Best metal albums of 2020
Liturgy nearly left black metal behind on 2015's art rock-leaning The Ark Work, before returning with the whiplash-inducing H.A.Q.Q. Her uncompromising vision and outspokenness is what turned a lot of black metal purists against Liturgy, but it's also what made them awesome, and what made them continue to stand out amongst a sea of tremolo-picking Darkthrone worshippers. Liturgy always approached black metal on their own terms, embracing many of its traditions wholeheartedly but also reshaping those traditions into something the band's mastermind Hunter Hunt-Hendrix could call her own. Liturgy's most honest, sincere album yet is also quite possibly their best. You can tell listening to Four Dimensional Flesh that Afterbirth wanted to make a set of songs where neither the neanderthal brutality or the PhD-level avant-riffing felt like the main course they are synchronous halves of a broader whole. These songs are tightly composed prog death, packing tons of twists and turns and plenty of shocking, delightfully strange dissonant chord choices and swirling proggy melodies - these in turn make those deep, intense slam passages feel deeply earned. Afterbirth, as a band, are smarter than that. For me, a song predominantly focused around building up its breakdown and predominantly focusing on making that breakdown simply atom-bomb heavy doesn't quite work for me it can feel, after a while, like the rest of the song is dead air, a waste of time, something to space out the slams and mosh riffs rather than something designed to be an equal-footed element of the song. Langdon Hickman wrote: Normally, my issue with slam is largely one built around songwriting.