Compared to many other years in the heavy metal history books, 2005 was disproportionately stacked with top-shelf releases. Opeth’s Ghost Reveries, Trivium’s Ascendancy, Bullet For My Valentine’s The Poison and Avenged Sevenfold’s City Of Evil are just the tip of the iceberg when you’re listing the excellent albums that dropped 20 years back. However, with so much mainstream-baiting riffery coming out, that inevitably means some quality getting cast to the wayside.
Below, Metal Hammer has delved beneath the top of the pile and found the 2005 metal albums that should have stood out more. Whether you love prog, deathcore or even nu metal, there’s probably something in this pile that will whet your appetite. Prepare to scratch your head over these bands’ not-chart-topping status as much as we do.
Cave In – Perfect Pitch Black
Cave In’s greatest strength is also their greatest weakness. Across their 30-year career, the New Englanders have refused to settle in one genre for more than one album at a time, exciting their ardent fans but meaning they never found a ‘scene’ to call home. Case in point: the fiercely underrated Perfect Pitch Black.
Released after their controversial radio rock dalliance Antenna, the band’s fourth album shifted to a sludge/metalcore gear that perplexed new converts, many of whom had just seen them tour supporting Foo Fighters. At the same time, its low-key release via indie label Hydra Head meant a lot of dejected metalheads didn’t get the chance to come back. Taken on its own merits, though, Perfect… was a wonderfully schizophrenic zig-zag between might and melody, worthy of far, far better than it received.
Chimaira – Chimaira
Chimaira claim they invented the phrase ‘New Wave Of American Heavy Metal’, having stuck it on the back of a t-shirt in 2002. Whether they did or didn’t coin the catch-all for the movement that hurried nu metal onto its life-support machine, what’s undisputed is that they were one of its unsung vanguards. 2003’s The Impossibility Of Reason combined thrash, hardcore and groove metal into an all-adrenaline cocktail that affirmed the changing of heavy music’s guard, even if the sales it drummed up weren’t magnificent.
Commercially, this self-titled follow-up leapt off the back of its predecessor but still didn’t get as high as deserved, reaching number 74 on the US charts. Nonetheless, the brash likes of Salvation and Left For Dead should be shouted about, flaunting more melodic nuance than anything the band had done before without sacrificing their guttural force.
Dark Tranquillity – Character
Conventional wisdom is that the heyday of melodeath was the 1990s, and many, many albums back that standpoint up. Carcass’ Heartwork, Death’s Symbolic, In Flames’ The Jester Race, At The Gates’ Slaughter Of The Soul and others reshaped the metal landscape as quickly and violently as a nuclear bomb. Dark Tranquillity were part of this seismic wave thanks to 1995 standout The Gallery, but the Gothenburg bunch were still nowhere near their peak.
Where other melodeath frontrunners changed genre or split up, Mikael Stanne and co. stayed the course. After incorporating some gothic atmosphere on 1999’s Projector, they entered a golden age with the ferocious yet catchy Damage Done, then continued apace with Character. Unfortunately, album seven’s songs wowed fans but didn’t rock metal’s mainstream, next-generation aggressors like Killswitch Engage having already taken over.
Despised Icon – The Healing Process
If you ask most metalheads which albums launched deathcore, they’ll most likely call you a poser and spit in your face. If you ask others, they’ll say Job For A Cowboy’s Doom started it and Suicide Silence’s The Cleansing popularised it. However, there needs to be space in that conversation for Despised Icon.
On their 2002 debut album Consumed By Your Poison, the Canadians began to imbue brutal death metal with something… simpler. After signing with Century Media, they got even more to-the-point, loading The Healing Process with the ball-busting breakdowns and squealing pinch harmonics of early metalcore. It’s a sound that came to define the North American metal scene in the late 2000s, but Healing… didn’t chart in any territory and these progenitors remain underground darlings, suggesting they were too ahead of the curve for their own good. What a shame.
God Forbid – IV: Constitution Of Treason
Like the above-mentioned Chimaira, God Forbid were New Wave Of American Heavy Metal fixtures worthy of becoming superstars. Playing an all-adrenaline fusion of metalcore, melodeath, groove metal and thrash, the New Jerseyans started off well, inking a deal with major label Century Media ahead of 2001 album Determination. They then toured with Lamb Of God and Shadows Fall before securing a slot on Ozzfest.
