The Noisey Editors' Best and Worst of 2015: Kim Kelly

I usually go totally overboard on year-end list-making because 1. lists are fun, and 2. before I started working here, I was freelance for a billion years, so I settled into the habit of making 4 (or more—the record is 7) year-end lists per annum. This past year marked my first as a part of Noisey's editorial staff, so that do-or-die freelance hustle that's kept the lights on for the past 12 years has been supplanted by a more daily grind and the freedom to cover just about anything I want (which, more often than not, entails no-fun black metal or obnoxious doom). It's a privilege that, trust me, I don't take lightly—despite the evidence to the contrary that you're about to read below.

Now that I only had to make one sole, solitary, all-encompassing year-end list and no editor to rein me in, I was originally inclined to throw caution to the wind and just list every record I enjoyed this year. Since I highly doubt you want to read through several hundred lines of type, though, I managed to whittle it down to a spare 50. Yes, 50.

I've been lucky enough to cover a wide range of fantastic music this year, and the links below lead to my writing on the various bands that populate this absurdly long (but obviously, objectively correct) list. I had to make a few painful cuts, like the year's two best country albums (Whitey Morgan's Sonic Ranch, and Angaleena Presley's American Middle Class) but these are the metal-oriented albums I had the best time listening to this year. So much for not going overboard…

1. Misthyrming - Söngvar elds og óreiðu

Icelandic black metal perfection.

2. Cloud Rat - Qlipthoth

The future of grind.

3. Vastum - Hole Below

An album that perfectly articulated death metal's messy, hairy, ugly humanity.

4. Mgla - Exercises in Futility

The pinnacle of orthodox black metal in 2015.

5. Death Karma - The History Of Death & Burial Rituals Part I

A truly morbid triumph of black/death.

6. Chrch - Unanswered Hymns

Cosmic, crushing doom that elevates and amazes; the first time I saw them, I knew I was witnessing something special.

7. Yellow Eyes - Sick with Bloom

The future of American black metal.

8. Genocide Shrines - Manipura Imperial Deathevokovil (Scriptures Of Reversed Puraana Dharmurder)

Sri Lankan death metal supremacy.

9. Cosmic Church - Vigilia

Criminally underlooked, astonishingly great melodic Finnish black metal.

10. Disemballerina - Poison Gown

The most beautiful thing you'll ever hear.

Spectral Wound - Terra Nullius

Black Cilice - Mysteries

Abyssion - Luonnon harmonia ja vihreä liekki

False - Untitled

Eye of Nix - Moros

Leila Abdul-Rauf - Insomnia

Obsequiae - Aria of Vernal Tombs

Khemmis - Absolution

Bell Witch - Four Phantoms

Ares Kingdom - The Unburiable Dead

Locrian - Infinite Dissolution

Pyramids - A Northern Meadow

Christian Mistress - To Your Death

Ethereal Shroud - They Became the Falling Ash

Gloam - Hex of Nine Heads

Tribulation - The Children of the Night

Revenge - Behold.Total.Rejection

Nachtlieder - The Female of the Species

Tovarish - This Terrible Burden

Vattnet Viskar - Settler

Macabre Omen - Gods of War - At War

Chaos Echoes - Transient

Abominor - Opus: Decay

Sivyg Yar - Burial Shrouds

Lluvia - Eternidad Solemne

Magic Circle - Journey Blind

Tyranny - Aeons in Tectonic Internment

Nightfell - Darkness Evermore

RAM - Svbversvm

Skepticism - Ordeal

Thou & The Body - You, Whom I Have Always Hated

Blood Incantation - Interdimensional Extinction

Dark Buddha Rising - Inversum

Napalm Death - Apex Predator - Easy Meat

Devouring Star - Through Lung and Heart

Cult of Occult - Five Degrees of Insanity

Cruciamentum - Charnal Passages

Primitive Man - Home Is Where the Hatred Is

Corrupted - Loss

Saturnine - Mors Vocat

Not all of these artists are on Spotify, but I made a little introductory playlist of the ones that are; check it out, and go buy all of these records!

Kim Kelly is an editor at Noisey, and wishes she'd kept the bloody thing to 15 at this point. She's on Twitter.