Among scenes of the moment, the Texas thrash universe has big-banged a number of chugging planets over the past few years, or at least popularized them in Power Trip’s wake. Similar to that Dallas standby, Judiciary operates a crank-engine riff machine without need for the noodling of yesteryear’s genre icons. The album cover tells the story: imagery more directly political than that of Metallica, and more violent than that of Megadeth. And yet Slayer it is not; while that band too jumped from the hardcore scene, groups like Judiciary and Enslaved have maintained a more tangible string to those punk roots, if they ever really left.

I recently read a worthwhile summary of drone rock as “maximal repetition, minimal deviation.” Tokyo’s Legion of Andromeda certainly qualifies, plodding ahead with crushing riffage for seven minutes at at time, kept in order by consistent blast beats and cymbals, certainly with no deviation into such maximalist songwriting as a verse-chorus-verse setup. Structurally streamlined, societal deviation comes in heavy doses from the band’s sheer existence, a death march demanding patience even beyond that of traditional death metal fans, among the most deviant already. A soundtrack for meditating on dire topics.

The debut album from the new act of Thomas Gabriel Fischer — Hellhammer, Celtic Frost and, heck, even his industrial project Apollyon Sun wasn’t bad — surprised no one when it absolutely crushed. For one, Fischer’s most enduring band, Frost, had just pulled apart in a less-than-concordant manner. The emphasis on “just” left Fischer plenty of reason to take that band’s baton and keep running with it, pushing the emotional dial toward its most angry music, and keeping it there. The lineup changed, and Fischer’s iconic role as frontman and songwriter remained. Heaviness and hellfire mark the first great metal album of the ’10s.

Simultaneously among both the easiest and toughest listens to be found on this list; while Kristin Hayter’s operatic vocals and arrangements for this concept album can be quite pretty, even beyond the gothic, both can be equally dissonant and cruel. More cruel, and what ultimately makes this a punishing piece, is the domestic abuse-driven narrative of the concept, a plot made more uncomfortable by its basis in fact. Hayter (the sole member of Lingua Ignota) rolls back and forth between hatred for both her tormentor and herself, pulling the music along with her. The only thing lacking in this feature is sympathy, except our own.

Torche has kept the flame burning for long enough but that fire has changed colors a number of times, with attitudes and approaches leaving fans of the heavier stuff curious whether the group aimed to be an accessible metal act, a less-accessible hard rock act, or an unfortunate comedy-rock hybrid that would never quite reach Clutch’s popularity. The question remains unanswered to this day. The 2015 LP Restarter offered hope for fans of both option A and option B (we don’t particularly have a preference, so long as it leaves a good taste in our ears), with the sound ranging from some of the band’s heaviest hitters to shoegaze hums..

Looking back at the previous three Horrendous LPs, the three that best represent the band’s current direction, a theme emerges: humanoid forms, either being torn apart or rearranged in slightly disfigured humanoid manner. That humanoid may be the band’s old-fashioned death metal roots, pushed in ever-more progressive forms as the aforementioned albums emerged. Anareta sits as the happiest medium between them; at points an HM-2 pedal away from being Americanized Swedish death metal but the ribs of that body are swelling just uncomfortably enough with bigger ideas, both compositionally and lyrically.