NO CLEAN SINGING

GODFLESH: “DECAY”

Oct 072026

(With pride, we present Todd Manning’s review of the the tenth and penultimate album from Godflesh, which is out now on Relapse Records.)

If nothing else, 2026 has provided the metal world with “return-to-form” albums from two of its most endearing and long-lived acts. Neurosis is probably the first to come to many people’s minds, but the new Godflesh album, Decay, should not be overlooked. For me personally, as a fan, a musician, and a writer, these two groups have easily been the most influential in shaping how I see underground music.

Godflesh has never made a bad album. How one parses out their discography probably depends more on personal taste than anything approaching objective considerations. I tend to rank their more abstract work as their best. Albums such as Streetcleaner, Pure, Slavestate, and Selfless do not sound like they were made by humans, while Songs of Love and Hate and Hymns contain at least a sliver of humanity. Decay returns to the former sound. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ELITIST — “TO UNSEE, TO UNTETHER”

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Oct 072026

(written by Islander)

Transcending Obscurity Records doesn’t often release splits, but on November 20th they’re dropping one that’s likely to leave a smoking crater in the midst of the coming winter.

Aptly titled Indomitable Hostility, the split joins together new songs from two death metal ravagers whose forward-thinking music you should already know — Replicant from New Jersey and Elitist from Denmark. And if somehow you haven’t yet discovered these bands, this album-length split provides a great jumping-on point for both of them.

Today we’re premiering one of Elitist’s new songs — a creatively chaotic mind-boggler and skull-buster called “To Unsee, To Untether” — and early next week we’ll do the same for one of Replicant’s new tracks. Continue reading »

BLACK ROYAL: “EXTREMOPHILES” (A NEW SONG, A NEW VIDEO, AND AN INTERVIEW)

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Oct 072026

(written by Islander)

We have been fervent fans of Finland’s Black Royal for a lot of years — not all of their years, but at least since singles began surfacing in the lead-up to their debut album Lightbringer in 2018. Ever since then we’ve been hooked by their stupefyingly heavy, massively grooved, frighteningly ferocious, and irresistibly addictive blend of sludge and death metal. And so we were most happy to discover that 2026 would bring us a new Black Royal album. Its daunting name is Abyssian.

In April of this year Black Royal and their label M-Theory Audio released a video for the album’s first single, the savage “Water of the Crow” (discussed here), and then in August they released the second one, “Drown the Seaweed” (discussed here). It too arrived with a striking video, and while it is (of course) an enormous head-mover, it also creates a mythic atmosphere that’s unsettling.

And now, as of today, we have the album’s third single and yet another attention-seizing video (a chilling one). The name of this song is “Extremophiles“, and like the first two singles it also has a water-focused theme — a fascinating and quite unusual one. While we can’t claim our sharing of it is a premiere, we do have an interview focused on the song (but also spilling over to the album as a whole) with Black Royal’s powerhouse vocalist and lyricist Riku. Continue reading »

WOLFBRIGADE – HOWL FROM UNDERGROUND

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Oct 072026

(Andy Synn gets ready to run with the wolves again, ahead of the release of their new album this Friday)

There’s a commonly held belief… or a tacit acceptance, at least… that bands tend to mellow out as they get older.

Of course, those of us in the “extreme” scene know that this isn’t a universal truth by any means, even if there’s still an (understandable) tendency for a lot of bands to get a little slower, and a little more melodic and/or proggier, as they get age.

Legendary Swedish Crust-crew Wolfbrigade, however, don’t just disagree with this trend, they outright reject it, hence the title of the manifesto (“Notes on Failed Domestication“, which I think would have made an even better album title, to be honest) that accompanies their new record, describing it as:

“A signal flare for the hungry, the wild, the wicked. For the outlaws, the freaks, the punks and queers who see the world for what it is: a padded cell of screens and slogans, engineered to keep the body tame and the spirit numb.“

And, trust me, there’s nothing tame about this album.

AN NCS PREMIERE: “ERADICATION FROM THE TAINT”

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Oct 062026

(written by Islander)

Earlier today my friend and NCS comrade DGR made an observation about certain kinds of brutal death metal that coincidentally turns out to be quite relevant to the song from Australia’s Caution that we’re about to premiere.

In the context of reviewing an album by New York’s Thaetas, he pointed to “a weirdly ardent vein of avant-garde approach in many brutal death and yes, even slam bands,” music that turns out to be “very intricate for the sort of caveman facade it puts on,” with compositions that can spin themselves into a whirlwind — “balls of vitriol that shift constantly in mercurial form.”

