MESHUGGAH Catch ThirtyTree CD (2005)

There are albums that push metal forward, and then there is Catch ThirtyThree, the 2005 record that basically dared the entire genre to keep up. Meshuggah wrote it as a single 47-minute composition, looped and fractured into movements, and the result sounds less like a band playing songs and more like a machine dreaming about violence.

This is the record that codified djent before anyone had a name for it, the one that made a generation of guitarists question everything they thought they knew about rhythm and polymetric time signatures. Fredrik Thordendal and Mårten Hagström locked into a groove so precise and so alien it practically requires a different part of your brain to process. Thomas Haake's drumming on this record is genuinely unsettling in the best possible way. Swedish death metal had already given the world plenty, but this was something else entirely.

CD, full length, released 2005 on Nuclear Blast. Running time approximately 47 minutes as a single continuous work.

Fans of: Gojira, Strapping Young Lad, Decapitated, SikTh, Meshuggah's earlier catalogue if you somehow haven't gone back yet.