2020 Metal ’n’ Heavy Rock/Heavy Music Poll: RESULTS – Top 100 Countdown

tied w Clandestine, and then Robert Andersson singing Stranger Aeons, yeah?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIfB8P732Tw

xps (if embed, sry)

we dont even know if LJ & TTs ballots are identical or not

#3
Poppy – I Disagree
537 points, 11 votes, 5 #1 votes

https://www.loudandquiet.com/files/2020/01/poppy-i-disagree-artwork-1024x1024.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/4LgpVx8efQT7SRXGRq5Tze

Since the very beginning, there has been a darkness buried in Poppy’s heart. It’s there in the earliest videos uploaded to her mysterious YouTube channel back in 2014, in which the character—portrayed by an actress and musician named Moriah Pereira—performed simple tasks against a white background, occasionally delivering surrealist monologues. Her very first video featured her eating cotton candy in a way that might feel familiar to fans of ASMR videos: Her lips smack, her throat rumbles, she makes satisfied “ahhs,” but something’s off about the whole thing. Audio and image are out of sync; nothing sounds quite like you expect it to.

It was an unsettling beginning, and in the ensuing years, she’s only plunged further into uncomfortable territory. One of her early popular videos, for example, features her staring into the camera as she teaches the viewer how to load a handgun. In another, she makes explicit reference to one of 4chan’s most notoriously noxious message boards. Unlike a lot of people who have set about parodying the strangeness of influencer culture, she and her collaborators—chief among them the director and producer Titanic Sinclair—have seemed uniquely attuned to the surreal perversity that lurks in the shadowy underbelly of YouTube culture. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that some of the platform’s more unsavory figures have been outspoken fans of hers. She’s fluent in the lingua franca of the internet’s darkest parts.

The music attributed to Poppy over the years hasn’t always mirrored this side of her work. Her first album was a collection of wheezy ambient compositions self-consciously designed to “help facilitate a full night of sleep” and made, she says, with guidance from doctors who study sleep at Washington University. She’s made several albums’ worth of sugary bangers for Diplo’s Mad Decent label and a sci-fi synth soundtrack to a graphic novel. But her new album I Disagree is her first to fully follow through on the upsetting qualities of her video works, adding the grim aesthetics and curdled riffing of nu-metal, grindcore, and industrial noise to the seasick melange of her music.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/poppy-i-disagree/

I don't hate this but ehhhh.

People itt have been really good about not dragging the stuff they dislike so, in that same spirit, I'll just say that I'm glad some folks found something they like in Poppy.

dammit, guess I'll have to actually listen to this to decide whether I should be mad right now.

I'm starting to think my #2 is not going to place. *sniff*

well, this is a surprise

I expected p4k to be into it more.

it made the general eoy poll didn't it?

Yep, #75.

I smell shenanigans

maybe it's just pepe again

Hah I didn't realize this was nominated I might have voted for it and bumped it up even more lol

Pom check yr email. Seandalai says we may have got a placing wrong

*heavy eyeroll*

Ok, the real #3 is…

#3
Poppy – I disagree
537 points, 11 votes, 5 #1 votes

https://www.loudandquiet.com/files/2020/01/poppy-i-disagree-artwork-1024x1024.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/4LgpVx8efQT7SRXGRq5Tze

Since the very beginning, there has been a darkness buried in Poppy’s heart. It’s there in the earliest videos uploaded to her mysterious YouTube channel back in 2014, in which the character—portrayed by an actress and musician named Moriah Pereira—performed simple tasks against a white background, occasionally delivering surrealist monologues. Her very first video featured her eating cotton candy in a way that might feel familiar to fans of ASMR videos: Her lips smack, her throat rumbles, she makes satisfied “ahhs,” but something’s off about the whole thing. Audio and image are out of sync; nothing sounds quite like you expect it to.

