(written by Islander)
This week’s column devoted to blackened sounds includes six individual songs, one each from five forthcoming albums plus a compelling new video. There’s another compelling video in the group too. To explain the choices: I fell down a rabbit hole that led to some very dissonant and disconcerting (and frequently eye-popping) tracks, one after another. And then I finally came across a song that pulled away from that; it’s the one at the end.
I had ambitions to write complete reviews of some of these forthcoming albums, i.e., to talk about songs you can’t hear yet, but personal events conspired to prevent me from doing all the listening and thinking that would have required. I may or may not be able to do that later, and so (as usual) I think it’s better to do what I’m able to do now to help spread the word rather than wait and wind up doing nothing.
HASARD (France)
I swear I’m not an employee or contractor of I, Voidhanger Records, despite the fact that I write about their releases a whole hell of a lot, including just yesterday when I spot-lighted the new Esoctrilihum. It’s just that if I were to make a Venn diagram of that label’s tastes and my own, there would be an enormous overlap. Also, I’ve always been intrigued by the creative impulses of Hazard, whether in his project Les Chants Du Hasard or in Hasard.
The Hasard project debuted in 2023 with the album Malivore (partially discussed here), and now IVR plans to release a second one named Abgnose. The label describes it as “in the continuity” of the first album. Here are Hazard‘s words about the inspiration:
Abgnose is a testament to the greater force that governs our lives, neither a god or a devil, but only pure chance. There is no greater entity sitting in the sky or below the earth, who watches with interest our petty lives. Only pure chance and random events. We spend a short amount of time as a small point on an equally small planet lost somewhere in the universe and we die, only for our futile achievements to be forgotten as fast as we’re replaced. Just count the here and now, as there’s no afterlife. Abgnose stands for removing the idea of the divine, thus leaving only the despair of having to live and not be rewarded for our actions in this world.
The first advance song from Abgnose is the opening track “Oniritisme“. It is an overwhelming experience, almost all 8 1/2 minutes of it. It catastrophically crashes and booms, heaves and convulses, maniacally boils and roils. Frantically shrieking fretwork pierces through the sonic storms and earthquakes; symphonic instrumentation ominously towers overhead; the vocals are utterly deranged; the drumming is great; the symphonic horns in the closing crescendo are tremendous.
Everything combines to create a nightmarish atmosphere of madness, destructive calamity on an immense scale, and shattering despair.
Abgnose will be released on September 5th. The frightening cover art is by Roy de Rat.
https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/abgnose
http://metalodyssey.8merch.com/
http://metalodyssey.8merch.us/
https://www.facebook.com/leschantsduhasard
ETHEREAL WOUND (Portugal)
Once again I have Rennie Resmini (starkweather) to thank for my discovery of this next song — and the one that follows it below. The first of the two is from a debut album of the Portuguese band Ethereal Wound, a duo consisting of lyricist/vocalist Sérgio Ramos and guitarist/recording engineer Nuno Verdades. On their two previous EPs Verdades programmed the drums. For the album, they had session work performed by Australian drummer extraordinaire Robin Stone.
Based on the band’s description, the album (entitled Defile | Demise) was inspired by “the most gruesome themes in Berserk”, the famous fantasy series created by the late Japanese manga artist Kentaro Miura. The first advance song from the album, “Cursed” is based on The Troll Caves.
Predictably, Robin Stone‘s drumming in the song is jaw-dropping — and it needs to be, because the surrounding music is also stunning, and the vocals are strikingly savage. The music is dense, intricately layered, often dissonant, and frequently wild. It’s also a dynamic song, which includes otherworldly notes that chime, wail, ripple, and convulse, as well as prominent bass-lines that do more than anchor the song in bone-throbbing heaviness.
The song is a wholly engulfing and thoroughly head-spinning experience, as unearthly and intriguing as it is violently assaulting and brutally grand. Really interested to hear the rest of this album.
Defile|Demise will be released on August 29th by Lowered Head Records, a new label established by Ohio musician Ben Vanweelden. The label shares the name of Ben‘s new musical project — which is responsible for the next song in today’s collection.
ETHEREAL WOUND:
https://etherealwound.bandcamp.com/album/defile-demise
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61557928844930
LOWERED HEAD RECORDS:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61578267781477
LOWERED HEAD (U.S.)
As noted above, Lowered Head is not only the name of Ben Vanweelden‘s new record label, it’s also the name of his new solo project, and of that project’s forthcoming debut album. As also noted above, I first found out about all this from Rennie Resmini. Here’s what he wrote about the music in his latest starkweather Substack column:
Good fucking lord, Ben Vanweelden. This madman has a new endeavor called Lowered Head. Perhaps of a similar disposition as Wallow where the modus operandi is funeral doom with a sludge bent. Initial dose has a guitar tone on the SAMO path of low end crush. Pair that tone with Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean, Buzzov-en crawl and uptempo outbursts with uber savage fried vocals and call it the sound of victory.
