(written by Islander)
I’m going to get right to the music today and dispense with the usual personal anecdotes that no one really wants to read, like whether I had to clean up cat vomit this morning (I did), if I’ve learned to make washing dishes by hand a Zen-like experience since the dishwasher broke (nope), the best thing I’ve seen and heard outside the house this week (the pair of hawks that have re-located into the forest and apparently scared all the other fowl into silence), how much I’ve enjoyed beautiful mild PNW days while reading about much of the country getting brutally microwaved (a lot), the only new item I read this morning that didn’t make me furious and/or nauseated (about an anti-poaching campaign in South Africa that involves injecting the horns of rhinos with radioactive isotopes), and my opinion on the rendition of “Paranoid” by the Kings’ Guards at Buckingham Palace (meh).
So yeah, none of that irrelevant personal stuff, getting right to the music, right away, no delays:
PESTILENGTH (Spain)
OOOOF! New Pestilength! One of a pair of big and happy surprises I’m using to launch today’s roundup.
Well, not a complete surprise, because a Debemur Morti Productions press release did tell us on July 9th that this new EP was coming (same press release which reported that the new Blut Aus Nord album, Ethereal Horizons, is complete and set for release this autumn). But one of the benefits of a leaky memory is that you can forget things like this and then go wide-eyed when the music actually drops, as it did yesterday.
The EP includes two songs, “Failure Décor” and “Inane“. Pestilength recorded them during sessions for their 2024 album Solar Clorex. Mainman M offered these thoughts about them: “These two textured frequencies are the hidden side behind the debris of a total demolished entity, the underlayers of corroded existence: the reach of a dwelling sorrow in every human being. Death is the longest path to wander.”
These aren’t long songs, neither of them reaching the 3 1/2 minute mark, but they prove once again how malevolently multi-faceted Pestilength‘s music is.
In the case of “Failure Décor” they bring together horribly churning and gruesomely writhing riffage, magma-strength bass bubbling, executioner percussion, monstrous roars, and blistering screams. The impact is enormous, the mood terrorizing. Nearer the end, when the drums vanish, the feverish layers of guitar corrosion make it feel like our bodies are being defleshed in vats of boiling acid.
“Inane” is initially less devouring and more strange. Clean-toned notes ping and ring, almost jazzy in their manifestation, backed by a slow, warm bass. They even manage to sound seducing, despite the sounds of gasping, snarling, and crying below them.
But of course things don’t stay that way. Like some fountain of blood making its way to the surface, the dense sound of viciously abrading guitars swells, engulfing the senses and broiling the mind. The enormity of the bass imposes itself, along with skull-splitting and tom-tumbling beats, bestial roars, and wails of pain. Yet another display of unearthly terrors from masters of black arts.
https://pestilength.bandcamp.com/album/failure-d-cor-inane
http://www.facebook.com/pestilength
https://www.instagram.com/unholydesignsart
HYPERDONTIA (Denmark/Türkiye)
Here’s the second surprise, another two-track EP released this past week by another band highly favored in my headspace. This one’s named Dormant Scourge.
“Echoes of Undying Cruelty” is a demented mauler and mangler, discharging deranged and darting flurries of angular fretwork, bursts of circle-saw riffage, lots of nimble bass-work, and a full panoply of fast-changing percussive adventures, not to mention the growls and roars from a throat choked with blood and bone.
But the song also includes beautifully contorting and spiraling guitar solos that sound like gloriously ecstatic spirits freed from their prison in the afterlife. Come to think of it, the whole song sounds ecstatic, even if mainly the ecstasies of fiends.
“Dormant” also sounds supernatural, and it’s also a head-spinner, but slower and more oppressive. Before the tremolo’d riffing heats up, the nuanced bass permutations seize attention. When the riffing does heat up, it generates another malicious and eviscerating swarm, but cleaner tones also peal like dismal bells, in line with the song’s doom-stricken opening.
Oh, also be sure to get your neck loose because Hyperdontia also include bouts of jolting, head-moving groove. And thankfully they also throw in two more terrific guitar solos (one of which is also stricken with sorrow), along with other fretwork embellishments and exuberant drum-fills that make the song exhilarating as well as desolate and devouring.
You want a second opinion before you spend your precious time listening? Here’s Ron Ben-Tovim at Machine Music:
Hyperdontia isn’t for everyone, I get that. Not everyone is into perfect riffs, perfect sound, perfect songwriting, perfect performances, and perfect production. I don’t know if Hyperdontia have officially risen to the ranks of modern death metal Valhalla – along with Dead Congregation, Vastum, Blood Incantation, and Tomb Mold – but to me they have. Not a bad release, not a bad song, not a bad riff for eights years running. Ridiculous.
Dormant Scourge is available now as a digital download. It’s set for release on 7” vinyl and cassette via Desiccated Records on October 31st. The cover artwork is by Misanthropic Art. Greg Wilkinson did the mix/master.
https://desiccatedrecords.bandcamp.com/album/dormant-scourge
https://www.facebook.com/hyperdontia/
RIBSPREADER (Sweden)
Every metalhead I know has their own musical “red meat” (sometimes “red meats”), the kind of music they always revert to when in need of sonic comfort food, the kind that always tastes good to them, the kind that makes them slobber when one of the master chefs serves up something new. In my case, high on the bloody red comfort-food list is old school Swedish death metal, including everything and anything with the name Rogga Johansson attached to it.