It was an unsettling beginning, and in the ensuing years, she’s only plunged further into uncomfortable territory. One of her early popular videos, for example, features her staring into the camera as she teaches the viewer how to load a handgun. In another, she makes explicit reference to one of 4chan’s most notoriously noxious message boards. Unlike a lot of people who have set about parodying the strangeness of influencer culture, she and her collaborators—chief among them the director and producer Titanic Sinclair—have seemed uniquely attuned to the surreal perversity that lurks in the shadowy underbelly of YouTube culture. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that some of the platform’s more unsavory figures have been outspoken fans of hers. She’s fluent in the lingua franca of the internet’s darkest parts.

The music attributed to Poppy over the years hasn’t always mirrored this side of her work. Her first album was a collection of wheezy ambient compositions self-consciously designed to “help facilitate a full night of sleep” and made, she says, with guidance from doctors who study sleep at Washington University. She’s made several albums’ worth of sugary bangers for Diplo’s Mad Decent label and a sci-fi synth soundtrack to a graphic novel. But her new album I Disagree is her first to fully follow through on the upsetting qualities of her video works, adding the grim aesthetics and curdled riffing of nu-metal, grindcore, and industrial noise to the seasick melange of her music.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/poppy-i-disagree/

a bubblegum, popping on a human spiked collar, forever

Ok enough trolling, Simon rightly saw through our feeble ruse.

#3
Kairon; IRSE! – Polysomn
537 points, 13 votes, 1 #1 vote

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0803105724_10.jpg

https://kaironirse.bandcamp.com/album/polysomn-2

There’s a particular quality to the best music that can only be described as a kind of ethereal comfort. Music where the sound seeps into your bones and around your skin, enveloping you like a cloud and allowing you to drift off into another world for a little while inside your head. It’s not common, no, but there are some records that do that for me, and no doubt for you too dear reader. When it happens, it’s a blissful thing. Kairon;IRSE! know all about this unnameable effect , and over the last decade or so they’ve mastered the knack of producing it.

We last heard from these Finns on 2017’s tower of strength Ruination, a minor masterpiece showcasing a seamless blend of prog, shoegaze and possibly the greatest bass sound ever committed to tape. They took elements, you knew in your heart should fit together, even though no-one had really managed it, and finally made it work. It’s been a long wait to see where they’d land after that sprawling musical journey.

Polysomn arrives with no small amount of anticipation to those already hitched firmly to the Kairon wagon. First single An Bat None indicated they weren’t going to steer us wrong, leaning perhaps in a more succinct direction but not compromising the ecstatic nature of their previous work. It’s safe to say that first taste wasn’t a fluke, and that Polysomn is another absolute beauty. Strangely though the song lengths are more concise, it’s perhaps not as instant as Ruination on first listen, coming across as a slightly more textural effort, but before you know it, you’re firmly sucked into its orbit. Once you’re in you won’t want to escape.

https://www.thesleepingshaman.com/reviews/kairon-irse-polysomn/

Thank you. Hail Finland, hail Wastement

I mostly enjoyed this, with no desire to revisit it, sorry.

Haha says a lot that I actually believed Poppy placed.

At least one person must've voted for it.

Gonna be a good top three for one Niko Lehdontie! Also a good top three for heavy shoegaze

looks like poppy got a little sloppy

Poppy was my #27 and I was getting ready to post about how I felt that it didn't deserve to be as high as #3, but this album - which is great and probably one of my favorites of the year - shouldn't have been nominated let alone placed this high. At least Poppy is actually heavy music. This is undoubtedly beautiful stuff, one of my favorite "psyche/shoegaze/mbv-worship" albums ever, but just doesn't belong in this poll.

Now we're talking!

Yeah I totally believed Poppy would be #3 on an ilm poll!

As for Kairon Irse, I liked the previous and although this has one or two outstanding songs as a whole I couldn't connect.

