Not quite my tempo

21. Converge, YOU FAIL ME: "This. Is. For the Heart. Still. Beating." Some days, I think this might actually be Converge's finest hour or at least their most balanced. The hairpin swerves from feral to seething to moody and back again give you the best kind of whiplash. youtu.be/aBinlcawp4U?...

22. Krallice, DIMENSIONAL BLEEDTHROUGH: Released later than anything else on this list, the sophomore album from Krallice still sounds futuristic: an astonishing wall of atonal splendor, like the 2001 monolith signal with a beat. youtu.be/WhVy1EMG6MY?...

23. Queens of the Stone Age, SONGS FOR THE DEAF: Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Which is wild in this case, because the parts are the drummer of Nirvana, the lead singer of Screaming Trees, and two members of Kyuss. youtu.be/eFg1AGuAGYA?...

24. Pig Destroyer, PROWLER IN THE YARD: Unnerving spoken-word bookends and disturbing liner-note murder poetry frames the ape-shit cacophony as a stream of homicidal consciousness. Genuinely gets under your skin if you let it. youtu.be/6eOvDH8bYmo?...

I really do!

I'm not a full-time critic anymore, alas. Still try to write about movies when I can, though. Including on Letterboxd.

25. Deftones, WHITE PONY: My hot take is that however much Chino resents it, "Back to School" rips and the album is better for it. That said, the rap-metal melange is about the only song that dates this Gen X classic (and newly minted Gen Z fave): youtu.be/iEtJQmv7-LY?...

MARTY SUPREME, by the way, is terrific.