As every year, we arrived at the moment that we put the musical taste of every member of our team together to compile what we want to put forward as some of the best releases of the year. It gives us a list with a nice diversity in genres and bands (from “big ones” to “underground”) and hopefully covers most of the releases that are worth spending some time on listening to. So without further-ado… here is GRIMM’s list of albums of the year 2018!

1. Behemoth – I Loved You At Your Darkest

Even though in the period leading up to the actual release of the new Behemoth album there were a lot of complaints and dismissals, once we got to hear the full album it became quite clear that this was another big step in the band’s career. Having started as a very underground black metal band, moving towards more blackened death metal and gradually making that music a bit more accessible in a way, has led to a wide range of reactions. For some people Behemoth is one of the greatest extreme metal bands and for others they’re the laughing stock every time they pop up in the news. One thing is sure, whatever Nergal and his buddies do, there will be a lot of talking about it.

On I Loved You at Your Darkest they continue a little bit in the same direction as The Satanist, but add enough elements to make their music sound fresh, exciting and new. You can catch a few throwbacks to their old black metal style and even pick up a few unexpectedly progressive parts like i.e. Bartzabel that bolsters repetitive but very progressive music for Behemoth‘s usual style. Clearly they did something right as Behemoth continued popping up in the personal lists of our editorial team…

Now that’s over, we’d like to set our sights on an exciting 2019 with releases to look forward to from both big and underground bands! We’d like to thank everyone who supported us and send our love to all the bands, partners and readers that we were in touch with the past year!