There is so much heavy and beautiful metal music being conjured all around the world that it can be overwhelming. Fortunately, Metal Has No Borders has curated the best extreme metal released this past year, from Greece and India to Turkey.
Be sure to vote in our ‘Best Metal Release of 2023‘ poll and enjoy our hand-picked favorite extreme metal albums for 2023 below.
Extreme Metal Album of the Year (Gold Tier)
Wothrosch
Odium
Released via Hammerheart Records
Greece
A majority of black metal output puts me in a cold, desolate, and vulnerable headspace. Wothrosch enters the extreme music bloodstream, harnessing the aforementioned tropes, yet adding the most peculiar dose of horror, a fascination for the darkest of tragedies. Themes of sickness and death regurgitate all through Odium, to the point where you find yourself immersed in and somehow comforted by the mental dystopia. Slithering grooves meet lead guitars that wail out in slow-motion, like trauma. These compositions would score Lovecraft’s longest fever dreams. After nearly an hour, this record released it’s sharpened grasp from my throat. The density within this album made witnessing silence again like first breath after asphyxiation. For those macabre-minded and enjoy the forced catharsis in blackened sludge metal, I have nothing less than a plead to listen to this effort.
Odium by Wothrosch is awarded Best Extreme Metal Album of the Year (Gold Tier) for 2023
Favorite Songs: “Child,” “Disease,” “Mass“
FFO: late Behemoth, Anaal Nathrakh, early Katatonia
Extreme Metal Album of the Year (Silver Tier)
Moral Collapse
Divine Prosthetics
Released via Subcontinental Records
India
The churning innards of Moral Collapse are Arun Natarajan (vocals, guitar, bass) and Sudarshan Mankad (guitar), joined by Hannes Grossman (drums; Alkaloid, Obscura, Necrophagist, etc.), Sandesh Nagaraj (samples; The Replicate), Bobby Koelble (guitar; Death, Nader Sadek), Moiz Mustafa (guitar; Godless), Julius Gabriel (saxophone, soundscapes), and Mia Zabelka (violin, samples, voice). This sophomore release seeps unorthodox heaviness and discomforting ambience. While the foundation of much of the material boasts complex, avant-garde death metal, the anxiety and tension that grow in the songs, also create catharsis.
Divine Prosthetics by Moral Collapse is awarded Best Extreme Metal Album of the Year (Silver Tier) for 2023
Favorite Songs: “Calamitous,” “Precise Incision,” “Divine Prosthetics I”
FFO: Blut Aus Nord, Gorguts, Artificial Brain
Album of the Month (Bronze Tier)
Exnun
Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death
Released via Time to Kill Records
Turkey
A backlit expose on the subconscious, Exnun curates extreme music into a state as palatable as possible, given the unforgiving subgenres present. Like well-paced horror stories, Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death brings a much more adventurous and modernized grindcore-deathcore fusion. This record is sadistic; it is the equivalent to scraping off rust to find the luster beneath.
Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death by Exnun is awarded Best Extreme Metal Album of the Year (Bronze Tier) for 2023
Favorite Songs: “What’s Wrong with the Lobotomy Kid?,” “The Diseases, and Casualties, this year being 1632,” “Majör Arkana Pt. 1. – The Mind”
FFO: Black Tongue, Napalm Death, Enterprise Earth