See do you get the joke the joke is that this is a mix of post-rock and metal and you could maybe call the genre "post-metal" but also I am literally posting metal. Anyway
- "Annihilvore", Behold… The Arctopus
My favorite track on my favorite metal album. Behold The Arctopus makes instrumental metal with the kind of post-rock musical rule-breaking I don't have the vocabulary to describe so I always fall back on "it's like jazz, I guess?" (or for the stuff after this album, "it's like twelve-tone?"). This one epic track is a rocking mix of the mind-expanding, the accessible, and the "damn, that's just a really good single sound".
- "My Neighbor Satan", Boris
Boris is a Japanese rock band with an epic and wildly genre-spanning discography spanning metal, pop-rock, and straight-up noise. This is a really fun track where they take what could have been a simple metal song, compress the metal bits until they're flat and turn the volume way down, and layer strange currents of pop and funk on top. Like peacefully floating on the bubble-bath frothy surface atop a dark noise ocean, occasionally beset by stray waves
- "Idols and Anchors", Parkway Drive
I don't have an interesting story about this one. It isn't a rarity or anything. It's just a song I heard on the radio once and liked, from the genre I can never remember if it's called "black metal" or "death metal". The utter sincerity with which this band with a goofy name singing goofy cookie monster vocals goes about its very serious business has always been really charming to me. Good blastbeats.
- "Super Fxx", Tera Melos
Tera Melos is a really interesting band from the Sacramento post-rock clique who started off making what I'd describe as metal played by free-jazz rules, and gradually transitioned to very loud surf rock with unusual chord progressions. Their last album ended with a weird, memorable blast of a song named "Super Fx", and then a single had a b-side named "Super Fxx" which I'd describe as the same song but with different words and chords.
This 15-minute piece, performed live on NYU's college radio station in 2002, is my favorite Earth recording, and probably their most complicated to find a copy of, appearing only as b-sides on three separate out-of-print releases (and in abbreviated form on an ATP festival mixtape by, of all people, Autechre). It keeps getting deleted off YouTube. Probably my favorite single metal song.
"Dissolution III" is a series of pendulous guitar distortions, layering deeper and deeper on themselves. It's impossible to rationally comprehend as music, and best experienced as a form of ritual. Listen to it as loudly as you can stand.