Chthonic hallucinations, sci-fi dystopia and devastating doom: End-of-year highlights from the underground

Merry fucking Christmas. You’re cold, everywhere is a nightmare of festive capitalism and tat, you’re going to try to fill the disconnected void between how the M&S ad says you should feel with too much booze and rich food, then wonder why you feel lousy for three weeks. There hasn’t been a good new seasonal song for over 20 years. And there’s still weeks to go until the big day.

To cheer you – and ourselves – up, we once again reach into the big stocking that is the underground, and pull out the best new stuff, to help you chase away the festive fuckery.

First up, the second full-length from mysterious London-based duo QRIXKUOR, the nightmarish The Womb Of The World. The band themselves describe it as “the echo of time tearing itself apart, a dauntless deliverance of dissolution.” They’ve managed this through a mash-up of death and black metal, finding the most dissonant parts to make it all sound like a Chthonic hallucination. Then they’ve added jarring strings, so that the already disorientating trip is punctuated by chilling stabs like something from the psycho soundtrack, or as if you’re actually tumbling into madness on Slithering Serendipity, where descending, scraping violins circle maddeningly around you. And as if it needed to be any more abrasive, Adorior singer Jaded Lungs pops up on And You Shall Know Perdition As Your Shrine… A brilliantly realised, intelligently crafted work of unsettling musical discomfort.

Lychgate walk a similar line on Precipice. Although rather than murk, there’s an equally disturbing, high-minded clarity and moments of subtlety to mainman James Young’s warped vision. It’s befitting for a record thematically based around E. M. Forster's sci-fi novella The Machine Stops – the not-at-all relatable story of a world in which humans are forced to live underground to escape inhospitable surface conditions, and where machines are used to do most of the entertaining, thinking, communicating and, to their doom, decision making. Working from a dark death metal base, there’s layers and layers going on, occasionally dizzying if you try to focus properly on it. Mausoleum Of Steel blossoms from blasting aggression and harrowing screams from Esoteric mainman Greg Chandler, into multi-layered vocals, via discordant guitar melodies, odd timings and a sense of musical superiority that gives the whole thing an overbearing quality. On The Meeting Of Orion And Scorpio they take a more chill tack, with minor key piano leading the way, before Opeth-ish guitars twist their way in, while the 10-minute Hive Of Parasites goes from appropriately twitchy heaviness into something bordering on jazz. You might make comparison to Negative Plane or Blood Incantation at times, but Lychgate are very much their own passage to the underworld here.

While we’re staring into the void: Voidceremony are back with their third album, Abditum. The California machine deal in death metal oddness, coming on like Morbid Angel staring into a cracked mirror, with a nice line in unwieldy timings and strange melodies over their churning cauldron of twisted noise. Prog fans will get a kick out of the instrumental sections, like the solos in Silence Which Ceases All Minds, which are basically death metal maniacs making gooey eyes at Rush. Then the rhythms go all weird and actually have a dizzying, vertigo effect.

Austria’s Hagzissa seem like an odd bunch. Having been missing, presumed gone, for the past six years, they’re back with a new EP, Revelry Of A Maltreated Jade, and a peculiar take on black metal. They’re wearing cloaks, chains and furs in their pics, but with a Bowie-ish swag. Just as powered by ’80s British punk as old school BM, it’s an intriguing blast of scrappy, street-level noise that nevertheless has the wit and smarts of a particularly good bar-stool philosopher. The start of A Single Feather Coiling is all Killing Joke-y downstrokes and straight-four beats, and Kingley Daughters Of The Alder-Wisp packs a middle-fingered riff, but the way it’s welded to a dark diabolism and sinister atmosphere gives them a satisfyingly weird overall vibe. It’s no shock when, after all this, Sic Transit (Gloria Mundi) ends this EP with glockenspiel, jaunty piano, and a feeling you’re caught in a 1970s Italian horror freak fest.

If you want weirdos, though, you could do a lot worse than Master’s Hammer. The Czech black metal legends have often worn their eccentricities on the outside, but on Maldorör Disco, they return from a seven-year slumber many assumed was a permanent thing with an album that lives up to its un-black metal title. Far from the chilling, folk-edged darkness of their essential 1991 Ritual debut, keyboards, big beats and arpeggiation abounds here, glittering up the riffs that leaves them sounding like a more raucous and ragged version of Rammstein. Oddly, it slots very well into their canon, albeit as a shagadelic curio. It is, however, a very enjoyable one as well.

Kerrang! first encountered anonymous collective Codex Serafini at ArcTanGent last year, where their brightly-coloured robes, Hawkwind-like psych-soul and enthusiasm for saxophones helped finish off what was left of our brains. On Mother, Give Your Children Sanity, they’re doing brilliantly far-out music that’s perfect for both frenziedly dancing or vibing out on a bean bag to. The basslines of opener Pitying Them For Giving Life and the lengthy, jammed second half of Keep The Mask That Fits are perfectly languid things, slithering around like a snake through your mind, while the robust beat that drives Alpha Sista With The Heel To The Mouth First could possess your feet into moving without permission. Over it all, the soulful vocals are enchanting, seducing you into CS’ weird world. Not quite as crazy as they are live, but still a very satisfying, eventful trip you’ll want to go on repeatedly.

A dispatch from the world of doom this month comes from Bell Witch and Aerial Ruin, with Stygian Bough Volume II. Four songs in an hour is to be expected from two such artists, and the way each rises and falls is even more impressive than on the first instalment. The more traditionally doomy bits, like the funereal riffs of Waves Became The Sky and the mid-section of From Dominion, will please fans of Pallbearer or Warning. Around them, they’ve added a landscape of desolate, folky acoustic guitar, almost-choral vocal droning, fragile sounds that stretch to a desolate horizon, and a sense of being in no rush at all to make their big reveal. When heavier moments kick back in, it’s stunning. Which one would by now expect from those involved, but it’s quite the special thing to be reminded that such moments are simply what they deal in, and that few do this sort of music quite so expertly as they.

Finally, Leicestershire riffers Mage have returned with their fifth album, Hymns For The Afterlife. And, apparently, what lies beyond the mortal veil is a massive party soundtracked by bangers that are equal parts Motörhead and Sabbath. Like Corrosion Of Conformity if they came from near Corby, it’s a record packed with big, heavy, languid grooves and fighty British grit. Recent single Devil Be Damned hammers along on big, bottom-end guitar and plenty of speed, before settling down into a big jam, while Summer and Witch’s Hollow offer similarly loud, beery thrills. They’ve got more than one gear, as well, with opener Soil For The Worm adding Tom Morello-like bass effects, while Odin’s Eye allows things to cook at a slower pace, dooming out and taking in the heaviness for a minute. Once again, Mage have created some big riffing magic.

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• Tom G Warrior: “We put so much fanaticism into Hellhammer, it’s nice to know it wasn’t wasted”