Staff Lists
RUSH’s 10 Best Songs
The Canadian legends' greatest tracks run the gamut from from radio-ready singles to complex prog masterpieces. RUSH’s 10 Best Songs Jon Hadusek and Jordan Blum
50 Most Anticipated Albums of 2023
No one really should have been shocked by how music unfolded in 2022. Everyone — everyone — was raring to get back out there. Artists that had sat on completed records for two years were finally able to share them with the world, while those who had spent their time cooped up writing new material had fresh songs ready to go. Still, it felt like there was an inundation of albums, which begs the question: Is there anything left for 2023? Dumb question. Of course there is. With the industry’s wheels turning at full capacity again, we have new music to look forward to from all corners of the landscape. Long-anticipated efforts from Gorillaz, Miley Cyrus, The Smashing Pumpkins, and (fingers crossed) Rihanna are expected. Icons like Depeche Mode, Peter Gabriel, The Cure, and Shania Twain (!) are...
15 Rising Artists to Watch in 2023
There are rising artists, and then there are rising artists that we can’t get enough of, to the point that we wonder, “Where have you been all our lives?” Each year, a handful of musicians become deserving household names — last year, we placed bets on artists who continue to swirl around 2023 festival lineups, like Wet Leg, Yard Act, and PinkPantheress. The road to becoming a top-tier artist is more complicated than ever, but here are 15 artists, listed in alphabetical order, that we feel are poised to make that jump. Remember these names — they’ll likely be headlining festivals and tours left and right someday soon. Babygirl Canadian indie pop duo Babygirl are in search of classics. Their stellar 2021 EP Losers Weepers featured some undeniable sad bangers, especially focus track “Nevermi...
Top 30 Metal and Hard Rock Songs of 2022
Our 2022 Annual Report continues with our Top 30 Metal and Hard Rock Songs list. As the year winds down, stay tuned for more awards, lists, and articles about the best music, film, and TV of 2022. You can find it all in one place here. Heavy music has reached a golden age of sorts. The family tree of genres continues to branch out, with artists finding new ways to expand upon the styles of the past. For example, Spirit Adrift are a loving update on vintage thrash and doom, while a band such as Boris seek to constantly test themselves with new sounds and concepts. Any and every sonic direction is viable, and that’s the beauty of it …a never-ending well of art that has tirelessly evolved into a aural universe unto itself. This year offered some welcome surprises and reunions, such as the ret...
Top 30 Metal and Hard Rock Albums of 2022
Our 2022 Annual Report continues with our Top 30 Metal and Hard Rock Albums list. As the year winds down, stay tuned for more awards, lists, and articles about the best music, film, and TV of 2022. You can find it all in one place here. Touring returned in full force in 2022, if not more so, as bands made up for lost time on the road. During that concert-industry shutdown of 2020 and 2021, many artists used the time to hit the studio. Veteran acts like Ozzy Osbourne, Slipknot, Rammstein, and Lamb of God, who had all just released albums in 2019 or 2020, were able to record new albums during their time off the road, and thus unleashed follow-ups in a relatively quick manner in 2022. Advertisement Other acts like Megadeth and Alexisonfire ended long waits, releasing their first albums in six...
The 13 Scariest Metal Songs
From the early days, when Black Sabbath pioneered the genre, to the emergence of extreme subgenres like death metal and black metal, there has always been an association of fear and horror with heavy metal. And thus, there’s an abundance of tracks to choose from when compiling a list of the scariest metal songs. With lyrics that focus anywhere from the occult to death and destruction, some songs stand out among others as the most frightful. And for certain bands, freaking people out is their modus operandi. Hell, we could have easily comprised this entire list out of Cannibal Corpse songs. Whether it’s the creepy music or the bloodcurdling lyrics, the baker’s dozen tracks below truly tingle our spines. Without further ado, here’s Heavy Consequence‘s list of The 13 Scariest Metal Songs. Adv...
