SHADES OF BLACK: EVEALE

 SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Mar 152026
 

(written by Islander)

I don’t have much to share with you in today’s column. I spent a lot of time yesterday unsuccessfully trying to solve a security glitch that disabled my administrative access to NCS, and then more time communicating with our web host and third-party security service and staring at the in-box waiting for them to figure out the problem and fix it. Listening to and writing about music got elbowed out of the way.

The web host did eventually fix the problem by disabling the CAPTCHA feature on the site, which I guess is now forcing some visitors to re-register here and/or re-set passwords. Sorry about that. To celebrate the fix, and to flush away the anxiety caused by the fear that we wouldn’t be able to post anything on Monday (including premieres I’d committed to do), I went out last night and drank too much.

That led to a very late start on this Sunday, which compounded the problem of not getting a head-start on the column yesterday. To further compound the problems, my spouse and I are leaving home very soon to visit a family member who’s recovering from an injury.

I thought about just abandoning the column for this one day, but as you probably know, I hate leaving any days without music at NCS. So here is just one thing I’d like to recommend. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: LAIR OF THE MINOTAUR, SKAPHOS, WITCH RIPPER, SISYPHEAN, VOID OF LIGHT, DEPRESSION NAP, APOSTLE, NOISE AHOLIC

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Mar 142026
 

(written by Islander)

Technology is treacherous. I had this post written five hours ago, but a glitchy security feature prevented me from accessing the site and posting it. Our web host fixed the problem just minutes ago. Which is why this roundup is appearing so late.

Other than weeks ending on a Bandcamp Friday and weeks that include Halloween, my perception is that weeks ending on a Friday the 13th tend to be the most bulging with new metal. That was certainly true of the past week (and the few days before it began). You want proof? Well, here are 10 well-known bands who released new songs and/or videos during that period:

ALLEGAEON (U.S.)

EMPLOYED TO SERVE (UK)

HELLRIPPER (Scotland)

IMMOLATION (U.S.)

INFERI (U.S.)

MONSTROSITY (U.S.)

PORTRAYAL OF GUILT (U.S.)

SARCASM (Sweden)

SIX FEET UNDER (U.S.)

VOMITORY (Sweden)

I easily could have included any of those songs and videos in this column, because they’re all damned good. And you won’t go wrong going after them, which I’ve made it easy to do via those hyperlinks. But I decided instead to do what we often do around this place, and that’s dig deeper under the ground. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CANDARIAN — “ALTARS AND ANCESTORS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Mar 132026
 

(written by Islander)

This is a tough day for people with friggatriskaidekaphobia, the fear of Friday the 13th, especially because we just had another one of those last month. But we’re about to magnify the fear of this day with a new song from the Costa Rican death-dealers in Candarian.

This song, “Altars and Ancestors“, is from the band’s debut album Trepanación, which will be dropped upon the world by Memento Mori and Me Saco Un Ojo on April 27th. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: MULLA — “KEIDE ÓLIM OSYNDRA JÚREDI”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Mar 132026
 

(written by Islander)

For reasons obvious to anyone with their eyes and ears open, the Middle East is the focus of great attention these days, the broad locus of a war whose boundaries seem to be continuously expanding with no clear end in sight (and a certain orange-toned deviant raving about the “honor” of killing people. The black metal band Mulla probably did not foresee this staggering conflict would be happening around the release of the video we’re now premiering, but it’s not as if the current conflagration hasn’t happened there before.

To be clear, Mulla is not a Middle Eastern band, despite some confusion about their location (which the band themselves had a hand in generating). This duo is located in Kazakhstan, their lyrics are in their native tongue, and they are not practicing Muslims.

Their goal, as they have explained, “is neither preaching nor criticizing, but rather creating a unique cultural hybrid, a simulacrum with its own powerful poetics.” “This is a conceptual journey through mythologized landscapes, where images of Islamic culture (calligraphy, philosophical motifs, linguistics) become the colors of a black metal painting.”

The video we’re presenting is for a song called “Keıde ólim osynda júredi” from Mulla’s latest album Jannan (released in December 2025). Continue reading »

DISSENTIENCE: “KAIJU”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Mar 132026
 

(Here’s DGR’s enthusiastic review of a new EP released last month by Pennsylvania’s Dissentience.)

For being such a short month, February was a wildly creative time for heavy metal. Perhaps, for all our prognosticating and bullshit being pulled from a hat in regards to how the year was starting, it was time for the dam to finally burst and unleash upon us a musical flood of sorts. You can get a real sense for this when you glance around our site for instance and see multiple summary articles of music that has been unleashed throughout the month, and barring the minor occasion of a crossed wire or two, there’s barely any crossover whatsoever.

It seems like our attention was so divided in so many different directions that we could just as easily portray our focus as a scatter plot drawn by someone in the middle of an earthquake while they fell into a manhole. If there is a unifier or throughline to be found, it seems it lays not so much in where our easily distracted pack of Golden Shepherds we call the writing staff here are looking at this moment, but what we are looking forward to in the future. We’re probably going to need assistance from multiple deities if we hope to make it through the April/May pre-summer festival torrent in one piece.

