Our Last Time Acting Normal (For Now)
Plans for the future and sweeping up the dust from 2020
Welcome to the final standard Apotheosis newsletter of 2020! We’re taking a slightly tweaked approach this week in order to accomplish a reasonable schedule for list week. The tweaks to this newsletter are pretty straightforward. Most notably, it covers the past two weeks of music instead of just the last week as usual. So the albums discussed in this issue include anything released from 12/18-12/25. Our list week schedule is:
12/27 - Best Metal Albums of December 2020
12/28 - Best Movies, TV and Miscellaneous of 2020
12/29 - Best EP’s, Mixtapes and Splits of 2020
12/30 - Best Metal Albums of 2020
12/31 - Best Albums of 2020
Here’s hoping y’all are ready for a litany of lists, each one will contain its own playlist so you don’t need to listen to every project listed, though they’re all worth the time investment. Also, as of right now (and this may change in the coming days) I plan to have the write-ups for albums that will be on both lists (Best Metal and Best Albums) be identical. So if you feel yourself getting deja vu, it’s not you, it’s me. Though this letter has been known to cause ä̷̢͎́u̴̩͠d̷̡̠͒i̶̧̮̚o̶͊ͅv̴̱͝͝i̴̹̜͑s̵̱͚̅̆u̸̖̚á̸̳̹l̷̝̆ ̵͊ͅh̸̘͐͒ā̶̭̀l̵̟͆l̶͎̯̉̉u̶͉̐̂ͅc̸̼̅͂i̶͖̿n̸̞̖̓̉a̵̠͝t̵̗̽̚i̵̢͂̕ỏ̸̪n̵̨̤̒s̷̼̬̚.
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Worm Shepherd - In The Wake of Sòl
Thank god this record came out because otherwise there’d be nothing to talk about. In The Wake of Sòl sounds rather similar to a nightmare made into soundwaves. The record is an unrelenting whirlwind of hate and fury, that feels like it actively wants to cause you harm. It might even have done so were it not for the note perfect execution of horrifyingly complex song structures, drum patterns and guitar sections. Metal doesn’t get a whole lot more brutal than this, but when brutality is executed at such a high level the appeal becomes undeniable.
Normally this is where I’d recommend other great metal albums from the past week but the past two weeks were so sparse that nothing else of note even came out (that we could find) so in the meantime, check out our playlist of the best new tracks in metal!
Get Dunked on By an AI
About three weeks ago we collectively lost it over how impressively Spotify was able to data harvest our listening habits. Well someone decided they could take that same information and use it to dunk on us. You can see how harshly I was judged in the above photo. Let us know how you got roasted in the comments.
https://pudding.cool/2020/12/judge-my-spotify/
Non-Metal AOTW
Avenade - Vice Versa in Such Things
This being my first exposure to Avenade, I went into the record without expectation. Having listened to it, I can see why there was so much buzz from fans about this record. Completely divorced from any sense of genre, Vice Versa in Such Things bounces around sound profiles with the frantic energy of a pinball. Sometimes bordering on metal-adjacent post-hardcore (“Even So”) other times bordering on the soft side of 30 Seconds to Mars (but, you know, good and not fronted by a cult leader) (“Closure”) it truly feels like Avenade could pull off anything. While it’s impossible to know if that’s true, I know for sure that they’ve pulled this off, and that’s all you can really request.
Runners-up
Things to Look Forward to
Album release schedules are always very weird around the end/beginning of the year. Many artists want to keep their cards close to their chest for some inexplicable reason so instead of going over what’s going to happen next week, here are some of the things we’re excited for in 2021. I’m going off the list on this Wikipedia page, and the upcoming section on Album of the Year. It’s a fluid list so these albums may or may not come out in 2021. Any albums with unannounced titles will have the album name listed as “TBA.”
Metal Albums
A Day To Remember - You’re Welcome
Blind Guardian - TBA
Ghost - TBA
Non-Metal Albums
Slowthai - Tyron
Julia Stone - Sixty Summers
Julien Baker - Little Oblivions
Kid Cudi - Entergalactic
Lana Del Rey - Chemtrails over the Country Club
Lorde - TBA
Rosalía - R3
Royal Blood - TBA
Schoolboy Q - TBA
Spoon - TBA
St. Vincent - TBA
Travis Scott - Utopia
Weyes Blood - TBA
Danny Brown - XXXX
Denzel Curry - Melt My Eyez, See Your Future
Darkside - Spiral
Black Thought & Danger Mouse - Dangerous Thoughts
Surely a bunch of these won’t come out, and of course a bunch more will. Whatever happens, trust that we’ll keep you up to date with the best music in every genre.
Shrinekeeping
So with this being the last typical letter of the year, here are some of the things you can look forward to that I’ll be adding to the newsletter in 2021:
The return of mini-essays about things that are actually relevant to music
The return of label highlights
The return of metal-merch recommendations
Permanent swap out of non-metal merch for whatever I feel like that week
Finally, I’ll be trying out a new section of “Subgenre Guides.” I’ve learned that a lot of readers are newer to the metal world, and no genre has a more intimidating list of widely accepted subgenres than metal. The format hasn’t quite solidified in my head but at the very least it will include stylistic signatures of the subgenre, formative influences on the genre and few groups that are current pillars of the genre. We’ll start with popular subgenres then move into the more esoteric ones.
If you’ve got a friend that would be interested in these additions, or who wants to learn more about metal, click the share button to invite them to the knife party.
If someone shared this with you and you want these lists and subgenre explorations delivered straight into your inbox, click the subscribe button to stick around.
Whether you’ve been here since the beginning or just joined up now, you have my heartfelt thanks. I don’t need to make a hokey speech about 2020, so I won’t. But writing this newsletter, even when it felt like a chore, always resulted in rewarding interactions and a feeling of accomplishment. I hope that the tweaks in 2021 make it even more enjoyable and informative for every one of you.
Thanks for taking the time to hang out in this damp little cave with all of us fiends.