Why IV: Constitution Of Treason didn’t blow the doors off modern metal remains a mystery, then. It may have been a concept album – telling the story of an apocalypse, a society that rises from the ashes, and another apocalypse – but there was no proggy fannying about. Instead, these were 10 laser-focussed, pulse-pounding tracks, and each one screamed that God Forbid should have been revered in the 21st century’s heavy metal landscape.
Hate Eternal – I, Monarch
There’s a contradiction at the heart of Hate Eternal. Their songs consist of singer/guitarist/founder Erik Rutan laying down the most primal, caveman-level riffs he possibly can, yet they’re framed by nonstop, noisy and madly technical drum patterns. Third album I, Monarch – which has Derek Roddy of Nile, Malevolent Creation and Today Is The Day fame raging behind the kit – is possibly the best display of that brutal contrast.
Behold Judas, a whirlwind of tech-death that never gets too intricate for its own good, and the title track are among the standout songs from the band’s career. Yet, for whatever reason, they rarely get hoisted among the death metal elite. Is it because they started when the Florida scene was past its peak? Or perhaps it’s because Rutan joining and producing Cannibal Corpse slowed their momentum? Either way, this maelstrom of ugliness needs to barrage more ears.
Karnivool – Themata
If nu metal started fading away in the early 2000s, then Karnivool were its dying gasp. The Australians were arguably the last visionary band to form during the genre’s heyday, their debut Themata taking just as much from prog and alt-metal as it did from Korn and Deftones. That mix resulted in unique anthems like the title track, which layered technical lead guitar lines on top of a swaggering rhythm section.
The album was something of a regional hit, reaching number 41 on the charts down under, and the band amassed an international fanbase as they gradually shed their nu metal skin. Still, with the melodic craft and innovation present throughout Themata, Karnivool should have become fast arena stars. Only now, with a headline slot at the UK’s 10,000-capacity Arctangent festival set for this summer, do they seem to finally be getting their rightful flowers.
Nevermore – This Godless Endeavor
Nevermore are frequently described as one of the most underrated US metal bands ever, and correctly so. Having formed in Seattle at the height of the city’s love affair with grunge, their career was always going to be an uphill battle, made harder by their refusal to neatly fit into one subgenre. On such excellent albums as This Godless Endeavor, the quartet condensed prog, power metal and thrash into one exciting package that reaped cult acclaim.
After Godless…, Nevermore toured with heavy metal heroes as wide-ranging as Megadeth, Disturbed and In Flames, but still never found their ‘scene’. A follow-up album, The Obsidian Conspiracy, took five years to materialise and charted at a meagre 132 in America, then founding singer Warrel Dane passed away in 2017. With any luck, the reunion slated to take place this year will earn this band some of the recognition they were robbed of first time round.
Soilwork – Stabbing The Drama
They don’t get mentioned as frequently as In Flames, At The Gates and Dark Tranquillity, but Soilwork are another gang of melodeath masters without which the New Wave Of American Heavy Metal would not have taken shape. Initially lightning fast with razor-sharp guitars, the Helsingborg boys adapted to the 2000s using hellish grooves and radio-baiting singalongs. And both those things strike at full power on Stabbing The Drama.
Where many a fan would point to Stabbing… as Soilwork’s master-stroke (the title track and fellow single Nerve being exhibits A and B in their case), it didn’t strike the same chord with outside ears. It reached number 52 on the German album charts but that’s it, possibly a result of such students as Killswitch Engage and All That Remains growing into their own and saturating the market.
Thrice – Vheissu
Vheissu is what happens when hardcore kids escape captivity. Through the early 2000s, Thrice became leaders of the post-hardcore movement, delivering angsty melodies as well as barrages of technical riffs that belied their youth. Then, with this major-label effort (the follow-up to 2003 fan favourite The Artist In The Ambulance), they made the leap from mastering one genre to wielding several at a time.
The Californians’ fourth album was a moment of self-actualisation comparable to Radiohead’s OK Computer and the Beatles’ Revolver. Cues from prog, metal, post-rock, emo and even jazz were pulled into a cohesive whole, then kept from falling apart by the sheer emotion of the songwriting and Dustin Kensrue’s vocals. From the chant-along might of Image Of The Invisible to the closing, climactic Red Sky, Vheissu was an imaginative opus that should have stunned and bedazzled the mainstream.
