for their most-loved releases of 2023. This top 10 is the result. Is your most-loved album here? It is not. Did we list any albums that normal people listen to? Again, probably not. Is this a list so frustratingly niche and packed with impenetrable metal that it asks why we’re even allowed to do this? Yes, of course. In fact, this might be one of our most infuriating countdowns, so much so that the metal powers that be have taken notice. As soon as I sent this list to the Stereogum mothership, I was indicted on 666 counts of poser fraud and must surrender myself to Metal Law authorities immediately. This is what we get for not listening to Tomb Mold.

With the storytelling acumen of an NFL Films production, Erik Rutan recites the time his passions for football and playing metal crashed together harder than a safety hitting a wide receiver over the middle. It was 2004, and the acclaimed guitarist, who has logged stints in Ripping Corpse, Morbid Angel, and Cannibal Corpse, was touring Europe with Hate Eternal. Halfway across the globe, his beloved Philadelphia Eagles were playing the Carolina Panthers in the NFC Championship game.

In a scenario that must’ve crossed H.G. Wells’ mind at least once, a time-traveling teen turns back the clock to go down on themselves. That’s the salacious sight gag in the 2022 HBO series The Time Traveler’s Wife, one that Decider called the “wildest oral sex scene in the history of television.” And, as these things do, the clip started making the rounds.

The Executioner knew the band had something from the start. “Honestly, I felt it click the first day I went to practice with Undulation,” the singer writes in a joint email interview with the group. “I was initially nervous, but there was an instant sense that I was in a space where I could be my authentic self, and things kind of progressed from there.”

Mean Mistreater’s debut single, “Bleeding The Night,” inspires a specific type of heavy metal feeling. I immediately sensed it when I caught the Austin, Texas, quintet performing a high-octane set of Trad Belt-contending heavy metal sweetened with a sprinkle of midnight malevolence.

It’s hot. Much like you, I am boiling in a heatwave that has thoroughly cooked my brain. So let’s take a break from the smart stuff and play a game. How well can you navigate Encyclopaedia Metallum? I have a challenge to test your skills. It’s a cross between competitive bingo and a scavenger hunt for people who like Black Sabbath, and it will take you deeper than you may have ever been into the internet’s premier heavy metal archive.

Inevitable, the debut album from Summer Haze ’99, begins with a simple nostalgic piano melody, a careful, cautiously hopeful innocence echoing from a distant memory. Lightly touched keys are soon joined by sparse drumming that reverberates in the silence of a studio, and an ethereal warbling comes in on high, gently unsettling a serene flow. Just as it finds an easy groove, it all comes to a halt with a crash, a dream taking a sharp turn from a surreal, tranquil ebb to a powerful, life-affirming rush of vigor heralded by trilling, heroic guitars. A black metal beast emerges, but one dressed in resplendent color, raging onward in doomed, blazing glory.

You’re driving down a back road on your motorcycle. Nothing feels safe anymore. Your eyes dart around nervously, scanning the trees for trouble. Suddenly, a person shambles in front of you. You swerve. No thud. You skid to a stop and turn around. It’s not a person. Human-shaped and frail, yes, but, oh god, you know better. It stares at you, its vacant eyes devoid of life but brimming with malice. It opens its mouth, its jaw stretching and stretching and stretching. It’s then that you hear it: that scream. Suddenly, freakers reacting to the signal pour out of the trees from either side of the road. Even if you escape this moment, you know it won’t be the hands clawing or teeth chomping at you that you’ll remember. No. It will be the scream. It will take over your life as a faint echo of terror. You’ll hear it in the wind. You’ll hear it in the whine of a sputtering engine. You’ll hear it in dead silence. You’ll hear it everywhere it’s not because you never want to experience it again. And yet, for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on, something about that scream is oddly captivating. Terrifying, yes, but it has connected with you.

For Mike Pardi, it started as a dream. “I literally had a dream I was in a band called Ardent Nova,” the multi-instrumentalist writes in an email, “and changing the band name meant changing the album name and also a song title.”

In February, Moans Music and Fabryka Hałasu reissued a remastered version of one of the best metal albums very few have heard. Originally released on Candlelight Records, Nyia’s 2004 full-length debut, Head Held High, has flown under the radar for nearly 20 years despite being championed by Napalm Death’s Shane Embury and featuring the cream of Poland’s extreme metal scene, with musicians who either played in or would go on to play in Vader, Third Degree, and Antigama.

In terms of creativity, can death metal still hang with the other metal substyles? Anachronism, the Swiss death metal quartet, have a characteristically well-thought-out answer. “Metal is cursed with gatekeepers and dogmatic douchebags,” the band writes in an email. “Fortunately, not every metalhead is like that, and new mind-blowing stuff keeps coming up, whatever the subgenre, making the metal scene still interesting and relevant. I don’t think it’s up to us to tell if we qualify for the latter, but what we can say is that we avoid artistic boundaries as much as possible.”

Welcome to the Black Market’s 2022 favorite metal albums extravaganza. As always, we’re sponsored by sleep deprivation, depression, and an insatiable need to hear heavy metal to make it all go away. We have 10 of the finest slabs of steel released this year on the docket for you today. But first, an intro that neatly sums up the state of metal and the years ahead.

John and Donald Tardy are reviewing my PowerPoint. What’s that? When you talk with two founding members of a foundational Floridan death metal band, you don’t show them slides? Oh, I’m the weird one? Whatever. At least the brothers are amused. “Those are completely, totally wrong,” John, Obituary’s vocalist, tells me over Zoom. “All wrong,” Donald, the band’s drummer, adds.

Let me borrow the pacing of a horror movie with rental store ambitions made on a shoestring budget and skip the exposition. I want to jump right into my favorite bit of acting in Death Metal Zombies, a super campy shot-on-video (SOV) feature directed by Todd Jason Falcon Cook and released straight to VHS in 1995. Here we go.