The 100 Greatest Albums of All Time
It’s Consequence’s 15th anniversary, and all September long we’ll be publishing a series of retrospective pieces encompassing our publication’s own history — and the entertainment landscape in general. Today, we’re kicking it off with our new and improved 100 Greatest Albums of All Time list. Oh my God, we’re back again. It’s been over a decade since we first took a shot at boiling down all of popular music history into the 100 greatest albums of all time. Forget about how opinions have changed over those 12 years — the entire culture has shifted. Even the people taking part in this exercise are different, as only two staff members who were part of the OG list, published in 2010, remain with Consequence today. Understandably, things are going to be different this time. Tastes have bee...
All 247 Songs Jack Antonoff Has Produced, Ranked From Worst to Best
This article originally ran in August 2021, but we’ll be updating it for years to come, because Jack Antonoff cannot be stopped. Jack Antonoff remains booked and busy. Antonoff, former member of fun. and current frontman of indie pop group Bleachers, is the most sought-after producer in the pop world right now, full stop. This, like any gust of fame, comes with a harsher magnifying glass. Antonoff has turned into a bit of a polarizing figure recently; many love the signature flourishes he adds to tracks, while others think he’s becoming formulaic. Wherever you stand when it comes to the Antonoff discourse, it’s worth highlighting his resume of contributions to modern pop. Not to mention his six Grammy Awards; he was nominated for Producer of the Year in 2020 and 2021, and won the category ...
The 100 Best Netflix Original Series of All Time
In 2013, you could count the number of Netflix original series that existed on one hand. Nine years later, that number is, well, a little higher. Over that time, the streaming giant became a huge player in the entertainment world, developing a massive catalog of content spanning all genres, for all audiences, in as many languages as the translators can manage. The below list, spotlighting 100 of the best offerings to come from Netflix since those earliest days, does its best to represent how Netflix has provided a home for near-countless series that might never have gotten a greenlight anywhere else, amplifying new takes and new voices just as a new hunger for innovative storytelling on television was being discovered. (For those curious about the rules here, the shows included had to have...
Song of the Week: Lana Del Rey Casts Her Spell with the Melancholic “Watercolor Eyes”
Song of the Week breaks down and talks about the song we just can’t get out of our head each week. Find these songs and more on our Spotify Top Songs playlist. For our favorite new songs from emerging artists, check out our Spotify New Sounds playlist. This week, Lana Del Rey’s cut from the Euphoria soundtrack captures all the glitter and drama of the hit television show. HBO’s Euphoria is a lot of things — trendy, absurd, moving, disturbing, a cinematography dream — but, above all, it is the moment. In an era often dominated by binge-watching, it’s a rarity to see people dutifully tune into new episodes of a show on a weekly basis for fear of missing out on the social conversation. Season 2 of the addiction drama seems just as strong (if not stronger) on that front. Sunday evening trendin...
69 Most Anticipated Albums of 2022
2022 is just barely underway, and already, this year is looking to be a legendary one for music. There are dozens of acts both big and small making a grand return in 2022; whether it be indie icons like Mitski and Animal Collective, legends of the ’80s and ’90s like Tears For Fears, Spiritualized and Eddie Vedder, or pop phenoms like Charli XCX and Cardi B, there will be plenty of marquee album releases. Not only that, we’re in a new era of releases entirely. During the initial lockdowns of 2020, many artists hunkered down and used that time to create — meanwhile, many others let themselves off the hook and waited until the pandemic began to wane to even record new music. Since then, genres and traditional labels have blurred even further, TikTok became the one of the most dominant music p...
Mining Metal: Top 10 Underground Metal Albums of 2021
Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence writers Joseph Schafer and Langdon Hickman. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts. For the December edition, Joseph and Langdon pick their Top 10 Underground Metal Albums of 2021. We thought this year was going to be the mother lode — and it was. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, we predicted that many bands working on albums would hold onto them for a year, expecting the global crisis to end in time for a celebratory 2021 album drop and profitable summer/fall tour. Obviously, some of those predictions fell though, though we did get big summer festivals like Psycho Las Vegas returning, and ...
