Another stellar year for heavy music has drawn to a close; we’ve published our Albums of the Year list, got our spreadsheets in order for 2024 and we’re ready to do it all over again, but as we take one last glance at some of the best releases of 2023 a few of us at Distorted Sound couldn’t help but notice how many of them were from bands arriving at that often all-too daunting sophomore full-length. PUPIL SLICER, URNE, CELESTIAL SANCTUARY and many more… none of these artists seem to have struggled with the notorious pressures and pitfalls that are said to surround second albums, and it got us wondering if there has ever been much truth to the story of the ‘sophomore slump’. These ten metal records certainly suggest otherwise…
Paranoid – BLACK SABBATH (1970)
It would be heresy to start anywhere else. If BLACK SABBATH established the blueprint for heavy metal with their self-titled debut, it was with Paranoid – released a mere seven months later – that they perfected it. Hopefully everyone knows the drill here; Tony Iommi’s iconic riffing, Geezer Butler’s dark, apocalyptic lyrics and rumbling, lumbering low-end, the battering ram that is Bill Ward and the Godfather of Metal himself Ozzy Osbourne – all working in perfect unison and tightly honed by two years of extensive touring to produce multiple heavy metal touchstones like War Pigs and Paranoid and Iron Man and even the more playful Fairies Wear Boots. If the genre does have an issue with sophomore albums it certainly didn’t start here.
Ride The Lightning – METALLICA (1984)
Much like SABBATH before them, METALLICA may have essentially created a genre with their ripping 1983 debut Kill ‘Em All, but it was the refinements they made for album number two that saw them produce one of the greatest and most influential metal records of all time. From the moment Fight Fire With Fire opens with gentle acoustic guitars, it’s clear that Ride The Lightning is a more sophisticated affair than its predecessor, as borne out in progressive thrash masterpieces like For Whom The Bell Tolls and Creeping Death and perhaps most notably the band’s first ever power ballad in Fade To Black. Not short on youthful ferocity either – the aforementioned Fight Fire With Fire being a prime example, and Trapped Under Ice of course – this is where METALLICA as most people will remember them really came into being.
Cause Of Death – OBITUARY (1990)
How do you follow a death metal classic? Probably just make another one a year later right? With Cause Of Death – and 1989’s Slowly We Rot before it – OBITUARY did more than any other band to define what is now regarded as quintessential Florida death metal. Thicker, groovier and doomier than a lot of what their more thrash-minded contemporaries were producing at the time, Cause Of Death is a grim, gruelling trudge through the swamps of the band’s home state, the listener pursued all the while by their deranged, yowling frontman John Tardy. You know all of those mid-tempo death metal bands we’re all loving at the moment? Most of them wouldn’t exist without this.
Sleep’s Holy Mountain – SLEEP (1992)
Holy Mountain is of course the full-length follow-up to SLEEP’s 1991 debut Volume One, but in many ways it feels even more like a spiritual successor to BLACK SABBATH’s Master Of Reality from some two-plus decades before it. With guitarist Matt Pike and bassist Al Cisneros in full tube amp worship mode, Holy Mountain towers ever so fittingly over its listener in a way that makes it seem completely absurd that this is the work of a three-piece. Smoky Sabbathian grooves, the unhurried heft of drummer Chris Hakius, and Cisneros’ psychedelic lyrics and vocals to match – all the trademarks of the last 30 odd years of stoner metal are nailed here pretty much right at its inception. Many say that Dopesmoker is the band’s magnum opus – and it is – but here is an arguably far more accessible entry point to that gloriously riff-filled land.
Iowa – SLIPKNOT (2001)
SLIPKNOT were bloody massive in 2001. They’d stolen the show at Ozzfest ’99, their self-titled debut had already been certified Platinum in the US and Canada, and its lead single Wait And Bleed had even been nominated for a Grammy. And then they got heavier. The product of one of the darkest times in the band’s career, Iowa is SLIPKNOT at their most extreme, the band flirting more with death metal than nu-metal in tracks like People = Shit, Disasterpiece and The Heretic Anthem and yet still producing some of their biggest ever hits. Grammy nominations followed for My Plague and Left Behind, and the album has since been certified Platinum in the US, UK and Canada, and Gold in six other countries. Any band thinking about watering down their sound in pursuit of commercial success would do well to have another listen to this one.
