We are excited to launch our first Monthly Staff Picks, a new series highlighting the metal albums capturing our team's attention. From underground gems to heavy hitters, join us every month for a curated look at exactly what is in our album rotation.
Ferdinand Peeters
Crystallion - A Dark Enchanted Crystal Night
Against all expectations, no “Follow the Cipher”, I like to present the very first metal album that I ever listened to: “A dark enchanted Crystal Night” by Crystallion.
“Burning Bridges” was my first ever metal song, while no longer in my top 10, it is still the song that introduced me to metal and started my power-metal phase. It still brings me back to my youth and I keep returning to this song.
Gladys Haelters
Lorna Shore - Pain Remains
This album gets the honour to be my first pick, not because it is my all-time favourite album, even though it is a band that is really good, but because next friday, I will see this band live for the 3rd time. In the days leading up to concert, the album has hijacked quite a bit of my listening time.
Let me describe them as “filthy metal”; if you want clean vocals or steady rhythms, this is the wrong band for you. But lyrically and technically they make amazing music. I dare ven say that they sound better live than on the album!
Despite releasing a new album, the previous album still has my preference, purely for the last three tracks. This trilogy can be described as a true “three-act grief opera dressed up in deathcore”; Each track focusses on a phase of mourning and vulnerability.
The emotional arc in a TL;DR: Part I: hope and ideals slipping away, obsessed with what was Part II: confronts grief, loss, and the desire to escape Part III: anger, acceptance, and catharsis
Feel free to look up the lyrics the first or second time you listen to this album, if you don’t listed to this style of metal often, the guteral throat sounds can be hard to understand :D
Take the album in your own way and interpret it as you feel it. Other favourites of this album are “Into the Earth” and “Sun//Eater”.
Kenzo Staelens
Within Temptation - The Unforgiving
To follow the trend, I will also start with one of my favourite albums, although it was a difficult choice between this album, and the album with my favourite song, perhaps for a different monthly staff picks.
Of all places, I discoverd this album in a video game, “osu!”. From there I was pulled into the genre, unlike the crazy stories of my colleagues, there is unfortunately no epic origin story to be fonud. But on the other hand this band has already had a number of shows and gigs in my former home town, mostly the festival “rock zottegem’, so that is something that I can be proud of!
FYI: for those that know “osu!”, this album can be played in a single sitting and is about an hour long.
Maarten VanPraet
Haggard - Eppur si muove
This is how metal would have sounded like in the middle ages! A mix that you don’t find often, but in my opinion a top album.
To quote Wikipedia:
E pur si muove or Eppur si muove (‘And yet it moves’ or ‘Although it does move’) is an Italian phrase commonly attributed to the Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei […] According to [popular legend], Galileo muttered this in 1633 after the [Roman Inquisition]forced him to recant his claims, though this is likely apocryphal.
I discoverd this album with my metal friends when we were attending high school. A catholic school, where the teachers weren’t a fan of our borderline anti-christian ways of live, to say to least (we all know how teenagers are). So you can understand why we thought Galileo was a badass and this album felt extra good.
If you only have time for a single track, or the albums starts a bit too slow for your liking: “Per aspera ad astra” is a very good starting point.
Pieter-Jan Cassiman
Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou - May Our Chambers Be Full
For this first album of the month, I am choosing one of my all-time favourites: May Our Chambers Be Full - Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou
It is a very unique combination of post-rock / indie & sludge / doom metal, two opposites that are a match made in heaven.
There are no crazy or rebellious stories behind my choice of this album, but it is an album that is very near to my hearth.
The contrast between the doom and gloom, on one hand, and on the other hand the hopefull and light at the end of the tunnel are mirrored very beautifully in the cooperation between Thou and Emma Ruth Rundle.
This album always evokes a certain feeling of melancholy in me; especially the last track on the album “The Valley”. This song cuts to the bone, every time I hear it; especially the following part:
I want to step into the armour of another, stronger I want to look once through the eyes of someone good
For those that can’t get enough of this combination there is also “The Helm of Sorrow”. Another album that was born from this cooperation, although a bit harsher in tone.