Last year’s inaugural list of the best music from the corners of industrial, noise rock and post-punk was a reminder that though these alternative sounds may be created from different substance on a superficial level, they equally pull darker matter into light. This year’s list continues to discover that, and albeit, its universe is expanding faster than ever.

For example, there are two albums on this list that lean as much into rap and hip-hop influence as they do industrial electronic and noise music. Several of the post-punk and noise rock bands repped here have a spine in hardcore and shoegaze. It was also a welcome return — as well as one much too early goodbye — for the kings and queens of darkness who’ve been paving the way into the void from some time, while a next gen embraces their own esoteric by pulling color into the grayscale as they rear their heads out from existential pitch black. These are the Best Industrial, Noise Rock & Post-Punk Albums of 2024.

Angry Blackmen – The Legend of ABM [Deathbomb Arc]

Mainstream rap and hip-hop sound awfully content falling by the wayside of playing it safe in their production for the sake of gaming streaming lately, and as its alternative underground swirls into a stream-of-conscious art form that’s been consistent but likely to lead to an inevitable crowded field of soundalikes, the arrival of Chicago duo Angry Blackmen and their breakthrough sophomore effort, The Legend of ABM, plays like a much welcome shock to the genre’s body. Armand Hammer prefaced this seachange of energy on last year’s great darker, experimentally-dense turn, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, and like their more jagged predecessors less concerned with a flow finesse, Quentin Branch and Brian Warren bite into their own take on the Black experience by starting new fires. Bars are built on a hard foundation of apocalyptic industrial punk and electronic noise beats, and the listen warps walls and shatters mirrors throughout. At the other end of the end of this world, The Legend of ABM is a story of surviving.

Chat Pile – Cool World [The Flenser]

The world hasn’t changed all that much since Chat Pile reaped a towering bleakness from eternal noise rock damnation, corroded, twisted metal, and a poison tongue of post-hardcore intellect with their 2022 debut, God’s Country. Because what was horrifying back then remains equally — if not, more so — horrifying today, very little about the four-piece’s steady diet of chomping on and regurgitating society needn’t really be tweaked. You could say that with their sophomore effort, Cool World, they’ve found a groove to it all, however, like they’ve really leaned into the role of the biggest, benevolent bestial god at the top of the food chain who enjoys toying with its prey right before shredding its flesh and popping its organs open with its jaw. That added zest in their stalking steps is appreciative, in that they’re doing their most to tenderize a little extra seasoning in with their heaviness, inflict some sharper stabs of pain, dashes of dark, cosmic humor, and mix their nihilistic slurry together with terminally seasick rhythm in their chomping down of pathetic human miscreants that often litter the listen’s scenes and make them pray for mercy.

Cola – The Gloss [Fire Talk]

Cola spent their first album, Deep In View, shaking off some of their habitual remnants — especially that from their previous band, with guitarist Tim Darcy and bassist Ben Stidworthy being members of the cult fav Montreal act, Ought. Moving forward now alongside drummer Evan Cartwright, the trio’s sophomore follow-up, The Gloss, spurts them through changing shapes in their patterns that register as fully their own design, with them leaning into guitar-rock nuances and varying speeds. They’re steering away from simply brandishing a proper post-punk tutelage that respectfully gets the job done, and toward an alternative to it where instinct reclaims surprise in more pronounced tunefulness in their songs’ choruses, run-on brain trails that hinge upon profound observation, and motion swerves that at times, can even be calmingly delicate.

The Cure – Songs of a Lost World [Fiction Records]

In hindsight, finally receiving the first new Cure album in 16 years in which Robert Smith now-infamously introduces it by proclaiming the end of everything song that we sing did in fact — through some cosmic tear — unleash a certain energy into the universe that would definitively lead us there. It’s also an alter offering of a reminder as why you should never write off the scene’s pioneers, even if it’s been 30-plus years since their last widely acclaimed release. Songs of a Lost World is no Pornography nor is it Disintegration, but that’s not what a modernist listener should expect. The album is the sound of these purveyors of the dark taking the generational temperature in modifying their gothic arena-sized ambitions with a production vibe of grandeur, meeting whatever’s left of today’s decaying alternative climate with heavy intentionality. These are epic pop dirges ringing out larger than life in crater-stamping riffs laid over moon-swooning synths, giving Smith carte blanch to paint the stars melancholic of whatever cliché wicked this way may come — his voice being vampirically ageless is a luster to it all, too. Dark matter doesn’t necessarily dim the more time passes, it turns out. It instead goes through a temporal period of creative dormancy before returning and swallowing the world whole all over again.

