Each month, tons of new music from many taste-spanning genres is released into a fast-consuming, unforgiving market; it can be tough to get a handle on what’s new before it’s on to the next. In an attempt to highlight the standout releases, at the end of each month, AUX staff re-cap the month in Punk, Metal, Indie/Pop/Rock, Hip Hop, Electronic, and Pop with the top five releases in each. Consider it your cheat sheet for year-end lists.

Top 5 Metal Releases: June

Agalloch – Faustian Echoes

Faustian Echoes doesn’t officially go on sale until Agalloch hit the road in early July, but the single song EP is online and streaming and with its release date listed as June 26th, we’re going to go ahead and include it this month. Here’s why: it’s fan-fucking-tastic. Agalloch EPs have traditionally dealt almost exclusively in the ambient, and at 22-minutes it’s easy to have concerns about Faustian Echoes, but while the track isn’t without its acoustic breaks, spoken bits and ambient passages, it’s built on what might be the most scathing black metal platform the band has ever explored.

Kreator – Phantom Antichrist

Thrash metal is a complete paradox. Of all the heavy metal offshoots, it’s likely the most uniform. And when a band makes what’s widely considered the best in the genre, as Kreator did with 1986’s Pleasure to Kill, they’re always held to that same standard and sound. This is funny, obviously, because thrash metal is about consistency and aggression. It’s about the result, not the process. So while Kreator fails to re-write Pleasure to Kill with Phantom Antichrist, they’ve nonetheless created an album that spits in the face of retro-thrash revivalists. It’s not the same album they released 26 years ago, but as with everything they’ve put out since, it’s an extension of it. So, thrashers, listen to Phantom Antichrist for what it is: a bucket of riffs tightly bound in the oldest pair of jeans available.

Rumpelstiltskin Grinder – Ghostmaker

Anyone who asks “what’s in a name?” obviously isn’t much for metal, because as awful as it is to admit there’s perhaps no genre more plagued by on-the-surface prejudice. Take Rumpelstiltskin Grinder, a band I’d ignored in the past based solely on their name. Always figuring them for yet another disposable modern grind band, their first and second albums whizzed by in a flash. Not their third. Ghostmaker proved me wrong. Rumpelstiltskin Grinder aren’t another gore-driven grind band, but instead mix all things extreme in to an undeniably thrashy package. Here’s an album that distinguishes urgency from tempo, blaring through album opener “Those Who Are Unseen” with scathing, ferocious anger and ferocity right through to “Desert Goblins.” The guitar work is incredible, the vocals are varied—high shrieks to hollowed gutturals—and most importantly, it’s listenable right through to the end. No small feat for a modern thrash album, especially one by a band with a name as silly as this.

Be’lakor – Of Breath and Bone
	Of Breath and Bone has one of the silliest album covers you’ll see this month, and it’s melodic to a fault, but you can’t argue Be’lakor’s seemingly endless onslaught of riffs. These songs are long, with most running at least 8-minutes, but the hooks and harmonies make up for the by-the-numbers gutturals with a flair that can only be called Maiden-esque.

Ahab – The Giant

The Giant is built on a format of false starts. Each track begins cleanly and subtly, rebuking the band’s butt-rumbling past as the forerunners of funeral doom before slowly transitioning into the old familiar sound of lower than low growls and tempos paced at a crawl. It’s jarring for fans, and a bit irritating in its structural repetitiveness, but as Ahab inch ever so slowly (did we mention they play slowly?) towards NeurIsis-ian territory, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. They won’t make it through the same band that dominated the scene with The Call of the Wretched Sea, but the transition seems like it’s going to take a while anyways.

Surprises, disappointments and albums to watch for next month

Surprise of the month: It’s no surprise that Manowar were drawn to Norse mythology given their affinity for thunder, hammer and ale, but after a half-decade of dabbling the gods of Metal are back with the album fans have been waiting for since Warriors of the World. Fittingly, it’s their first fully listenable album since that 2002 release. It’s far from a classic, with many of its tracks running through tired clichés that’d make even the purest of the pure blush, but songs like “El Gringo” are what keep fans wanting more. Like the two albums before it, The Lord of Steel is plagued by production, though this time it’s Joey DeMaio’s fuzzy, might-as-well-be-a-guitar sounding bass work, which is as cheap sounding as it is distracting. But with much of the theatrics that hurt them over the last decade put on the back burner for fan appeasing anthems like “Manowarriors” and the career-spanning “Hail, Kill And Die,” the Kings of Metal have finally returned with an album their fans can enjoy mostly unironically. And in the end, that’s what it’s all about.

Disappointments: First, some clarification: I’ve never expected anything from Panopticon. But when I read that Austin Lunn was planning to mix American folk music with the atmospheric black metal he’s known for, I was intrigued. I imagined Kentucky as an extension of Taake’s “Myr”. What I got was… whatever the hell this is supposed to be. There’s an obvious folk element on the album, but it’s entirely separate from the other extremes. Folk traditionals like “Come All Ye Coal Miners” and “Which Side Are You On?” are done pretty traditionally and scattered as bookmarks between ten minute black metal songs. “Killing the Giants as They Sleep” mixes in folk elements, but flutes hardly with the album’s implied aesthetic. Similarly, “Bodies Under the Falls” breaks 5 minutes in for a bit of banjo, but there’s no transition, only an awkward, jarring change that eventually leads back to more of the same shoegaze-y black metal seemingly every American act is peddling these days.

Out in July: Periphery’s Periphery II: This Time It’s Personal, Baroness’ Yellow & Green, Om’s Advaitic Songs and Nachtmystium’s Silencing Machine.