Dec 012023
 

Composed of four members with extensive resumes in extreme metal, the Salvadorean band Witchgöat made their advent with the 2018 demo Umbra Regit and then soon followed that with their 2019 debut album Egregors of the Black Faith.

Now, on the other side of lockdown times, they’re returning with a second full-length of black/thrashing mayhem. Entitled Altars of Necromancy, it’s set for release on the last day of this year by Morbid Skull Records (El Salvador) and Deathrockersorrow Records (U.S.). To help spread the word, today we’re revealing a lyric video for the song “Rejected by the Demiurge“. Continue reading »

Dec 012023
 

Today we’re presenting one of the most intense, most wholly absorbing, and most uncomfortable audio-visual experiences we’ve encountered this year. The song itself is overpowering, and shattering. The video magnifies that experience, like turning up the dial on electrodes in your spine that are already delivering tremendous voltage.

The song is “This Corpse“, and it’s one of seven on a new album named Catharsis by the Portuguese trio Music in Low Frequencies. It will be released on December 8th by Raging Planet Records. Continue reading »

Dec 012023
 

Today we are entering the final month of 2023, and that begins the final countdown to the end of the year. In the world of metal, this month we’ll also start seeing more and more lists of the year’s best releases.

Back in 2009, when this site was just a few days old, I wrote a post about year-end lists and why people bother with them. The best reason still seems to be this: Reading someone else’s list of the albums they thought were best is a good way to discover music you missed and might like.

We don’t do an “official” NCS year-end list of best albums. However, we publish the picks of each of our regular staff writers as well as a group of invited guests, in addition to lists that we re-post from a few print zines and “big platform” online sites.

Every year we also invite our readers to share their lists and we’re doing that again right here, right now.

If you’ve been pondering what you’ve heard this year and have made your own list of the albums, EPs, or splits released in 2023 that you think are the best of what you’ve heard, we invite you to share it with everyone in the Comments section to this post. And if you haven’t made a list yet but want to, there’s still plenty of time (read below). Continue reading »