Ekko Astral – pink balloons [Topshelf Records]

Ekko Astral are unapologetically themselves with pink balloons, their proper introduction to reaching spaces beyond just the D.C. scene with their raptured buzz of noisy, hard-charged post-punk. They’ve arrived at a time when there really isn’t anyone else to challenge that notion either, as their adrenaline-fueled disruption fills a void left all these years after the departure of Priests and whereabouts unknown of Control Top. For Ekko Astral’s Jael Holzman, she, guitarist Liam Hughes, and drummer Miri Tyler are relatable comrades against the capitalist drudge through their shouted squalor. But the impending collapse of America is also a reason to burn through money, party like there is literally is no tomorrow, and to celebrate queerness without fear of whatever dangers await right around the corner. And to anyone or anything who gets in their way? Fuck you.

Force Model – Found Camera [Bug Body]

It feels like another lifetime ago where art-punk and noise rock used to be weirder for the better, and not only that, but it was the norm. The Blood Brothers. The Locust. Pretty Girls Make Graves. At the Drive-In. These Arms Are Snakes. Just to name a few. Everyone plays it so safe nowadays even when they serve up something solid. Force Model aren’t falling in line with any of that, as they’re a reminder of that rare thrill in letting your full freak flag fly in both the studio and the pit you unleash your outsider inhibitions in. With the Los Angeles trio’s debut album, Found Camera, there’s a snapshot of some ghosts from those past scenes haunting the energy of their flash footage while also filtering in more vivid portraits of ’90s noise intellectualism and their locale’s overheated DIY punk spaces. Vocalist Edie Vogel — hellbent on embracing darker turns of emotion in pure joy — is a natural master of the chaos they reap where spiral guitars swoop around hook-driven choruses, and it’s never an easy fete to bring their sound to a complete resting point.

High Vis – Guided Tour [Dais Records]

Where many of their peers in the adjacent hardcore scene confront societal decay at the hands of oligarchical villains by making full use of an aggressive sound and fury, High Vis seek out the path of the life-affirming enlightenment in their working class anthem without sanding down any of the coarse edges needed to survive whatever trials may present themselves. Guided Tour — the band’s third album and follow-up to their 2022 sophomore breakthrough, Blending — glides through them with more stealth maneuvering compared to its hardened predecessor. The five-piece continues to converge a distinct style that mediates a post-hardcore rubble with an affliction for early Brit pop, with its tone gleaming brighter through the greyscale in the silvered shimmer of bent wave guitarwork and a collective vehicle of rhythmic versatility. They’re packing hooks with muscular fists full of rock when drudging through heavier political overcasts and depressive emotional states while pushing off the weight to make way for self-manifested wins over them. The duality is symbiotic, presented as both a song for rebellion and championing of the voiceless under the infinite echo shout-alongs trailing off Graham Sayles’ sandpaper tongue.

Marbled Eye – Read the Air [Summer Shade / Digital Regress]

Read the Air is an album that defies what modern post-punk music prefers to do in staying indoors and hiding itself in the dark by instead opting for open sky views and oxygen, although the dredges of post-capitalist existentialism are omnipresent in sucking the life out of you. Still, hearing Marbled Eye live to play another day is a fete in itself, seeing that the past five years since their debut album, the Bay Area punks have had to put aspirations on hold thanks to contending with a global pandemic, losing their bassist and in-house recording engineer along the way, and figuring out next steps with everything else life has to throw at you while you’re merely trying to survive. Time, as it turns out, has been on their side, with the four-piece in their most incisive craft etching in its details on every malaise through a bright, guitar-driven morbidity that further lends heat to the scenery instead of building more drab, cold walls. 

