50 Best Hard Rock & Heavy Metal Albums Of 2017

Thanks to its sumptuous blend of incendiary blast beats, unhallowed growls, orchestral violin, acoustic loveliness, weighty melodies and death metal riffing, Urn is one of 2017’s undisputed metal triumphs.

It may be more polished and less frenetic than the previous albums from Australia’s extreme metal titans Ne Obliviscaris, but what the disc lacks in danger, it more than makes up for in intelligent song-writing and diversity. The classical inclinations of violinist Tim Charles add an air of grandeur to Urn that few extreme metal bands have been to come anywhere close to this year, the maven’s clean vocals adding in a hard rock edge that both fits with and opposes the melo-death leads of Benjamin Baret.

Session bassist Robin Zielhorst (best known for his work in the similarly progressive and heavy Cynic) makes his Ne Obliviscaris debut on Urn, his quick and technical work on the four strings surprisingly high in the mix, finally giving the bass the true spotlight it has long deserved from extreme metal, but rarely received.

Urn is, much like the rest of its creators’ discography, high art. Its complexity and adventurousness know no bounds, while Ne Obliviscaris also find themselves able to balance their continued desire for evolution with such notions and hooks and melodies.

There really isn’t anything to not like here.