Blood Incantation Makes Time Magazine's Top Ten

The Colorado-based metal group's latest album, Absolute Elsewhere, has been racking up spots on high-profile year-end lists.

By Jason Heller

December 27, 2024

Image: The members of Blood Incantation standing together

Blood Incantation is getting major mainstream recognition. Courtesy Julian Weigand

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Blood Incantation has had a hell of a year. And the hits just keep on coming.

The Denver band's stunning fourth album, Absolute Elsewhere, was released in October to a frenzy of critical acclaim. And rightly so: It's a masterpiece of progressive, sci-fi-themed, synth-infused death metal, and the world has taken notice, including the decidedly un-metal magazine Time.

On Time's list of the ten best albums of 2024, Absolute Elsewhere snagged the number-seven spot. "For Blood Incantation, the metal mandate to seek extremity is joyously open-ended, freeing them to explore quietude as often as ruckus," says writer Stephen Kearse.

But that's just the cherry on top of the accolade sundae. Rolling Stone named Absolute Elsewhere the sixth-best metal album of the year. Pitchfork ranked it 34th on its year-end albums list, and the record appears on NPR's unranked list of the fifty best albums of 2024. That, of course, is in addition to dozens of mentions on metal websites and blogs around the world.

“It’s almost like some bands home in on their sound, like, ‘Okay, it’s only this,’" Blood Incantation's drummer, Isaac Faulk, told Westword in October. "I feel like we’re saying, ‘Oh, no, more and more and more and more stuff.' As a musician, that’s super exciting, because you can break into stuff that you would never have thought you would do in a metal band.”

Like, oh, being in Time.

Jason Heller is a staff writer at Westword. He's the author of the book Strange Stars: David Bowie, Pop Music, and the Decade Sci-Fi Exploded (Melville House/Penguin Random House), and has contributed to the New Yorker, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and NPR.org. His work has won a Hugo Award and a Colorado Press Association Award.

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