February’s EPs fell upon us like rain, alongside a sizeable gathering of albums, and thankfully there was even enough spread between the tried-and-true trying new stuff out and new bands to be discovered that it didn’t feel like we were subsisting on bite-sized morsels. One band that happens to have made very good usage of the EP format this time around is Philadelphia’s Dissentience, who took four massive songs and combined them into an equally massive movement of music they have named after the EP’s final song “Kaiju“. Twenty-three-and-a-half-minutes later you will feel as if you have been placed under the footfall of a gargantuan monster as well. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TRAGOS — “BELLICUM”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Mar 122026
 

(written by Islander)

We’re about to lead you off our usual well-beaten paths, or rather the French band Tragos will do that through their debut album Bellicum that will be released by Fetzner Death Records on March 13th.

Gazing at the album’s cover art will give you a hint about the music within, which is an exhilarating alchemy of savage and slaughtering death metal and classical elegance influenced by baroque composers such as Matteo Carcassi, Fernando Sor, Scarlatti, and Bach.

If you’re unfamiliar with Tragos, you might now be imagining heavy doses of keyboards or synthesized violins or cellos, or perhaps the kind of over-the-top bombast that some classically inclined death metal bands put forward, but you’ll learn that’s not what Tragos are up to. You might also be wondering how well their unusual fusion of beastliness and elegance will work, and you’ll get your answer (it works exceedingly well) through our complete premiere of Bellicum today. Continue reading »

WORM SHEPHERD: “DAWN OF THE ICONOCLAST”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Mar 122026
 

(We present DGR’s review of a new EP by Massachusetts-based Worm Shepherd which was released last month by Unique Leader Records.)

Sometimes a band will find themselves unwittingly serving a purpose beyond the basic enjoyment of music/listener exchange. Worm Shepherd are one such group, as their sort of alternating status between fully activated live act, in-home studio project, nebulous existence altogether has served a somewhat unintentional beacon on the wider evolutionary path of the deathcore genre as a whole.

Built out of constituent parts of various other deathcore groups based along the East Coast and couched in the current day bombast and spectacle of the symphonic and blackened absorbtion, Worm Shepherd have become a sort of guide to the genre as a wider whole – you could explode the band out into seperate guide stones and each one would walk you into a different path of recognizable artists. As these many influences converge, so too does Worm Shepherd reassemble itself.

It is not whether the band itself exists in some instances but the larger picture they paint, and in the case of Worm Shepherd they’ve been excellent as that sort of aforementioned snapshot of where the deathcore genre may be as a whole – especially in its current moment of trying new things again, as the influenced by the influenced by the influenced by the influenced by crowd find themselves facing diminishing returns.

Worm Shepherd’s new EP Dawn Of The Iconoclast is representative of some of this, as the group’s formula was built out of a distilled-down through psychotic chemistry approach to symphonic deathcore, yet slowed down to such a point that it seemed less like we were doing big roaring breakdowns for the sake of declaring just how immensely heavy something feels but because they were a group verging on stumbling into funeral doom territory and just couldn’t figure out how to make the macho hoody aesthetic work with it just yet. Continue reading »

NECROPOLISSEBEHT: “TAURUNOVEM – TH’ASTRAKTYAN SERFDOME”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Mar 122026
 

(Norway-based NCS contributor Chile has an amazing new find he wants to recommend today, even if spelling or pronouncing it poses a challenge.)

We have already spoken many times about all the good sides and the benefits of metal music as a whole. In fact, there is so much metal going around that we will never run out of it, as opposed to water, clean air, or soil to grow our food, just to name a few. In effect, you’ll be hungry, thirsty, and full of pollutants, but at least you’ll have some great music to accompany you.

Anyway, this abundance makes life that much easier for all of us, listeners and reviewers alike, and especially those of us lucky enough to be both. Just close your eyes and at a stone’s throw in any direction, there is a great band waiting to be found.

In comes Necropolissebeht. The strangely named international crew (ok, it’s Germany and Canada), with just one previously released EP from 2022 under their belts, comes back to drain your world of hope and any traces of light in the form of their just-released debut album, similarly strangely named Taurunovem – Th’Astraktyan Serfdome. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LAGO — “FODDER”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Mar 112026
 

(written by Islander)

How long has it been? How long has it been since you first heard the Arizona band Lago, or last heard them? In my case the first exposure was 13 years ago when I heard (and was floored by) their two-song demo Tyranny. Ever since then, I’ve followed their releases closely and managed to catch two shows they played in Seattle, one in a small club almost 11 years ago and another at Northwest Terror Fest in 2018, both of them killer performances.

As for the last time I heard them, well, 2018 was also the last time they released an album — Sea of Duress (favorably reviewed here by our Andy Synn). A lot of time passed, but things looked up when Lago released a new single in 2024, “Millenia of Scourge“, which I thought represented a strong step forward from what they’d done before. It was also a promising sign that Lago’s creative cauldron had started to boil again.

And sure enough, Lago have a new album headed our way this year. Titled Vigil, it’s set for release on May 8th by one of our favorite labels, Everlasting Spew Records. As E.S.R. previews, the music is “a dense and suffocating descent into lacerating and surgically cold darkness,” channeling “the weight of dissonant and modern Death Metal while carving deeper into their own bleak and atmospheric sound.”

We also have a statement about the album from Lago themselves: Continue reading »

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