13 Metal Albums to Listen to This October
A seasonal, unranked metal listening guide for October, moving from horror-soaked death metal and gothic classics to doom and records that simply sound like autumn.
October is an easy month to soundtrack with metal.
Horror movies, graveyards, ghosts, gore and the occult are already baked into half the genre, so Halloween alone gives us plenty to work with. But October is more than Halloween. It is cold rain, dying leaves, forests turning brown, earlier sunsets and that particular grayness that settles over everything once summer is properly dead. So this is not a ranking, and it is definitely not an attempt to name the thirteen “best” horror metal albums ever made. These are simply thirteen albums that belong in October. Some tell horror stories. Some borrow directly from horror cinema. Some are grotesque enough to qualify on principle. Others just sound like autumn.
Cannibal Corpse – Tomb of the Mutilated
We might as well begin with the musical equivalent of discovering something terrible in the basement.
Cannibal Corpse’s third album, Tomb of the Mutilated, arrived in 1992 and contains some of the band’s most infamous material, including “Hammer Smashed Face” and “I Cum Blood.”
There is nothing particularly autumnal about it. There does not need to be.
October also belongs to splatter films, rubber intestines and absurd quantities of stage blood, and few albums embrace that side of horror more completely. If the month requires at least one record that sounds appropriate while carving a pumpkin with unnecessary aggression, Cannibal Corpse have that department covered.
Listen to Tomb of the Mutilated
Eisregen – Fleischfilm
Few albums fit this list as literally as Fleischfilm.
Released in 2017, Eisregen’s concept album revolves around Italian horror cinema from the 1970s and ’80s. Its songs reinterpret films associated with directors including Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava and Joe D’Amato, covering everything from giallo to zombies, cannibals and supernatural horror.
That makes Fleischfilm particularly appropriate here because it is not merely metal with vaguely spooky lyrics. The album is effectively a collection of horror movies retold through Eisregen.
Put on the album, dim the lights and consider it an extremely German way of having a horror marathon.
Acid Witch – Stoned
Detroit’s Acid Witch barely need an invitation to an October list.
The band’s own description is “Devil’s Night Doom from the dank and depressing depths of Detroit,” while Stoned includes titles such as “Trick or Treat,” “Whispers in the Dark,” “Stoned to the Grave” and “Sabbath of the Undead.” It was originally released at the end of October 2010.
Death metal, doom, psychedelia and horror-movie atmosphere all get thrown into the cauldron.
There are albums that happen to work well around Halloween.
Then there is Acid Witch.
Hooded Menace – Never Cross the Dead
Hooded Menace approach horror from the opposite direction: slow, crushing death-doom inspired heavily by old horror cinema.
Never Cross the Dead draws lyrically from films including Return of the Evil Dead, Night of the Seagulls and Vampyres, while “The House of Hammer” pays tribute to Hammer horror more broadly.
That makes it ideal for the point in October when the weather stops feeling pleasantly autumnal and starts looking like something should be crawling out of the ground.
Less pumpkin spice.
More crypt.
Listen to Never Cross the Dead
Carach Angren – Death Came Through a Phantom Ship
Not every October story needs a masked killer.
Sometimes you need a cursed ship.
Carach Angren’s 2010 Death Came Through a Phantom Ship is a symphonic black metal concept album built around the legend of the Flying Dutchman, reshaping the old ghost-ship tale into its own horror narrative.
The theatrical presentation makes it particularly suited to late-night October listening. Rather than simply assembling horror imagery, the album works as a supernatural story told across an entire record.
Ghosts at sea deserve Halloween representation too.
Listen the Death Came Through a Phantom Ship
The Vision Bleak – The Deathship Has a New Captain
If classic horror cinema had its own gothic metal house band, The Vision Bleak would have a strong application.
Their 2004 debut The Deathship Has a New Captain carries the subtitle 9 Songs of Death, Doom and Horror, and its references stretch across Night of the Living Dead, The Wolf Man, The Fog, Nosferatu, Metropolis and H.P. Lovecraft.
This is the old-film side of October: black-and-white monsters, foggy streets, gothic mansions and dramatically illuminated castles.
