I don’t think two posts’ worth of viciousness are enough to ameliorate the suckitude of this Monday. We need one more. Unless of course I come across even more slashing metal before this vicious Monday turns into a moderately less vicious Tuesday.

This next offering is a brand new song from Samael, a Swiss band whose experimental brand of black metal will be known to many of you. After almost three years of work, their new album, Lex Mundi, will be released on April 29 in Europe and May 3 in North America via Nuclear Blast Records.

The cover art is by Patrick Pidoux, who is also the drummer for a band called Sludge. It’s apparently intended to be shiny black imagery on a matte-black background. When I first saw it on other sites, it just looked like a solid black square (which may have something to do with the settings on my computer). Anyway, to bring out the imagery, I enhanced the exposure of the image on a photo program, and the result is above.

As for the song, it’s awesome. I’m not terribly well-versed in Samael’s extensive discography, but it doesn’t sound quite like anything from the band that I’ve heard before. It features tribal rhythms and scorching guitars, and it’s just massively infectious. You listen to this, and in addition to whispering “Fuck Mondays” under your breath, you may be moved to start pounding any nearby flat surfaces with both fists. Go past the jump and stream this mutha . . .

Another month has passed. Another Halloween has come and gone. Here in Seattle, we are looking forward to what is supposed to be an especially wet, dark, cold, sucktastic winter — which is really saying something, given that all Seattle winters are wet, dark, cold, and sucktastic. If they weren’t, we would have the population of Los Angeles, so there’s a silver lining to that massively dark cloud.

Yes, the seasons come and they go, the great wheel of life rolls forward, and we are all one month closer to our end, whatever it may be. But as time inexorably passes, new things happen. In particular, we find out about new metal gestating in studios around the world, struggling and kicking and yearning to erupt into the air, screaming like a banshee.

And that brings us to another monthly installment of METAL IN THE FORGE, in which we cobble together a list of forthcoming new albums, cribbing like rag-gatherers and lint-pickers from PR releases and metal news sites like Blabbermouth in order to construct a line-up of new music that at least we’re interested in hearing, even if no one else is.

What we do in this series of posts is update the list of forthcoming new albums we first posted on January 1. (All the other updates can be found via the “Forthcoming Albums” category link on the right side of our pages.) After the jump, in alphabetical order, is a list of still more projected new releases we didn’t know about at the time of our previous updates, or new info about some of the previously noted releases.

Fair warning: This will be one extended session of spittle-flecked frothing at the mouth, because we haven’t been this blown away since stumbling into a full-fledged Seattle windstorm last winter. So get the safety glasses on and strap on sanitary masks if you got ‘em.

The subject of our enthusiasm is Nothnegal. They’re a band from The Republic of the Maldives that now includes two non-Maldivian heavyweights — drummer Kevin Talley from Dååth and keyboardist Marco Sneck from those Finnish swamplords Kalmah. They’ve got a four-song EP to their credit called Antidote of Realism and they’ve just signed with Season of Mist for the release of their debut album early next year.

Oh yeah, they’re also playing with Arch Enemy this month and touring Europe in the fall with the likes of Rotting Christ, Samael, and Finntroll.

And we’d wager that most of you have never heard of them. Until earlier this week, we hadn’t either. But this band shows all the seismic signs of an impending Vesuvius-sized eruption onto the scene — and based on the band’s output to date, it would be well-deserved.

If you like technically immaculate, headbangingly compulsive, Scandinavian-style melodic death metal played at autobahn speed, stay with us after the jump. Among other things, we’ll stream all four tracks from that EP and we’ll show you how to download a cut from Nothnegal’s forthcoming debut album.