(written by Islander)
Today is another Bandcamp Friday, a good time to buy or pre-order music because a greater percentage of the proceeds will reach bands and labels. I had a few hours to myself yesterday afternoon and this morning that I spent surveying new music that’s come out over the last week or so. From that, I picked music from six bands to recommend today.
With one exception, all these songs are advance tracks from albums that will be released either later this month or in September or October. The one exception is the first single from an album that’s being released in full today. There’s a hell of a lot of great cover art in today’s collection too.
If things go as planned, I’ll have more recommendations in the usual space for these roundups tomorrow.
RUNEMAGICK (Sweden)
If my count is correct, Runemagick‘s new album Cycle of the Dying Sun (Dawn of Ashen Realms) is the band’s 14th full-length in a career that began in 1991. This one was entirely composed and performed by Runemagick founder Nicklas Rudolfsson, aided by a few carefully chosen guests.
“Old Bones” has been released as the new album’s first preview song. This musical rune simultaneously creates an air of menacing mystery and punches the pulse of listeners with hooky darting riffage and rocking beats. It grows more frantic and distressing as it goes but also more dismal and haunting.
It discharges apparitional tremolo’d chords, but also big battering-ram blows, booming beats, gritty growls, and savage howls. And at the end things get very bleak but also hypnotically haunting, thanks to an angelic female voice.
Cycle of the Dying Sun… will be released by Hammerheart Records on October 24th.
https://runemagick.lnk.to/oldbones
https://runemagick.bandcamp.com/album/cycle-of-the-dying-sun-dawn-of-ashen-realms
https://www.facebook.com/runemagick/
NEW WORLD DEPRESSION (Germany)
Crank your head up and down and sideways, so that stiff necks don’t fall prey to injury while enjoying this next song. “Carnage” is its name, and headbanging is its game.
Seriously, if the song’s vicious chugs and rocking grooves don’t get your body parts moving (especially your head), that would be a surprise. Those things set a big hook, and the band then bring in raw and rabid howls and frenetically squirming arpeggios. They also change the pace into a menacing lurch, setting up an eerily wailing guitar solo, and then fuel the pistons again, augmented by bursts of rapidly slithering fretwork.
“Carnage” is one of two songs released so far from New World Depression‘s seventh full-length, Abysmal Void. The previously released song from Abysmal Void is “The Vault“, and you’ll find that below too, paired with a video that includes vistas of the band performing.
You’ll get your groove on with this song too, and the vocals are again tremendous (and tremendously monstrous). Like the video, the song also creates an evil and chilling supernatural atmosphere, complementing the music’s visceral, gut-punching hooks.
The album will be released on September 19th by Testimony Records.
https://linktr.ee/newworlddepression
https://newworlddepression.bandcamp.com/album/abysmal-void
https://www.facebook.com/newworlddepression
INNUMERABLE FORMS (U.S.)
Later this month Profound Lore will release the third LP by Innumerable Forms. Its title prepares you for what’s to come: Pain Effulgence. This week brought us the album’s second advance track, “Blotted Inside“.
Prepare for gruesome and grisly tremolo’d riffage that creates inhuman feeding frenzies, undergirded by ruinous low-end upheavals and neck–cracking drums. Equally ghastly, hideous roars reverberate as if recorded in crypts, and the freakish soloing has a similarly sepulchral ring.
But as we’ve come to expect, Innumerable Forms create other dimensions of horror too, slowing to a dismal, doomed crawl, oozing foul sonic secretions as they sluggishly drag their way forward and slow the listener’s heart. There’s another solo there, which slowly wails in misery — and then convulses.
I’m also including a stream of the album’s first advance song, “Impulse“. This one briefly reverses the flow as compared to “Blotted Inside“, hideously doomed at first and then convulsing. Back and forth the song goes, staggering and then flying apart in madness, only to stagger again. Once more the soloing creates preternatural sensations, of agony and fiendish ecstasy. Once more the vocals are gargantuan and authentically malevolent.
Pain Effulgence will be released on August 22nd. Credit for the unforgettable cover art goes to Katie Muller.
https://linktr.ee/innumerableforms
https://innumerableforms.bandcamp.com/album/pain-effulgence
https://www.facebook.com/profoundlorerecords/
TITHE (U.S.)
The Portland-based trio Tithe are already returning with a new album of grinding death (their third) following 2023’s Inverse Rapture. Like the Innumerable Forms album just above, Profound Lore is handling the release. The album’s name is Communion in Anguish.
The song below, “The Fruits of Spiritual Apartheid“, is at first sickeningly slow and dismally diseased in the mood of its mangled and mutilating riffage. And then Tithe stomp their gas peddle, creating a rush of hammering drums, sizzling and darting fretwork (still sickening in its tones), and hideous roars.
