By now you’ve read the one list that really matters – the Thrash Hits Top 10 Albums of 2014 – but now we’re giving you the opportunity to delve a little deeper into the minds that created it. Here are the unedited, unspoiled and unsullied opinions that we crunched together to distill our Top 10. We asked our contributors to tell us what their personal Top 10 records of the last 12 months were, and to justify their top choice to us.

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You know how we do festivals by now. This is the Thrash Hits Festival Splash Page and this is where you’ll find all of our coverage of Damnation Festival 2014.

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Black Moth were another band who initially wrestled with the booming acoustics of the PHD stage, the high ceilings and resultant echoes squashing some of the precision that hides within their riffs. But Leeds is the band’s hometown, and through sheer force of personality and a setlist skewed towards the slower, moodier ends of both The Killing Jar and Condemned to Hope, Black Moth made sure their homecoming was an early afternoon highlight of Damnation 2014..

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With the Autumn/Winter indoor festival/all-dayer scene gathering pace, this week we turn the attention of the Sunday Spotify Slaylist to probably our favourite event of the colder quarter of the year – Damnation Festival. And boy, are we stoked for their 2014 line-up.

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Black Moth
Condemned To Hope
New Heavy Sounds
22 September 2014

by Hugh Platt

There isn’t a single aspect of Condemned To Hope that isn’t an improvement on The Killing Jar. Black Moth have burrowed down deep and incubated an album that doesn’t so much piss on the concept of “the difficult second album” as they have dug up its corpse, fired 10,000 volts through it’s embalmed veins and cackled madly as it dances around to their nefarious tune.

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Black Moth’s new album, Condemned To Hope, is brilliant. With it, the Leeds/London split five-piece have smelted British doom metal traditions into something vibrant yet weighty, borne aloft on a spiders legs’ worth of hooks, taking in everything from grunge to The Cramps via midnight scuffles at the chip shop to undead psychedelic experiences. It’s one of our favourite albums of 2014, which is why we sat down for a lengthy chat with vocalist Harriet Bevan and guitarist Nico Carew to get deep down into the nitty-gritty of Condemned To Hope.

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We went on the BBC Radio 1 Review Show for a record seventh time this week. We reckon it’s because we’re a) one of the few blogs on Radio 1’s books who doesn’t deal in boring indie, and b) one of the few blogs willing to really put the boot in to bad music when we hear it on the show.

To that end, come and listen to our Deputy Editor Hugh Platt take on Paris Hilton on this week’s show.

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Record Store Day is once again looming – this weekend, music collector nerds of all shapes and sizes will descend upon their local record shops to buy over-priced and often not-very-good limited edition releases to mark the occasion. However, some of the stuff being put out for Record Store Day is bloody brilliant, and the New Heavy Sounds Vol.3 compilation – featuring a load of killer new tracks from a whole load of their bands – is one of those, hence why it’s our pick for If You Buy One Thing This Week.

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This week, the magnificent Temples Festival sold out of weekend tickets. For a new festival to do this in their opening year is pretty damn impressive, and speaks volumes for just how strong Temples Festival’s line-up curation has been. It also makes for a goddamn murderously good Sunday Slaylist.

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Corrosion of Conformity, Black Moth, Darkane, GOLDSBORO, Sound Storm, Collisions, Cypher16, Huron, Maplerun and Dead Existence have been added to the Hammerfest 2014 line-up today. No, we don’t care about most of those bands either, but we care very much about Corrosion of Conformity and Black Moth, which makes this announcement a winner in our eyes.

They join the already announced Kreator, Overkill, Soilwork, Grand Magus, Unleashed, Earthtone9, Breed 77, Enthroned, Paragon, Annihilated, and Gravil on Hammerfest’s 2014 line-up. Tickets are on sale now from the official Hammerfest website, with the price varying on how many people you want in your room.