Of course, his name is attached to many, many bands. Ribspreader is one of his longest-lasting projects, and a fairly prolific one with 10 albums released over the last 20+ years. And this year we’ll get No. 11: As Gods Devour will be released by Xtreem Music on September 30th. The lineup for this new one is Rogga on guitar/ bass/ vocals; Håkan Stuvemark (Wombbath) on lead guitar; and Jon Rudin (Just Before Dawn) on drums.
The first single from the album, “The Pig In You“, was unveiled yesterday. It incorporates ghoulish and fiendish guitar harmonies, viciously eviscerating riffage, neck-snapping beats, and voracious growls. It also heaves and stomps, dismally moans and maliciously boils, slugs hard and writhes in agony. Horrors abound and hooks get set. A very nice slab of (festering) red meat indeed.
The hellish cover art is the work of Spanish artist Lucretia Morti.
http://b.link/Ribspreader
https://xtreemmusic.bandcamp.com/album/as-gods-devour
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100044948155884
MALEVICH (U.S.)
“post-death metal influenced blackened screamo \ power ambient”
That’s the shorthand description of the music made by the Atlanta quartet Malevich. It’s a mouthful. It also accurately checks all the boxes for what they’re doing, as demonstrated by the two songs now streaming from their forthcoming third album, Under a Gilded Sun. But just ticking the boxes doesn’t tell you how much emotional power they’re able to generate from the amalgam of those ingredients — it’s a lot.
The vocals are raw and scarred, high and tormented, spine-tingling and frightening in their intensity. But their intensity is matched in “Blossom in Full Force” by the catastrophic thundering and battering of the drums, the immensity of the bass-level blasts and undulations, and the distressing siren-like whine-and-moan of the riffage.
Malevich also bring in a striking contrast to the earth-shaking upheavals and all the larynx-laceration: the drifting and glittering shine of expansive celestial keys, mesmerizing in their effect, even with the viscerally pulse-pounding percussive clobbering and punchy throbs going on far below. But even those eye-widening cosmic glories begin to sound distressing themselves.
The second song, “Into Bliss“, brings the contrasts right away, combining gargantuan bass-level grumbling, tortured vocals higher up, and ethereal fevers way up in the sonic stratosphere, eventually joined by bone-fracturing beats.
The song also rhythmically jolts and jabs, mewls and blurts, and includes bits of gloomy singing in an upper register. It will get your muscles grooving at the same time as it sounds like the vocalist’s torturer found even more terrible ways to ruin his mind, and the guitar embellishments sound increasingly hallucinatory and disturbed.
Under a Gilded Sun is set for release on August 22nd. The band’s drummer/vocalist Sasha Schilbrack-Cole also made the very cool cover art for the album.
https://malevichatlanta.bandcamp.com/album/under-a-gilded-sun
https://www.facebook.com/malevichband/
https://www.instagram.com/malevich.band/
SARNATH ETERNAL (Ukraine)
In the earlier years of NCS I used to include a recurring feature called MISCELLANY. You can still see the Category tag for it on the right side of our pages. I numbered them, and by the time I stopped, the series was up to No. 79. It had actually withered away several years before that 79th installment.
The self-imposed rule for that series was that I would pick bands I’d never heard before and listen to one song (or maybe two) from something new they’d released, record my immediate impressions, and then leave it to readers to decide whether to explore further. That strategy allowed me to sample from albums and EPs that I didn’t have time to listen to completely or review in full, without knowing in advance how the music would strike me (or you).
This final song in today’s roundup would have fit within that series. It’s from a debut album named Гірка доля безрідних (The bitter fate of rootless) that was digitally released last fall by the Kharkiv-based black metal band Sarnath Eternal. I missed it then, but it has recently surfaced again due to a physical release now set for September 20, 2025, by the Archaic Sound label.
The one song I sampled is the one that’s set to play first at Archaic Sound’s Bandcamp, where the whole album is streamable.
That song, “Вічнозелений” (Evergreen), moves with a powerful rocking beat anchored by a very heavy low end, and those ingredients undergird harmonized riffing that’s part-corrosive, part-clean, and thoroughly broken in its emotional quality. Fronted by harrowing screams of equivalent torment, the music rings and roils, and the band underscore its distraught qualities with a piercing guitar solo that seems to cry out in pain and grief.
Big tumbling beats herald a change, in which churning tremolo’d riffing generates an even more dismal but also possibly furious mood – segmented by defiant jolts and scalding vocals. Haunting choral voices, monastic in style, and reverberating slashes bring another change, and finally the music detonates in an eruption of hammering drums, thundering bass, and blazing riffage. The trilling lead guitar sounds glorious but still stricken.
And still there’s more: The storm briefly spends itself and the rocking groove returns, but the music remains emotionally powerful — heavy and head-moving, both fierce and forlorn. And at the end, the music substantially softens and grieves again.
I thought the song was very impressive, viscerally strong, emotionally moving, and melodically memorable. Even more impressive because this is a one-man band. It impels me, and I hope you, to listen to the rest of the album.
https://archaic-sound.bandcamp.com/album/the-bitter-fate-of-rootless
https://www.facebook.com/archaicsound