Preferably with thunder in the background for absolutely no meteorological reason.
Listen to The Deathship has a new Captain
King Diamond – Abigail
Eventually every October listening list wanders into a haunted mansion.
King Diamond’s Abigail is a full concept album telling the story of Jonathan La’Fey and Miriam Natias, who move into an inherited mansion and very quickly discover that their new home comes with some rather significant supernatural baggage.
Ghosts, possession, murder, omens and a family curse make Abigail less an album with horror themes than a complete heavy-metal horror story.
Sometimes subtlety can stay outside.
There is a haunted mansion to investigate.
Cradle of Filth – Dusk and Her Embrace
By this point we have had gore, zombies, ghost ships and haunted houses.
Time for the gothic wing of October.
Cradle of Filth’s 1996 Dusk and Her Embrace brings the ornate, nocturnal side of extreme metal: keyboards, black-metal foundations and an atmosphere steeped in gothic horror.
This is not the October of chainsaws and buckets of fake blood.
It is the October of candlelight, old cemeteries, enormous stone buildings and wondering whether buying a velvet coat would actually improve your life.
It probably would not.
But the album might make a convincing argument.
Listen to Dusk and Her Embrace
Necrophagia – Season of the Dead
Horror and death metal have been inseparable for decades, and Necrophagia were there remarkably early.
Formed in 1983, the band were among the pioneers of death metal and built their identity heavily around horror themes. Their debut, Season of the Dead, appeared in 1987.
That historical angle earns it a place here.
October listening does not have to mean reaching for the same handful of famous records every year. Sometimes it is worth digging backward and hearing how deeply horror was embedded in extreme metal while the genre itself was still taking shape.
Fulci – Tropical Sun
An album called Tropical Sun does not immediately sound like an October record.
The band being named Fulci should probably provide the first clue.
The Italian death metal group’s second album is directly inspired by Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2, combining death metal with horror-film atmosphere and imagery drawn from the movie.
It also makes a nice companion to Eisregen’s Fleischfilm. Both draw from Italian horror cinema, but they approach that material from very different corners of metal.
October can apparently accommodate tropical islands.
Provided those islands contain enough zombies.
October Tide – Rain Without End
Eventually October stops being about Halloween decorations and becomes something quieter.
October Tide’s Rain Without End, released in 1997, sits comfortably in melodic death-doom territory. The band itself grew from the Katatonia orbit, having originally been formed by Jonas Renkse and Fred Norrman.
The appeal here is not horror.
It is weather.
Cold rain, gray skies and the gradual disappearance of daylight are as much a part of October as pumpkins and skeletons. Death-doom provides a soundtrack for the part of autumn where everything outside looks permanently damp.
The album title practically did the administrative work for us.
Agalloch – The Mantle
And then there is autumn itself.
Agalloch’s The Mantle was released in 2002 and blends metal with extensive acoustic and neofolk elements, with guitarist Don Anderson describing the album’s construction in strongly visual, cinematic terms.
Forget Halloween for a moment.
This is forests, cold air, dead leaves, overcast skies and long walks where the world seems to have quietly emptied itself out.
Some albums belong to October because they talk about monsters.
The Mantle belongs here because it sounds like the season.
Type O Negative – October Rust
Come on.
We were not going to make this list and somehow avoid October Rust.
Type O Negative’s 1996 album sits squarely in gothic metal territory, wrapping its enormous, melancholy sound around songs about love, sex, death and everything else Peter Steele could make sound vaguely unhealthy. It was released in August 1996, despite possessing perhaps the most aggressively October album title imaginable.
There are deeper cuts we could have chosen.
There are stranger albums we could have chosen.
But sometimes the obvious record is obvious for a reason.
Thirteen albums. No ranking.
That is the point. October can mean an Italian gore film, a haunted mansion, a ghost ship, a Detroit Halloween party or an empty forest under a gray sky. Metal has music for all of it. So whether October means horror season or simply the month when autumn finally takes over, there should be something here that fits. And if not, there is always November. That month has doom metal written all over it.