Téo Acosta is reforesting a 2.5-acre plot in California’s Mojave Desert. What’s helping to fund the project? Metal.

The dreaded comeback. When it goes wrong, unwanted records flood the markets, razorblades slide under stickers, and tattoo shops are booked solid with coverup appointments. At least, that’s what some fans imagine are the stakes. In their minds, goofing up the comeback is a legacy wrecker, the irreversible sin of the presumed cynical cash grab. Because, well, what else could bring a band back from the dead? Enduring friendships? The joy of playing music with other people? Pfft. Right, next you’ll tell me Mortiis is wearing a mask.

This month, Metallica scored an unlikely hit when their 36-year-old “Master Of Puppets” charted in Top 40 in both the US and the UK. What pulled the strings? Stranger Things. The ’80s-set Netflix show paired a fun visual with one of metal’s most indelible epics in a way that landed with modern audiences.

So, In Flames are good again?

I screwed up. Well, I screw up a lot. Let’s narrow this down: For me, the hardest part about doing this gig is missing great music. Specifically, it hurts me bad when I come across bands that released great music in the near past, stuff that is too old for the column but too young for a “turns 10” retrospective. These tardy non-discoveries are my bane because recommending metal is literally the only thing I’m capable of doing. It’s quite the Sisyphean situation: Considering the amount of metal released every month, and the limited column acreage available to cover it all, it’s inevitable that I will screw up and screw up again and screw up a lot. Let’s just say it would depress you how much I dwell on this. Argh!

When does it click for you that a metal artist gets it? Is it the music? The presentation? The live show? Or is it something else, something subtler, something that’s like an up-up-down-down cheat code? Something that cuts through perfunctory metal artifice by presenting a heightened version of the self. Something informed by a shared understanding of what makes metal metal. Something that, when conducted well, seems to whisper in your ear, “Hey, I, the artist, get it.”

It must be a hell of a burden when you tell someone this, but I think Brendan Sloan is the only person who can answer my very important questions. And, oh boy, do I have a few of them.

The middle of Cathexis’s Untethered Abyss feels like the start of something. The first four tracks are like attempting to navigate a maze of riffs and rhythms on the back of a Kawasaki Ninja. Released on Willowtip Records last year, Untethered Abyss is the kind of technical death metal that underlines both the “technical” and “death metal,” making sure that fans of either don’t go home hungry. Of course, that’s not always the case with bands in the tech space. There are plenty of doing-it-for-the-playthrough, light-as-a-feather shredders, the neoclassical calculator fiddlers that are about as heavy as the scrunchy that fastens a snooty guitar teacher’s ponytail. Cathexis, though, is heavy, legit heavy, tipping the scales with a weight that would put it in a class with Close To A World Below, Formulas Fatal To The Flesh, or From Wisdom To Hate. You bet, it has that pleasing crunch that gives its momentum definition, that crucial death metal dimension. And you can really feel the weight when the Texas quintet pulls the e-brake.

It’s December and this is the last column of the year. Let’s spit out some hot takes.

It’s a rare off-day for Jinjer during their 41-date North American tour in support of their new album Wallflowers, but I’m not giving bassist Eugene Abdukhanov a day off from the one question someone is always, and perhaps only, asked after their video goes viral: Did he have a sense of the magnitude of what he filmed that day? “It was another day in the office,” he says over the phone. “We had fun. We just came out and played this song. And we released it on the internet. That’s it. The next morning, we woke up and saw that something was going on with that video. Nobody expected it to be that big.”

In a tone far more diplomatic than I deserve, Burst is letting me know that I have, in fact, fucked up. “This is a very blasphemous question,” the guitarist for the speed metal band Blood Sport writes in an email. “The music is a vital part of the Argento style and I don’t think the songs are even that bad!”

Mike Krawczynski remembers the time two rock stars crashed his record store. “We were just about to close up,” Krawczynski says over Zoom. “They came in and started going mental. All of my employees’ jaws were dropping. They pulled out this massive pot bud that was almost fluorescent red. Everyone looked at me and I said, ‘Well, close the door, okay? We’re closed.’ All of these kids outside were pressed up against the window.”

Iron Maiden released the official video of its new single, “The Writing On the Wall,” to YouTube on July 15. At the time I’m writing this, the frequent Trad Belt holders’ first stream from their forthcoming 17th full-length, Senjutsu, has racked up 6,885,982 views. That’s a lot of views. Like… a mainstream amount of views. And here I am, writing about it. I still can’t get over that. It’s not every day that a band we might talk about in the Black Market, for reasons other than post-peak-thrash oafishness, makes that kind of dent in the zeitgeist. But that’s kind of the thing: Maiden are one of the few heavy metal bands that appeal to normal people and nerds at pretty much the same level.

Let’s say you’re vaccinated. Things are starting to reopen. It’s summer. (My sincere apologies for rubbing this in, southern hemisphere, but you had your summer.) It’s BBQ season. You have charcoal briquettes on the brain. You and every yard-blessed metalhead and their fire-escape-cooking cousins are ready to once again consider the burning question of every cookout: What should be on the BBQ playlist?

As the world turns, and the day when I have to talk to real people in a real-world setting without a mute button draws nearer, I’ve been scrambling for small-talk icebreakers. Not to brag, but as a chronically unconfident idiot cursed with a lifelong streak of shyness, I’m a legendarily bad conversationalist. Oh, but that was then, before I eureka’d myself into a powerful anecdote prospector. Now, for a certain kind of metalhead at least, I think I’ve armed myself with a passable opener. Here we go:

This is the second part of a two-part series on Piledriver’s 1984 album Metal Inquisition. Read part one here.