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Welcome to Pitchfork’s new monthly metal column, where we’ll guide you through the genre’s new music and various happenings with an eye towards a specific theme. This month’s theme is space. Below you’ll find five of March’s best metal albums that found inspiration in the darkness and beauty of the cosmos.
For many metal fans, Black Sabbath’s 1971 album Master of Reality is the moment when the genre exploded into something new. Album opener “Sweet Leaf” is arguably the song that birthed stoner metal, while “Solitude” explores how quiet and melodic a song could be while retaining its evil aura. But it wasn’t until the very end of Master of Reality that Sabbath truly launched out of Birmingham and into the stratosphere. On the album’s closer, “Into the Void,” Tony Iommi delivers one his most primal riffs atop Geezer Butler and Bill Ward’s pummeling rhythms, while Ozzy Osbourne sings about a rocket ship bound for the unknowable terrains of the galaxy. It’s an explosive escape scene unlike any in rock history—one that, along with Hawkwind’s similarly starry-eyed work, established a new trend in heavy music: outer space as an outlet for the unfettered imagination.
Tellingly, Black Sabbath’s galactic mission wasn’t a choice—it was a necessity. The subtext within “Into the Void” suggests that humans have destroyed their own planet—with pollution, with violence, with ignorance—and left the population no choice but to abandon it for a new home. In this apocalyptic view of space—not as a destination to explore but a refuge from our bleak reality—lies the inherent metalness of the cosmos. From Bowie’s interstellar theater to Janelle Monáe’s dystopian soul-dance, science fiction has long been a common theme across a number of genres. But metal bands have often used space’s boundless terrain to explore their own dark anxieties—black hole as blank slate, essentially.
In Kyuss’ “Space Cadet,” Josh Homme looked to the sky and saw only his own alienation reflected back. On Spanish tech-death group Wormed’s latest record Krighsu, space is relentless and impenetrable, with the band’s intricate compositions reflecting the overwhelming chaos of the unknowable. And throughout the ’80s, Canadian thrash metal group Voivod carved their name into the lineage of cosmic metal. Their music wasn’t always about space—“Sometimes you’ve got a riff, and you cannot see a UFO in the music,” vocalist Denis “Snake” Bélanger once said—but more often than not, Voivod did see the aliens; it was a glorious, gruesome vision.
In recent years, outer space has continued to open itself up to mankind in new ways. Just last month, a series of Earth-sized planets were discovered, all of which could have the potential to to host living creatures—and will likely inspire sci-fi metal albums before that reality comes to be. In the meantime, two of last year’s finest metal albums—Vektor’s opus Terminal Redux and Blood Incantation’s debut Starspawn—offers glimpses toward the genre’s future while taking the space theme in a new direction. For Vektor, it involves an intricate concept about a heroic astronaut and an intergalactic bureaucracy threatening cosmic war. Blood Incantation, on the other hand, refined their sci-fi themes into less narrative-based lyrics, alluding to space-age conspiracy theories with sparse bursts of poetry. The album’s final words—“You are the stargate”—could even be perceived as a happy ending, a continuation of Black Sabbath’s vision of escape to the cosmos as a means of saving ourselves.
And so the tradition continues this month, with five extraordinary new albums that navigate cosmic terrain with confidence, delving even deeper into the void.
Junius // Eternal Rituals for the Accretion of Light
Junius’ third album, Eternal Rituals for the Accretion of Light, takes lyrical inspiration from spiritual theorist Elisabeth Haich, whose writing explored mankind’s internal ability to overcome the pains of daily life. What’s striking is how the Boston duo excels in further communicating just how routinely overwhelming this task can seem. Multi-instrumentalist Joseph E. Martinez’s clean, gothy vocals would fit just as well over a Depeche Mode song, but here he finds a companion in drummer Dana Filloon’s deathly grooves. Together they eschew Haich’s considered writing for a more dramatic kind of catharsis: wallowing in the bleakness of earthly existence as a means of transcending it.
Artificial Brain // Infrared Horizon
At the end of last year, Will Smith of the Long Island death metal quintet Artificial Brain shared the concept for his band’s upcoming album: “Like Dante’s Inferno but with futuristic machinery and robots.” Out next month, the record is a nauseous whirlwind of guttural vocals and jazzy chord progressions, telling the story Smith describes over music that reflects its technology-driven world. First single “Synthesized Instinct” sucks you right into the band’s scorched landscape. Keith Abrami’s intricate drumming is the crucial ingredient—soaring atmospherically and stuttering violently between the song’s disjointed sections, giving the song a jarring pulse that might make you question modern programming as you thrash along.
Gorephilia // Severed Monolith
Before listeners heard a note of Severed Monolith, Gorephilia’s first new album in five years, the band shared the cover art: a ghastly skeleton imploding in space, lightning bolts crashing through the body. While certain songs and lyrics further depict the artwork’s interstellar violence (particularly the extraordinary “Return to Dark Space”), the music is death metal at its most primal. Dual guitarists Jukka Aho and Pauli Gurko trade riffs with an almost bluesy edge—like Tony Iommi by way of Autopsy—and offer as much in atmosphere as they do in grueling momentum.
Lunar Shadow // Far From Light
For Germany’s Lunar Shadow, inspiration comes from history’s great epics, be it Tolkien or Conan the Barbarian or Number of the Beast. On Far From Light, the quintet crafts a few new epics of their own, with suitably dramatic titles like “The Kraken” and “Hadrian Carrying Stones.” Even when they’re telling tales of characters like “Earendil,” Tolkien’s seafaring hero who carried a star across the sky, the band lets the music do the heavy lifting, creating a hazy environment that forgoes the standards of modern studio metal. The drums remain comfortably distant while proggy acoustic guitars do the atmospheric work, as if synths and effects pedals hadn’t yet been invented in this galaxy. But the band’s old-school approach also helps Far From Light adhere to the timeless thrill of those early metal records: music as absorbing as the mythology that surrounds it.
Cloud Catcher // Trails of Kozmic Dust
With its gnarly odes to voodoo children and celestial empresses, Trails of Kozmic Dust finds Colorado’s Cloud Catcher settling further into their swampy, vintage sound. These eight slices of bluesy psych-rock capture heavy metal at its most classic. With a record store’s worth of riffs at his disposal, vocalist and guitarist Rory Rummings’ extended solos—equal parts cosmic grandeur and classic rock worship—are the record’s highlight. The whole album serves as a reminder that space might represent our projections of the future, but it’s been there long before any of us. “We’ll leave this world far behind/Believer in ancient times,” Rummings sings optimistically in closing track “Righteous Ruler.” And just like that, the great unknown feels a bit more familiar.