Music

14 Canadian metal bands you might not know

by Tyler Munro

Canada’s metal scene has long been regarded as one of the world’s finest; bands like Slaughter and Voivod helped pioneer a burgeoning death-thrash movement, and Quebec stole the death metal reigns from Florida with its tech explosion.

But even as the JUNO Awards’ mostly perfect nomination pool for this year’s metal awards—Gorguts, Anciients, KEN Mode, Protest the Hero and, oddly enough, the Flatliners—show that those outside the scene are catching up to what’s current, there’s still an emphasis on the past. That’s fair; there’s a lot of history there. But what’s buzzing below the mainstream deserves some attention too. That’s why we’ve dug around and compiled this list of some bands metalheads need to listen to. It’s nonspecific, ranging from bowel-bashing death metal to throat-scarring sludge, but the common thread is clear: Canadians aren’t ready to pass the crown just yet.

 

Antediluvian

via Facebook

Split between Guelph, Ontario’s Antediluvian are the kind of band that describes their sound in poetic non-sequiturs, but even as you scoff at mentions of the “inter-cosmic energy trapped in matter” on their albums recalling “the primordial abyss of pre-existence,” one listen to their new album λόγος will tell you their sound often defies any sensical explanation. As rhythmic and explosive as Through the Cervix of Hawwah is, λόγος brings with it an entropic avant-garde edge. It’s far from easy listening, but what death metal is?

 

Adversarial

via Metal-Archives

Adversarial are like Morbid Angel’s good albums (all three of them) played at double speed, like Hellhammer blasting his way through Blessed Are the Sick, and while you’ll hear complains about the drums on All Idols Fall Before the Hammer, a practised death metal fan should have no trouble looking past the tinny snare. Look beyond production values and you’ll find blackened death metal with a decidedly old school vibe. Get on the bandwagon now—the Toronto-based band are currently working towards releasing their second full length.

 

Mares of Thrace

via John Mourlas Photography

That Mares of Thrace are a bass-less two piece can’t take away from their earth-shattering heaviness, least of all once you consider vocalist Thérèse Lanz plays a custom built (by Converge’s Kurt Ballou) baritone guitar with both guitar and bass pick-ups. Paired with her inhuman screams, their last album and Polaris long listed The Pilgrimmage makes for a wholly punishing affair. Their Facebook page says they’re “like a burlap sack full of kittens being lowered into a woodchipper,” which while gruesome paints a startlingly accurate picture of how disorientingly heavy this sludge-y two piece can get. Originally based out of Calgary, they’ve since relocated to Chicago, but in our eyes will always be a Canadian project first and foremost.

 

Megiddo

via Facebook

After about a decade off, Toronto’s Megiddo are gearing up for a new album (hopefully July, we’re told) and, for the first time ever, some shows. The mystique surrounding the Toronto outfit has boiled underground for a while, and with only one active member, that’s not soon to change. But with two solid full lengths under their belt, including one of the genre’s best in The Devil and the Whore, there’s reason to be excited for the future. Their sound is uncomplicated and uncompromising, with mid-paced second wave traditionalism crashed by cacophonous drum work and razor sharp riffs. And while their lyrics are to-the-point Satanic, they rarely, if ever, devolve into goofy dork-metal pageantry.

 

Akitsa

via last.fm

Veterans on this list, having formed in 1999, Montreal’s Akitsa can’t get enough credit for their crusty, punk-infused black metal. Their sound is minimalist even for the genre, with torturous vocals scraping along a primitive backbone with efficiency and anguish. It’s hokey to call a black metal band grim or cavernous—here, it’s entirely necessary.

 

Culted

via Facebook

Oblique to All Paths made our best of list in January, and with good reason—it’s atmospheric yet pummelling, with throat curling vocals unravelling across band’s doom-y, dirge-like pace. Their sound is hard to peg, funnelling Swans’ nightmarish energy through a funereal backbone and a depressive black metal edge, like Asunder meets Shining cloaked in a wash of distortion and artfulness. And with a Swedish singer the rest of the band has never met face to face, the Winnipeg based band has a great story to match.

