The year in music is here, that thing where your music app gives you charts so you can show off how cool your music tastes are to your friends or just strangers on the internet. And I’m not immune to this showing off! Let’s take a look at what I listened to in 2024 in some more detail. And yes, I use Apple Music not Spotify. I know.
Top Artists
I do really like Combichrist, but I think their new album CMBCRST having a lot of tracks on it may have skewed my listening minutes. I’ll talk about that in my top albums, below. I did also go to see Combichrist in the Camden Underworld in August and whenever I see a band I usually spend a chunk of the week before listening to them, and some time afterwards. I’m surprised AC/DC didn’t make the top 5 as I listened to them a lot before and after seeing them at Wembley in July.
Magnavolt and Suicide Commando aren’t too much of a surprise as I really like some of their albums and I have a lot of their tracks in my two playlists I listen to most regularly – my synthwave playlist and my industrial gothic playlist. These playlists are around 75 hours of music combined and I have them on all the time.
If this blog post is somehow making you want to listen to some of this music and you want a good Magnavolt album, I insist you listen to Seducer (2021) which will make you feel like you are in a sleazy cyberpunk club where the strippers are androids. For Suicide Commando there are loads of albums to recommend but I’d suggest Implements of Hell (2010) (or the remix album) which is pretty full on but is almost exactly what I want from horror tinged industrial music.
Acryl Madness are also excellent and I remember listening to them a lot at the beginning of the year. Check the top albums list below for a recommendation.
The only surprise for me is Front Line Assembly at number 3. I absolutely love them but don’t remember listening to them as much, but Caustic Grip is an incredible album and it has crept into the top 5 below so I must have listened to them a fair bit.
Conspicuous by their absence are Nine Inch Nails, normally a mainstay on my top 5 but they actually came in 6th this year. They should’ve gone on tour in the UK or released some new music or something to make me listen more and I’m sure they will be gutted to have not made my top 5 when they get nominated for another Oscar or something (they’ve already won two!)
Top Songs
I feel both surprised and unsurprised at Bang Bang Bang by Suicide Commando being my top song. A great industrial song with a very catchy hook. I know I listened to it a lot, but I didn’t think I listened to it that much!
The Rain Within Her Hands by Bella Morte being 2nd isn’t too much of a surpise, as Apple Music’s algorithm seems determined to play that song when I put my Industrial Gothic playlist on shuffle, to the point I got a bit sick of it. It is a gothic post punk style song, and a good song, I just heard it a bit too much.
I’d probably say the same about Wolfen (Her Pack) by Die Krupps song. In 25 hours of songs in that same playlist, Apple Music picked out those two a lot. Is it because they were new to the playlist? The mysteries of the great algorithm will always elude us. It is a good song and reminds me of my favourite Doe Krupps album from my teenage years – Paradise Now (1997) – which is annoyingly not available for streaming anywhere and I got rid of the CD when I ‘went digital’ a long time ago. If I did have it, I don’t have a CD player to play it on. Even the Xbox doesn’t have a disc drive.
Both of the Acryl Madness songs are complete bangers and both on the album below, so that’s all I have to say about them right now.
Top Albums
As I mentioned above, CMBCRST (2024), the new album by Combichrist, has a lot of tracks on it. 23 to be precise. 14 are standard tracks and I assume the other 9 were a bonus disc or something (it’s hard to tell on Apple Music) and it comes in at 1 hour and 40 minutes long which is why, if you are counting by minutes as Apple Music does, CMBCRST is my most listened to album this year. Despite all of this qualification, I must tell you that it is indeed a good album. By their own admission Combichrist are more metal than industrial nowadays, but this album is a pretty good combination of the two.
The number 3 album – Midnight Fight Express Pt.1 (2022) by Noisecream – suffers from a similar predicament. It is a great soundtrack to an equally great video game but at 22 tracks and over an hour long, it’s very easy for it to creep into an Apple Music top 5. Nethertheless, it’s a cracking album and definitely good music if you are going for a run or trying to get somewhere in a hurry (much like the game but without the murder). Pumping, fast paced tunes.
Back up to number 2 and Kaiden (2021) by Acryl Madness really is an excellent album. A bit of an assault on the senses, it’s a hard combination of heavy synthwave that drifts into the industrial at times and very much worth a listen.
At number 4, Total Nihlism by Nitronoise is an album from 2012 that I only discovered recently because listening to music online and getting suggestions from an algorithm based on your listening can make your taste in music seem very old indeed. Very aggressive techno tinged industrial in a similar vein to Combichrist, it’s a great album that I know nothing about, nor the band, but I’ve been very happy to keep listening to it.
Caustic Grip (1990) is one of my favourite albums of all time. A masterclass in industrial music and in my opinion the best Front Line Assembly album. I’ve listened to it fairly regularly for years.
Matt Hart 