The drumming goes even more nuts, the vocals maniacally scream, and the riffage boils and burns, a scourging tremolo-picked froth. They segment these berserk spasms with bits of moaning, groaning, and screaming fretwork, but mainly they bring flat-out hell.
Communion In Anguish will be released by Profound Lore on September 19th. The stunning cover art is the work of Mitchell Nolte.
https://linktr.ee/communioninanguish
https://tithepdx.bandcamp.com/album/communion-in-anguish
https://www.facebook.com/profoundlorerecords/
CANCER VOID (Poland)
The resurrection of old school death metal has continued apace this year, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. In the case of the new Polish band Cancer Void, it’s for the better — at least based on the first single I heard yesterday from their debut album First Metastasis (clever name!).
That song, “Ammonia Baths“, is also cleverly named. Just imagine luxuriating in a tub filled with ammonia. In the song, the sonic ammonia churns, a whipping bubble bath of aromatic toxicity. It comes with vivid galloping beats too, poisonously writhing tremolo’d abrasion, feverishly slithering leads, haunted-house soloing, and an amalgam of horrid roars and strangled screams.
Fun video too, including the car trunk, which apparently has interdimensional properties, and cemetery pole-dancing, because why the hell not?, and of course some blood-letting.
This is the band I mentioned in the introduction, whose album is being released in full today (by Me Saco Un Ojo Records). You can listen to all of it now at Bandcamp — which is what I intend to do as soon as the dust settles on today’s NCS postings.
https://mesacounojo.bandcamp.com/album/first-metastasis
https://www.instagram.com/cancervoid_death/
https://www.facebook.com/mesacounojo/
SUM OF R (Switzerland/Finland)
And to close, we’ll move from red meat for the death metal addicts to something considerably more strange.
I knew I’d written about Sum of R in the past. I didn’t realize until checking that it was almost 12 years ago! They’ve released two more albums since then, and now there’s a new one named Spectral that will be released on October 3rd by WV Sorcerer Productions and the band. I’ve listened to the two songs they’ve released from it so far. They both put a deep chill on the back of my neck (and everywhere else).
The most recently released of the two, “Solace“, includes a maniacal, fangs-bared guest vocal appearance by Juho Vanhanen (Oranssi Pazuzu), one of several scary facets that twist into place in this head-twisting and hallucinatory song.
Other changing facets include slow-rocking drums with such sharp and punchy immediacy you might think the kit was set up inside your skull; snarling and sizzling chords; vaporous singing with a pleasing quaver; eerily squealing and frighteningly pulsating leads; and a suddenly catastrophic crescendo that creates towering malignancy, augments by even more horrifying vocal intensity.
The earlier song, “Empty Rooms“, is less about creating a nightmare spell, which “Solace” achieves, and more about creating interdimensional horror. It sounds like a convocation of monstrosities roaring and wailing in the void, surrounded by an array of shrill unsettling electronic emissions that ratchet up the fear factor.
About halfway through, big booming beats join in, along with extravagant singing (like a cult leader prophesying the glories of death), brittle ringing tones that fiendishly dance, sounds of burbling alien frogs, and a bit of cosmic warbling.
Both songs are inventively deviant and demented, very odd but paradoxically hard to resist.
If you don’t know, Sum of R‘s lineup includes composer Reto Mäder (Ural Umbo, JeGong, RM74) on bass guitar, synthesizer, effects, tapes, metallophon, mellotron; Jukka Rämänen (Dark Buddha Rising, Hexvessel, Waste Of Space Orchestra, Dust Mountain) on drums; and Marko Neuman (Dark Buddha Rising, Ural Umbo, Waste Of Space Orchestra, Convocation) on vocals. Other guest appearances on the album include Vicotnik (DHG/Dødheimsgard Official, Ved Buens Ende) and G. Stuart Dahlquist (Burning Witch, Goatsnake, Asva).
I first found out about the new album thanks to Rennie Resmini‘s latest starkweather Substack post. Here’s his take on the pair of tracks now available for listening:
Given the band members affiliations and Oranssi Pazuzu’s Juho Vanhanen assisting on “Solace” this is grown from a similar creeping garden of slime mold and fungi. Eat shrooms, drop acid, get fucked up on this psychedelic droning freak show. Felipe Froeder (Arcano XV) artwork is appropriately whacked for this October country journey.
If you let the Bandcamp player continue to run, you’ll hear both songs.
https://sumofr.bandcamp.com/album/spectral
https://wvsorcerer.bandcamp.com/album/spectral
https://www.facebook.com/sumofr/