Over to Imago for his response

I feel like I should defend my lads, but I won't, they're false as hell. My #13 though, because while they're false as hell, they do things with noisy guitars that I feel qualify them for inclusion in a poll that celebrates noisy guitars. Even if those things are delicate, beautiful, pretty and generally extremely lovely

I cannot be rused in the metal poll I am too trve

Kairon; IRSE! are rockist enough to qualify. That's the actual secret criterion we don't tell you about.

Also, there's an album yet to place that is more or less just as false as this, so maybe we just need to get accustomed to shoegaze being metal now :)

Something like Altair Descends really is just astonishingly pretty for a track on a metal poll album, almost offensively pretty haha

Not once does that review I quoted use the word 'metal'.

Look, if the DM Trve Krve wanna mobilise and swat away the foul spectre of pretty Finnish spacerock then they'd better get boots on the ground because I will never stop voting pretty Finnish spacerock

The trve krve is mostly gone, alas.

Then what shall reign?

The False King, obv.

*gazes about at his empire of falsehood* I HAVE BUILT THIS

Look on my works, etc.

Except one of the two remaining albums is the sickest metal I've heard in my life, more or less, so

Speaking of falseness…

all this talk of falseness seems a bit premature when we can clearly look forward to Anal Stabwound winning next year's poll.

#2
Hum – Inlet
663 points, 17 votes, 1 #1 vote

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a4126716193_10.jpg

https://humband.bandcamp.com/album/inlet

Rumors of a fifth Hum album have been circulating since 2016, and there’s some poetry in its surprise drop coinciding with the 20th-anniversary celebration of Deftones’ White Pony, this century’s most influential vision for heavy melodic rock and something that wouldn’t exist without Hum. In the past decade, an entire galaxy of bands equally indebted to shoegaze, emo and alt-rock has emerged from the niche Hum occupied in their heyday—seen as intimidating older brothers by fellow bands on the upstart Polyvinyl label in their home base of Champaign-Urbana, overshadowed and unfairly likened to upstate neighbors/tour mates Smashing Pumpkins. Yet, Inlet doesn’t indicate a band awaiting a hero’s welcome or trying to connect with the world at large. Rather, the massive album presents an invitation to block out everything in existence and ponder the enormity of the universe.

Hum’s wanderlust for inner odysseys was evident in the titles of their two major-label albums: You’d Prefer an Astronaut, Downward is Heavenward. Inlet doesn’t evoke the same playful adventurousness; its heavily fortified exteriors are more reflective of their standoffish relationship with media attention; a decade before it soundtracked a Cadillac commercial, the modest success of “Stars” allowed Hum to terrorize the Howard Stern Show with glass-shattering volume and confound Matt Pinfield by wearing chicken suits on 120 Minutes. “Step Into You” is the only thing here that could possibly give Hum a second chance at the mainstream success they tried their hardest to avoid—mostly because it’s the only thing here less than five minutes, though the cyclical, deadpan melody, head-nodding midtempo groove and hair gel-slick guitar solo could’ve shared space on the alt-rock dial next to Collective Soul.

Hum’s legacy has largely been stewarded by acolytes like Greet Death, Narrow Head, and the Talbott-produced Cloakroom, all of whom have embraced their more funereal aspects and ignored their commercial flirtations. In that light, Inlet is essentially fan service. Talbott’s rhythm guitar, moves with the velocity of a mudslide or molten lava, while Tim Lash’s textured leads evoke water and air, replicating an algae bloom in “Waves” or a slow-motion geyser on the chorus of “Shapeshifter.” And the riffs—the riffs!—are Black Sabbath-slow and simple, like Hum really spent 22 years stockpiling and eliminating anything that couldn’t withstand at least six minutes of repetition or maintain its melodic thrust at the slowest possible tempos.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hum-inlet/

Good record that I'd outright love if the singing was a bit more involved.

Too false!

Glad I voted for this in the end. I almost removed it from my ballot, CORRECTLY GUESSING it would be the biggest threat to the Champions Of Music, but it is goddamn epic so I couldn't not. Those outros!

Almost hit the 666 too