Toxicity – SYSTEM OF A DOWN (2001)
Six times Platinum in the US; five in Australia; twice in the UK and Canada; and either Gold or Platinum in a further 11 countries. It peaked at Number 1 on the Billboard 200 and apparently it’s even one of Mel C’s favourite albums of all time. How on earth did a record as batshit mental as Toxicity go as big as it did? SYSTEM OF A DOWN’s second album is an art metal masterpiece laden with wild musings on everything from orgies, groupies and tapeworms to police brutality and the prison industrial complex. It’s home to comfortably their biggest song ever in Chop Suey!, and realistically probably their second in the title track, it’s got one of the most insane vocal performances of all time from Serj Tankian, and no-one – apart from maybe the band themselves – has ever made another quite like it.
Leviathan – MASTODON (2004)
MASTODON’s 2002 debut Remission was and still is an essential sludge metal record, but its 2004 successor Leviathan was the Atlantans’ first masterpiece. Inspired by the 1851 epic Moby-Dick, it’s an album that lives up to the gargantuan proportions of Herman Melville’s classic novel, and indeed of its titular white whale. From the sea-splitting heft of the record’s legendary opener Blood And Thunder, to the sludgy groove of Iron Tusk, to the proggy twists and turns of the likes of Megalodon and Aqua Dementia, here MASTODON revealed so much more of what they were truly capable of, and even amid the stiff competition of later efforts like 2009’s Crack The Skye or 2017’s Emperor Of Sand, you won’t find many fans who don’t still rank this at number one in a unique and remarkable discography.
Fortress – PROTEST THE HERO (2008)
Sticking with great proggy and at least vaguely conceptual records for a moment, PROTEST THE HERO somehow got even better at their instruments in the years between their fantastic 2005 debut Kezia and its 2008 follow-up Fortress. Adding more of a technical metal influence to the mathy post-hardcore of its predecessor, the Canadians’ second album is a work of dazzling guitar wizardry, ever-changing time signatures and glorious theatrical vocals from the band’s ultra-versatile frontman Rody Walker. It peaked at number one on the album chart in their home country, got the band onto Guitar Hero, and while most of the records they’ve released since have been of a similar calibre, it would be hard to argue that any casts a greater shadow than this.
Sunbather – DEAFHEAVEN (2013)
Just let it sink in that DEAFHEAVEN recorded Sunbather in six days; an expansive, ambitious and completely enrapturing masterpiece that still quite literally defines a genre, brought to life in less than a week. It’s one of those records that seems to make time fold in on itself, an hour swiftly lost to huge washes of reverb, visceral outpourings of blackened ferocity, and all the melodic beauty and dynamic patience of post-rock. It was the best reviewed record of 2013 according to Metacritic – the first time that such an honour has ever gone to a metal album – and naturally it cleaned up on end of year lists both within the scene and far beyond it. Sunbather might not have been the first blackgaze record but it will probably always be its most important.
Nightmare Logic – POWER TRIP (2017)
There’s a reason every vaguely thrashy band that has come since has been compared to this. Adored by fans of metal and hardcore alike, Nightmare Logic is without question the gold standard for modern crossover thrash. Trimming the fat on the band’s already excellent 2013 debut Manifest Decimation, it’s eight perfect tracks of razor sharp riffing, squealie divebomb solos, and massive hooks, grooves and breakdowns all produced to crisp perfection in what is still arguably Arthur Rizk’s career best. And of course, out front there’s the late, great and inimitable Riley Gale barking and yowling his socially conscious lyrics in a performance that would permanently cement him as one of the greatest frontmen of our time.
What did you think of our choices? What are some of your favourite sophomore albums? Let us know in the comments below!
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