Oneida – Expensive Air [Joyful Noise Recordings]

Oneida are never the same band twice, and drawing boundaries around their sound is impossible considering they’ve continued to rupture new facets through the worlds of psychedelics, noise rock, krautrock, no wave, and electronic in an ever-shape-shifting way since ’97. And yet, 17 albums in with their latest, the late-career recharge, Expensive Air, Kid Millions, Bobby Matador, Hanoi Jane, Shahin Motia, and Barry London reintroduce themselves in an umpteenth new lease on life that states a great case as to why the next gen of alternative listeners should bother digging into their form of rock sculpting that’s unorthodox even by experimental standards. This release makes for a perfect rediscovery point just as well for older heads. It’s compact and grounded — dare I say one of their most “traditional”-sounding efforts — opting to pummel dirt and visceral grit deep into sloshing synths, first cohesively in its early stages until they then remind you never to get too comfortable in those surroundings.

Kim Gordon – The Collective [Matador Records]

That Kim Gordon has made a noisy experimental electronic album leaps ahead of the year 2024 at the age of 70 with The Collective shouldn’t surprise anyone. She’s had her pulse on shaping the future since forever, but coming out of 2019’s astounding solo debut, No Home Record, perhaps there’s an even more jaw-dropping audacity of the multi-threat artist icon to further fracture her sound away from the many past lives on its follow-up. Blistering riffs and blown-out amps still tear through its fabric, but really, it’s Gordon’s endless pursuit of reinvention through her art that constitutes the one constant fingerprint in her sonic influence. Her lens on grotesque observations of pop culture gives listeners much to consider as she flips into selfie mode to embark on a deconstruction of digital self-currency. Somehow, it’s a statement on the loss of something wholly of the individual, yet altogether very Kim Gordon.

Pharmakon – Maggot Mass [Sacred Bones Records]

“As rotting matter / I will make / A good mother / Wet nurse to carrion feeders / Suckling from my wither and warp,” Margaret Chardiet’s voice throbs and gristles in the opening moments of “WITHER AND WARP””, a standout from her fifth full-length album endeavor into the bowels of the existentialism under the moniker Pharmakon. Maggot Mass is not exactly the first time we’ve heard the New York City-based noise artist seeing her body as a vessel of decay, but in this lurching post-mortem decomposition through its own heavy decay of industrial and noise, Chardiet is inviting us all to sit with ourselves and see our limbs as an extension to the natural world’s ecosystem. Roots unfold and plantforms consume us whole once we kill the ego of our own importance on this earth. The ground ultimately takes us back into its soil, and turns everywhere we thought we were into mineral for its own repair.

Powerwasher – Everyone Laughs [Strange View Records]

A name like Powerwasher is one of a band who should be leaving a lasting mark on the listener. Maybe that target wasn’t hit in the initial foundation of anxious post-punk with a corrosive post-hardcore exterior heard throughout the Baltimore four-piece’s first extended play in 2020’s The Power of Positive Washing, but four years later, it’s a different conversation. Their debut album, Everyone Laughs, ensures the surge of growth is like experiencing a blast to your skull. The corners of underground rock which Powerwasher now move through are varied in edge. Post-punk looms omnipresent, acerbically so at that, with more hooks loaded into its jabs, but so does an element of unpredictability feeding off the vocalist’s teetering mental pace. There’s a dotted line between Shellac, Life Without Buildings, and Militarie Gun being designed somewhere in it all. In essence, they’re all part of the same method of observation in turning the everyday existential into their own provocation of a noisy mind made fun.

Porcelain – Porcelain [Portrayal of Guilt Records]

Featuring members well-versed throughout other projects within the Austin music scene, Porcelain pile on a nuanced approach to heavy rock contortion that sees its roots turning inside post-hardcore, noise, and indie rock studies of the underground while never quite settling into one distinct corner of this scorched earth. That’s a fitting place for their sound to meander, as unease is rife throughout their sound on their self-titled debut album. Vocalist and guitarist Steven Pike oft peaks through shadowed grooves of rhythm before he alongside guitarist Ryan Fitzgibbon, bassist Jordan Emmert, and drummer Eli Deitz collectively explode the view of the world. Creatively and conceptually, Porcelain are a reflection of societal spoils tempered and blistered throughout. That it’s released and co-signed by the label run by Austin underground scene torchbearers, Portrayal of Guilt, only endorses their otherness in the rock world and leaves you with anticipation as to how they will further build their own.