Those observations seem germane to the Caution song “Eradication From the Taint” that you’re about to take in. That’s not to suggest that Caution and Thaetas are cut from the same cloth, but “Eradication From the Taint” does display a kind of musical wildness that contrasts with the primitive and utterly bludgeoning thuggishness it also inflicts. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HYPERION — “FIDES NOVEM”

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Oct 062026

(written by Islander)

The Swedish metal band Hyperion have not been prolific, and they do not work quickly. They didn’t release their first demo until roughly three years after their formation, and six more years passed before they released their 2016 debut album Seraphical Euphony. But who would have guessed that a decade would drift by before a second full-length arrived?

Yet at last, a second full-length will be arriving on November 6th via Willowtip Records (who always seem to astutely know a good thing when they hear it). The name of Hyperion’s new album is Elysia.

Erik Molnar still leads the band, but the full lineup is different from the group that released Seraphical Euphony. After a decade of ideas gestating and work undertaken, it’s not surprising that the music has evolved as well, and we have a sign of that today in our premiere of a lyric video for Elysia’s second single, “Fides Novem“. Continue reading »

CLEARING THE SLATE ISSUE FIVE

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Oct 062026

(Our writer DGR has been playing catch-up on records released earlier this year when other distractions interfered with writing about them. Beginning in mid-July he has delivered four Issues (which you can find here, here, here, and here), and now we have Issue Five bringing together extensive reviews of four more records released in preceding months

For a brief period it did seem like there was light at the end of the tunnel of this experiment in trying to catch up with everything I’d been listening to and then trying to write about it here. Obviously, and as mentioned before, it has gotten out of control, but it has allowed me at least to keep up a steady pace of reviews. It looks like my overall “quantity” of reviews year over year will remain about the same, which has at the very least assuaged some of my concern that I have been slowly losing it as life has been taking turns beating the shit out of me on the other side of the virtual space.

My problem of course is that I have still kept finding new things, so I am now at a weird point where every four or five of these smaller writeups – insert laugh track here – I find some new thing that I want to tell the world about.

I’ve even seen a few of the ones that I’m intending to cover show up in other people’s musical collections that are posted here, which has lit up the center of my brain that likes to make me think that I’m smart and I am in fact on to something here. Whether this trend keeps up as I continue to carve my way through the year’s musical releases with the grace of a drunk elephant, I won’t be able to tell you, but 2026, in spite of so much of the year resting on the comfortable side of flaming dogshit, has produced a bumper crop for musical discovery.

A lot of our veteran bands may be playing it too safe and the “music as product factory” that dominates the upper part of heavy metal hasn’t done much interesting this year either, but the many bands I’ve been taking a gamble on seem to be working out in my favor. Or maybe it’s just self-hypnosis so I don’t fall into an existential crisis about what else I could have actually been doing with my time. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NIGHT GAUNT — “THE DEER AND THE HUNTER”

Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres No Responses »

Oct 052026

(written by Islander)

As we are prone to do, more often than some literal-minded visitors approve of, we’re about to premiere a song that’s an extravagant exception to the command in our site’s title, and it arrives through the good graces of the mercurial Roman band Night Gaunt.

The name of the song is “The Deer and the Hunter“, and it’s the second track to surface so far from their new album Rupture, which will be released by Aural Music on November 6th. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: UNTU — “RAMPOGAN”

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Oct 052026

(written by Islander)

Untu is an experimental death/thrash band from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, whose music fuses old-school extreme metal with Javanese gamelan — a traditional Javanese instrumental ensemble that includes such percussive instruments as gongs and the bronze saron demung. The group was originally formed in Los Angeles in 2015 as a large ensemble by composer Sean Hayward, and this year they have been working their way toward the December release of a four-song EP named Yet, I Smile.

In June Untu released the first song from the EP, “Batara Kala“, which we reviewed here. Two months later they released the second single, “The Dukun’s Hand“. And today we’re premiering a remarkable video for the third single, “Rampogan“, which will be digitally released tomorrow. Continue reading »

TO THE GRAVE – LIBERATION FRONT

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Oct 052026

(Andy Synn heads into the slaughterhouse once again with Aussie antagonists To The Grave)

Sweet zombie jesus… this is a heavy fucking album.

And, to be quite honest, I could probably leave this review right there and end with a quick exhortation to “go listen to the damn thing if you don’t believe me” and call it a day.

But, considering the fact that I know the real reason you all come here is to imbibe my unique brand of trenchant insight and critical analysis… I suppose I’d better better drop at least a few more paragraphs about the absolutely monstrous new record from Down-Under Deathcore heavyweights To The Grave.

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