Like any artform, music is not a competition. There is only good and bad music and that categorisation in itself is all down to subjective taste. However, in a bid for scientific rigour; some quantitative analysis to fortify the qualitative spiels, we’ve asked all the Thrash Hits contributors to list their favourite albums of 2013. Yeah, it’s here to boost our egos by claiming what we say is best and it’ll surely get some good clicks and you may (rightly) point out that it’s just another list but, at the very least, you might see an album that you’ve never heard of and think about buying it. That would be cool.

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Part and parcel of being opinionated music lovers is that we go and experience lots of music in its natural habitat – on a stage – and then we decide how good it was. Some spectacles are so powerful that they evoke emotions strong enough to form memories through the drunkenness. It’s a rarity but that’s why some here have to name several before deciding upon their Favourite Gig of 2013. There is zero reason for you to be reading this but if you’ve read this far, you’ll get at least halfway down before clicking the cross.

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Life is funny. Music is fun. Life is serious. Music is serious. As in life, it is in music. There are moments that are hilarious and others that are much less so. Either way, they stick in your mind. Whether you revel in having fun or in poking fun, you will have had a Favourite Moment in 2013 and that’s what this list is. Some of them are utter abominations of class and style but that’s why you’re on this pitiful excuse of a website. Hooray.

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If you’re on this page, you really should have seen the Thrash Hits Albums of the Year 2013 list already. If you haven’t, you should click that link or this link and sort that out. This piece will attempt to delve into some vague statistical analysis of the results. This is really only interesting if you care deeply about either the Thrash Hits Top 20, any old statistical analysis or both, so the chances are you’ll have clicked through to something else by now. Anyway…

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Malthusian
MMXIII
Invictus Productions
22 November 2013

by Pete Long

A band’s name should tell you something about them. Malthusian have named themselves after the theories of the Reverend Malthus regarding the role of war, disease and famine in keeping population levels sustainable. It is a name heavy with connotations of pessimism, inhumanity and cruelty. Given that MMXIII is the first release from the Dublin based four-piece, that name is the best clue of what to expect from this three song demo.

It is a very accurate guide.

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Altar Of Plagues
Teethed Glory And Injury
Candlelight Records
29 April 2013

by Rob McAuslan

“Impact” is a pleasingly kinetic word to actually say, one of the few that truly feels like the thing it’s trying to describe. The first syllable winds up to the plosive second, giving a real sense of the build and release involved in the whole process. It’s a word that Altar Of Plagues already undersand on multiple levels, with their two previous records landing them directly in the path of huge plaudits and reducing the attendees at their live appearances to stunned, rambling husks. Teethed Glory And Injury already promised to be a significant release for the first half of this year – and then people started to hear bits of it and that first syllable stretched itself to an impossible tension.

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We’ve got a fairly loose system when it comes to organising submissions from our contributors. They email us an idea, we tell them if it’s good or rubbish, then they go off and write it. Nice and simple. So when Tom Dare emailed us with a pitch for a retrospective on how Black Metal has evolved in the twenty years since the release of Darkthrone’s A Blaze In The Northern Sky, we just let him get on with it.

We just didn’t reckon he’s write quite so bloody much.

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All this week, Tom Dare has been guiding you through how Black Metal has evolved over the course of the last two decades (check out parts one, two, three and four if you haven’t already). Now, as the week draws to a close, we’ve asked Tom to put together the songs that have made it happen into a Spotify Slaylist, and in doing to to lovingly cobble them together in an order that somehow tries to make sense of the wildly differing styles that constitute the genre these days. Wish him luck….

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In the final part of his look at the Black Metal evolution over the past 20 years, today Tom Dare is examining the murkier and more indistinct realms of “post”-Black Metal band, as well as those bands who might’ve moved beyond the boundaries of Black Metal musically, still remain within the genre in spirit, at least….

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We’ve shown you what Raz and Hugh’s albums of the year are, but they’re not the only ones responsible for the Thrash Hits Top 20 Albums of 2011. Oh no. We’ve got a whole load of contributors – writers, photographers, and miscellaneous behind-the-scenes types – that help keep Thrash Hits running smoothly, and the albums they loved the most from 2011 matter just as much as those favoured by the boss men.

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