Russian Baths – Mirror [Good Eye Records]

Beginning with the promising 2019 debut LP, Deep Fake, Russian Baths have professed an understanding of what they want their stylistic aesthetic to present through an academia of noise rock, post-hardcore, post-punk, and shoegaze influences without explicitly committing to one single corner. Add in a touch of darkness that taps into human fear, they sound like a reality-based horror film soundtrack sequencing everything from bouts of imposter syndrome, sleep paralysis, serial killers, and 1984 encroaching closer and closer upon us. Their sophomore effort, Mirror, heads deeper into Luke Koz and Jess Rees’ ongoing exploration of the psyche through sound, rendering it as one less greyscale in its shadows than found on their debut. Their songwriting remains distinctly devotional not only to NYC’s past experimental art rock scene, but music held to a higher brow of standard in the manner its recorded and mixed. Louder bursts of noise rock balance out meandering, dreamier comedowns purposed in atypical arrangements. For those who prefer their rock alternatives with equal risk and distortion as much as there is a clear reflection in its sound, Russian Baths’ Mirror sees you in the dark.

Shellac – To All Trains [Touch and Go Records]

In true anti-industry fashion, we didn’t get any advance promo singles or any proper rollout beyond a release date leading up to Shellac’s sixth studio album, To All Trains, but then again, Steve Albini didn’t give us a head’s up that he’d be dying a week before it’s release either. There’s some dark, twisted humor and cosmic irony in the way everything has played out. Still, To All Trains being he, bassist Bob Weston, and drummer Todd Trainer conclusive thought could not have been written as a better epitaph if this was the way the universe decided to have its last laugh with you. The album leave us with a last rites of everything that the Chicago noiseniks has been, compacted into a 28-minute-long onslaught of lean, caustic noise-rock accentuated by Albini’s sardonic tongue and arguably the band’s hookiest retreat into the perils of living yet. For longtime listeners, To All Trains hears Shellac departing at the top of their game, and for the uninitiated, it delivers you to an quintessential entry point of one of alternative rock’s most uncanny forces from the belly of the damned.

So Pitted – Cloned [Youth Riot Records]

It took eights years, some failure (and maybe some Failure?) in order for So Pitted to come into their own with their long-overdue sophomore album, Cloned. Four brains now think up the decay of So Pitted for one thing, with Jagger Beato and Lauren Rodriguez joining original members Nathan Rodriguez and Liam Downey. The latter two switch off on lead vocals now as well, with modulations to them upping their mutant factor in their post-nuclear noise rock. Mixed in with ample sludge by the hand of early grunge scene pioneer Tad Doyle, the dozen tracks making up Cloned go to a warranted oversaturation point in handing it to humankind for all of its fuck ups and self-made disasters. Hard-loaded riffs and bass lines fill deep voids into whatever epicenter drums drill into Earth’s rotting core when highlighting menacing inspiration or fast toxic chugs. A rash of squelching synthesizers running pushes So Pitted’s feral esotericism further, while absurdism gets weaponized in tongue-in-cheek fashion. It’s an ugly mirror of a world that’s not getting any better. It’s wild because our current chaos necessitates it. It’s caustic because the acid tongue burns like so. More than anything, Cloned devours anything resembling any of those things as a means of evolving to survive.

Uniform – American Standard [Sacred Bones Records]

American Standard, stands — violently and towering — alone from the rest of Uniform’s world-burning narratives before it. Definitively the Brooklyn band’s most personally exorcised demon to date, the listen’s four epic-length chapters pore deep into frontman Michael Berdan’s lifetime battle with bulimia nervosa, ensuing bouts with mental health, self-hate, the collateral damage effects to relationships, and ultimately fighting to reconfigure the mind and body connection against a monster of an illness that never truly dies. Though fully exposed by his vulnerabilities, Berdan himself is a bastion and a beacon of reignited intensity in this visceral performance doubled down on a huge scaled up soundscape. The Molotov sound Uniform have become defined by is godlike in its powerful grip, tearing not through brick buildings or cop car windshields, but rather flesh and muscle, festering an ugly existence that can only be exacted through a brave admission worn on the face of a different kind of terrorizing human experience: the kind that lives inside of you.