Whether it's the longer, darker nights, or the dropping temperature inspiring ice-cold riffs, it seems like the best metal releases always come out in the winter. See below for my top 3 picks for best metal albums this week.

It’s been a while, but this week had some hip hop releases that got us talking. Here’s the long-awaited continuation of our hip-hop roundup!

Frida and the Filibusters Bid Farewell and Fall Asunder embodies the anarchic energy and radical inclusivity that makes DIY music feel like home. As a live record, listeners are given a front row seat to CIME’s molotov cocktail of noise rock, freak folk, jazz, funk, Latin music, and art punk. While their sound is already explosive in-studio, CIME’s live work is even more intense and captivating. Conga percussion and swells of alto saxophone back Monty Cime’s expressive vocals, her voice strained to its limits in a performance that would draw any porch-dwellers back inside the house to catch this unmissable set.

Where church tradition depicts such moments with choirs and organs, both musical elements with a clean, open sound that soars high above our physical bodies, Saint Elisabeth exhibits a willingness to engage with Jesus and Francis’s shared bodily nature.

From just behind the horizon, however, a slow yet certain march encroaches, bringing with it bulletproof bureaucracy, unsolvable resource shortages, and factory farms.

With an anxious and in-your-face approach, ni downright refuses to fit in any one category as they explore techniques in black metal, avante-garde jazz, math rock, psychedelic prog metal, and more across this 10-track run.

This week, our Inside Noise roundup consists of one standout album all by itself: The Rime of Memory by Panopticon!

As an end result, these typically straightforward words become these abstract masses that convey more of a feeling than an actual concrete meaning.

Haunted Disco employs a variety of genres and styles that all get treated to a distinct lofi aesthetic, making every second of this release almost uncomfortably intimate.

Of course, the loose cannon vocals are this record’s crowning jewel, stringing together shrill screams, throaty yells, defeated speech, and wailing singing to tell a story of a deeply troubled person in the midst of a mental breakdown.

From the dark and twisted to the beautiful and bright, this week brought us an incredible variety of great underground metal albums!

Overall, the record only takes a cautious step forward when that step brings the sound more in tune with the flow of the world, a design philosophy that makes the integration of field samples so seamless as to be nearly unnoticeable.

We got alternative funk. We got outsider pop. Put them all together, and we have one strange dance roundup for you this week.

Pulling elements from industrial music and dark techno, these sounds are deconstructed down to their base elements and reformed to create highly textured beats and an atmosphere of unrestrained chaos.

Gossamer synths and hazy samples set an ephemeral tone, as hypnotic looping tracks paired with washed-out vocals create a sense of disorientation that only immerses the listener deeper into this world.

With angular synth riffs and steady, resonating percussion, the high energy coldwave instrumentation is paired with emotive shouting vocals to deliver the sound of frustrated EBM.

Shadows from the Walls of Death recounts the process of learning that the Victorian era’s beloved ornate wallpapers actually contained debilitating levels of arsenic. Throughout the record, the experimental duo puts us in the shoes of Icarus as he feels his wingtips get grazed by the sun, crystallizing the feeling that at some point everything extraordinary and beautiful eventually starts doing more harm than good.

No matter how much diversity Princess Thailand serves up in their style, each moment still exists mainly to raise our blood pressure and give a voice to our directionless anger.

Each sound gets treated to its own acoustic space, resulting in a mosaic that blends together into the type of strange image that we experience with our senses at all times.

Throughout the record, the expert sound design inherent in the drone metal tradition helps mold the artistic direction, both when the band meditates on sparse chords and when they’re tightly executing whiplash-inducing mathcore segments.