 

Thrawsunblat

via Thrawsunblat

Thrawsunblat seem borne of the hyper serious viking metal variety until you learn their name was forged as an anagram to the phrase “narwhal butts,” and while the music is at times far less playful than that anecdote would indicate, there’s never a smirk too far away from even the most crushing passages. Their curiously titled first album Thrawsunblat II: Wanderer on the Continent of Saplings marries rollicking blastbeats with harmonic clean (and harsh) vocals and a folky Maritime underpinning bred out of their New Brunswick homebase that hits a fever pitch in the delightfully east coast “Goose River (Mourners’ March).” Cheers once more, me b’y, indeed.

 

Mitochondrion

via Facebook

Like Dead Congregation or Ulcerate, Mitochondrion’s brand of death metal is dissonant, disorienting and absolutely mammoth. Their last album Parasignosis slowly cakes on layers of hell-furled vocals and needling guitar work before spiralling out at a breakneck pace, and once hooked early the band never lets go. Working out from the more traditionally technical Archaeaeon, the Vancouver-based band has become increasingly atmospheric, but their riffs are never as muddled and muted as a band like Portal.

 

Shooting Guns

via Facebook

Saskatoon’s Shooting Guns make music to get lost in, riffing through an instrumental sludge palate with a handful of psychotropics. Hard as it is to maintain an ear with instrumental metal, their Polaris long-listed debut proved it possible. Its follow-up, 2013’s Brotherhood of the Ram only stepped things up a notch. Imagine the Fucking Champs with a headier Sabbath-inspired gallop on a soundtrack written for trips down the Trans-Canada Highway. Add in a smoke machine, let it waft and before long… Shooting Guns.

 

Sombres Forêts

via Facebook

Like most French black metal, Sombres Forêts play a brand of black metal heavy on the atmosphere, but this one man band out of Quebec excels where so few do: the low end. Starting on Royaume de glade, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Annatar worked at fleshing out the low-end, and while the bass is still often inaudible through the band’s newest, 2013’s La mort du Soleil, it’s presence is a rarity in the genre. Still, it’s far from the focus. What endears listeners to Sombres Forêts is that their songs, while laced with atmosphere and ambience, are far from pretty. At its core, this is heavy to the black metal spirit—misanthropic and, for the most part, unforgiving.

 

Begrime Exemious

via Bandcamp

Another Dark Descent Records alumnus, Edmonton’s Begrime Exemious play speedy, filth-smattered extreme metal that’s equal parts death, black and thrash. Like Blasphemy and Slaughter before them, albums like Visions of the Scourge are tech-adjacent; competent, but never compromising in to-the-point brashness in favour of knob-extending shred. With no shows on the horizon, Begrime Exemious are currently locked away and working on new music, which they say will be spread across splits before hitting an eventual third full length, and if their 2013 EP Wasteland of Damnation tells us anything, it’s that their sound is, if possible, still on an upswing.

 

Rage Nucléaire

via Facebook

Lord Worm famously quit Cryptopsy to focus on his career as an English teacher, but he couldn’t stay away forever, first returning with the so-so Once Was Not before leaving Cryptopsy once more to eventually form Quebec’s Rage Nucléaire. Unrelenting Fucking Hatred is an apt title for their first full length, which one reviewer described as sounding like “Motörhead-playing robots discovered Transilvanian Hunger.” And it does: this is hyper-kinetic and apocalyptic, and its ear-splitting sound is carried by what might be Lord Worm’s most impure and puerile vocals yet. Like on None So Vile Worm’s buried his otherwise eloquent lyrics beneath layers of shrieks, burps, growls, gurgles and everything in between, sounding as much like a demon mid-seizure as a junkyard dark tearing apart its prey. Suffice to say—yikes, but in a good way.

 

Skagos

via Bandcamp

The least volatile band on this list, Vancouver’s Skagos are Cascadian post-black metal at its most realized: an experimental approach to ambiance and atmosphere that mirrors calming, naturalist acoustic movements with a whirlwind of blastbeats and aggression. Their latest, Anarchic, is a triumph, and at an entirely listenable 66-minutes, a wholly immersive listening experience. Fans of Agalloch, Wolves in the Throne Room or Panopticon need not look any further: this is what you’re after.

 

Gris

via Metal-Archives

Of the anguished, atmospheric black metal bands from Quebec, Gris might be the best. Following last year’s masterful À l’âme enflammée, l’äme constellée…, there’s no excuse for black metal fans to skip out on this two-piece, whose orchestra backbone makes for a remarkably textured listening experience. This is music to get lost in, sure, but its haunting enough to make the experience more of a nightmare than anything.