The combo of Ben Falgoust’s vocals and Sammy Duet’s razor-wire riffs takes me to my happy place. Goatwhore’s rollicking, ranting take on black thrash was my reintroduction to the hard stuff, and since then they’ve been a constant companion to my metal fandom. Ferox was just getting back into metal at the time, dicking around with gateway drugs like Mastodon, and Baszler’s shirt led me to Carving Out the Eyes of God. The rooftop of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles had been repurposed to host a grappling event, and Shayna Baszler (then a fighter with the UFC, now a performer with WWE) was there in a Goatwhore t-shirt. I discovered Goatwhore at a museum, of all places. Goatwhore doesn’t look to be slowing down any time soon–but if they retired tomorrow, the band would leave behind a consistent, entertaining, and ever-so-slightly underrated legacy of raising a collective middle finger to everything a reasonable person might hold sacred. The albums themselves remain vital, and the outfit’s live show is as good as ever. This new pursuit has taken the band to some amazing places (“When Steel and Bone Meet,” “Baring Teeth for Revolt”) and some borderline goofy ones (“Fbs,” short for “Fucked by Satan”). Carving Out the Eyes of God’s monster opener “Apocalyptic Havoc” ushered in the era of the “ Goatwhore hit” every platter since features at least one downright catchy anthem.

Goatwhore is reliably extreme, but they’re also big fun. You could substitute “Boss-Man” for “God” in lots of their demented biker hymns without changing the spirit much. It all sounds (and can be!) a bit silly, but Goatwhore’s brand of Satanism has a “fuck you, I do what I want” energy that has as much in common with Judas Priest as it does Watain. A loosely declared war on paradise is afoot, prosecuted by means of foul rites and rampaging demons. The elements of the Goatwhore Cinematic Universe remain constant.

Goatwhore’s effortless fusion of genres is more original than it gets credit for being, and the band has yet to put out a bad album. Fronted by a charismatic pair of metal lifers in vocalist Ben Falgoust ( Soilent Green) and guitarist and occasional singer Sammy Duet (the essential Acid Bath), the New Orleans outfit locked into a feral, frothing hybrid of black metal, death, and thrash on third platter A Haunting Curse. They’ve been roaring along in that vein for five albums now, with eighth record Angels Hung From the Arches of Heaven slated to drop October 7th. Over the past couple decades, the band toured relentlessly and spit out a steady stream of quality releases–and somewhere along the way Goatwhore became an extreme metal institution. Goatwhore declared war on heaven in the year 2000, and the fight rages onward. But what if, once in a while, the collective paused to take stock and consider the discography of those bands that shaped many a taste? What if two three aspects of the AMG collective personality shared with the slavering masses their personal rankings of that discography and what if the rest of the personality used a Google sheet some kind of dark magic to produce an official guide to, and all-around definitive aggregated ranking of, that band’s entire discography? Well, if that happened, we imagine it would look something like this…

The reviewing collective at AMG lurches from one new release to the next, errors and nOObs strewn in our wake. The life of the unpaid, overworked metal reviewer is not an easy one.

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