April 2024 Best Heavy Metal Albums

April was another good month for metal. There were plenty of notable releases, making it difficult to narrow down this list. Here are our choices for April 2024’s best heavy metal albums.

1. Dvne – Voidkind (Metal Blade)

Voidkind comes to us by way of Scotland-based Dvne, a group that seamlessly blends prog, sludge, stoner, and more into a simply fascinating stew. This is the band’s third full-length, and combined with several EPs and a short live offering they’ve never failed to both deliver and grow.

Back in 2021 Etemen Ænka found its way into our top 20 prog albums of the year, and best of March. If things have changed since then it is only for the better, as Voidkind is a step up across the board – even the vocals have improved in the last three years. With nearly an hour of stellar arrangements, serpentine grooves, and hypnotic riffs, there’s something for everyone here and once again Dvne top the month, our pick for April’s best new album.

2. Full Of Hell – Coagulated Bliss (Closed Casket Activities)

Coagulated Bliss is Full Of Hell’s sixth album and first since 2021’s Garden Of Burning Apparitions. During those almost three years the band continued to hone their craft and continue to be one of extreme music’s most varied entities. From the odd sounds used at the beginning of “Half Life Changelings” to the high-octane assault of “Transmuting Chemical Burns” or even the punk drive of the title track, all of your favorite Full Of Hell sounds are here and used to greater effect than their most recent albums.

Some of Full Of Hell’s best work comes in the form of a long track amongst the scattered pieces of bite-sized chaos. This time around that track is “Bleeding Horizon,” which starts out with hummed feedback which gives way to doomy riffs and pained vocals, taking up most of the six minute runtime before rounding itself out as a truly sludge/doom affair. “Schizoid Rupture” and “Vacuous Dose” end with a flurry of riffs that could surprise fans and is another reason that Full Of Hell feels fully realized on this new album. Coagulated Bliss is the sound of Full of Hell achieving noisy nirvana.

3. High On Fire – Cometh The Storm (MNRK Heavy)

With their ninth album Cometh The Storm, High On Fire have awakened from their nearly six year slumber. High on Fire have seemingly gone back to what sounds more in line with classic albums Blessed Black Wings and Death Is This Communion with Cometh The Storm, bringing with it massive riffs and crushing solos.

High on Fire remain one of the genre’s most notable bands over 25 years into their career and it doesn’t hurt when Matt Pike is your main driving force and guitar player. He can find a riff for just about any situation. This is an excellent album that has been in the works for a while and the great care and curation used to finely craft it should be evident to both casual fans and devotees. Cometh The Storm is the band’s finest work in nearly a decade.

4. Black Tusk – The Way Forward (Season of Mist)

Southern sludgy punk posse Black Tusk are back after six years to give us The Way Forward. The sounds vary right from the first two tracks: “Out of Grasp” is a real burner with shouted vocals and follow-up “Brushfire” is a slower song that feels just as much like Black Tusk as the prior song. After a series of sub-three minute movers, “Breath of Life” arrives to shake that up. Beginning with a fat riff, the song opens up and lets this Savannah crew properly blast through with gritty guitars and a sense of more refined purpose at this midpoint in the run time.

It is worth noting that this is the band’s first album as a four piece, adding Chris Adams on second guitar shortly after the release of T.C.B.T. and his presence is felt throughout this LP. Black Tusk continue to shine with short form sludge bursts that heavily lean on hardcore punk structures allowing them to be one of the very best at the style. After nearly 20 years Black Tusk aren’t looking back; instead they are focused on The Way Forward, another notch in their belt and perhaps their best album yet.

5. Inter Arma – New Heaven (Relapse)

Richmond, Virginia’s Inter Arma have taken a significant step forward with their latest album, New Heaven. They seem to have incorporated everything they have done so far into a new experimental musical experience, with a structure that is becoming progressive, abstract and adventuresome.

Inter Arma’s usual tone, which combines sludge, black metal, and post-metal, is still evident in New Heaven. However, this time the band present a darker, more dissonant, and more startling image of a horizon that is full of desolation, isolation, agony, and tales of challenges and survival. That’s why the image Inter Arma chose, a photograph by National Geographic photographer Louie Palu, fits well on the album cover; depicting a ranger standing in front of the unknown, contemplating facing the wilderness. Inter Arma’s interpretation added to the real background of the image makes the album a resounding and magnificent work. New Heaven is a prodigious opportunity to explore new perspectives of the band and oneself.

6. Homecoming – Those We Knew (Copper Feast)

Those We Knew is progressive metal in a sense that it looks beyond the narrow lines that genres form themselves in, as Homecoming define what it means to be forward-thinking. The sophomore album from this French foursome is a stunning blend of so many different sounds that it’s amazing they can put it all together in such a comprehensive manner. Even with the shortest song being over seven minutes long, the consumption of the record is far easier than expected.

This is due to the band’s exquisite songwriting, which can expertly transition from a chunky grunge riff to zippy blast beating before switching up to an alluring melody. Their idea of an interlude is a nine-minute instrumental, a ballsy move that they know they can pull off. Those We Knew is one of those albums that may go underappreciated in 2024, but will deserve all the acclaim it’ll get.