The song I’ve heard so far, the one now streaming from the album at Bandcamp, is the opening song “Never Enough“.
One might think of heads lowered in prayer, or in grief, or in solemn contemplation. This head seems more like a horned one that’s been lowered in order to make a monstrous charge right through a wall. Anchored by an enormous bass that brutally heaves, moans, and stomps, the drums ruthlessly pound, the guitars slash and burn, and the viciously screaming and howling vocals resemble a demonic bestiary whipped into a throat-lacerating rage.
When guitars take center stage near the song’s center, they create a sizzling harmony of poison and pain, as a prelude to galloping delirium. When the drums get more steady, the music seems even more hallucinatory but no less brutish or evil. But the song saves one more calamitous and crazed crushfest for the end.
Lowered Head (the album) is set for release on September 30th. It will be a digital release to start, and then a CD release to come. It features cover art and logo for the band and label by Dipayan Das. It’s recommended for fans of Hell (M.S.W.), Thou, and Asunder.
https://loweredheadrecords.bandcamp.com/album/lowered-head
ANGE DE LA MORT (U.S.)
Jared Moran has more personal musical projects and band involvements than any sane person would want to count. One of the solo projects is Ange De La Mort (“Angel of Death”), which Moran seems to have launched in 2013. Two albums are on the discography so far, and in August the UK label Centipede Abyss will release a third one, entitled Bequeathed.
I do try to check out as much of Jared Moran‘s new music as I can, and I make the same effort for everything Centipede Abyss releases. What I checked out for today is the song from Bequeathed named “Eloquent Temple“.
Today’s collection has already included a lot of eye-popping drum performances, but the one in “Eloquent Temple” takes the cake, a tour de force of speed and dexterity. In many songs, something like that would pull a lot of attention away from all the other ingredients, but in this one the other ingredients are so spectacularly scary and stripped of sanity that the drums don’t steal the show.
The other frighteners include boiling-oil guitars, shrill and dissonant in tone and berserk in their contortions, as well as insane screams and monstrous guttural roars. The fretwork is relentlessly caustic, relentlessly deranged, centrifugal in speed, and mentally mutilating. Sheer chaos, even when the drums aren’t going at jet speed.
Centipede Abyss will release Bequeathed on August 14th. The cover art is by Inentropy.
https://centipedeabyss.bandcamp.com/album/bequeathed
NEXION (Iceland)
Five years after their debut album Seven Oracles (partially discussed here in our premiere of a song), the Icelandic black metal band Nexion are returning with a second full-length named Sundrung. What comes next is a video made by Gabriella Mena Tabib for the second song released from the album so far, “Uþarpaspa“.
When I saw Nexion perform at Iceland’s Ascension Festival last summer I described it as “gloriously raging, wrenching, and glittering black metal, replete with barbarous chants and a commanding stage presence.” Much the same can be said of this new song and video.
Nexion go on the attack right away, with voices roaring, drums blasting, and the music violently swirling and swelling. The riffing is dissonant and dismal, and rings out in ways that seem to channel agony and fear, while the screaming is savagely intense.
Haughty choral chants add to mythic elements of the song that invoke ancient times, a connection underscored by the imagery in the video, and there’s a beautifully melancholy guitar solo near the end, adding one more dimension to a multi-faceted and very engrossing thriller of a song.
https://nfan.link/nexionice
https://avantgardemusic.bandcamp.com/album/sundrung
https://www.facebook.com/nexionband
ONDFØDT (Finland)
Now we come to our last song today — “Stormin“. It’s the closing track from Onfødt‘s latest album Dimsvall, which was released by Eisenwald in May of this year. What you’ll find below is a video of the band performing the song live at Wolfthrone Studios (where the album was also recorded) in the Summer of 2025.
By my lights this is a terrific song, a great way to close a generally impressive album and arguably the record’s strongest track, and getting to see the band perform it adds to the pleasures.
The music is mostly sweeping and intense, though its melodic harmonies (a combination of abrasive riffing and piercing leads) are distressing. The scarring impact of the vocals adds to the song’s feelings of wretchedness, which the soloing pushes to an even higher level of soul-rending torment.
In a couple of places Onfødt do dial down the intensity, switching to fervent near-sung pronouncements and softly ringing notes (a less burning form of sorrow), and then later to a kind of dismally wailing guitar interlude, though they don’t stay in those relatively quiet places for long.
This is also one more song today that features excellent drumwork, and big rumbling bass throbs.
https://ffm.bio/ondfodt
https://ondfodtofficial.bandcamp.com/album/dimsvall