(written by Islander)
Greetings again on another Sunday, or whatever day it might be when you find your way here. Today’s collection is shorter than I would like it to be, because I have plans for the morning with my spouse that will take us out of the house, and I wasn’t able to spend much time pulling this together yesterday.
I’m beginning with an album released one month ago that I’ve been meaning to say something about for at least that long, and then following it with singles from two forthcoming albums that sound pretty exciting.
ASTERIAE (Poland)
My friend Andy Synn reviewed Asteriæ’s debut album Gasnąc in March 2023. Among the compliments he offered were these:
Fans of bands like Downfall of Gaia, Regarde Les Hommes Tomber, and Celeste in particular would do well to check out Gasnąc, as the group’s blending of Black Metal intensity, Post-Metal atmosphere, and Post-Hardcore emotion, strikes a similar chord to their more well-known peers, while still retaining just enough subtle differences to set itself apart.
I thoroughly enjoyed Gasnąc, and agreed with Andy‘s emphasis on the band’s effective use of melodic ingredients as counterpoints to their music’s vehemence, and the impact of “raw, emotive vocals [which] ring far truer than the hate-fuelled hymns of many of the corpse-painted clades with whom Asteriæ share at least some common ancestry.”
Their new studio album was released last month, and they introduced it this way: “This album, like all the music we write, is a way to flee from ourselves. That’s why the album is called Miejsce, które nazywam sobą which means in english ‘A place which I call myself’. It is in music that we can place every bad emotion, which allows us to be more open and good in everyday life.”
Once again, Asteriæ explore intersections of post-metal, hardcore, and black metal on their new full-length. That’s evident on the album’s opening song, “1-4-8“. On the one hand, the band immediately launch a ferociously surging black metal assault with dense, dark, and abrasive riffing, furiously hammering drums, and hurtling bass-lines. As the vocalist’s scalding screams arrive they also subtly shift the mood of the music into bleaker territory, elevating the riffing into a distressing range.
On the other hand, they pull back into a more introspective and melancholy phase, allowing the bass to mournfully muse and brittle guitar notes to glisten. And while the band’s fury explodes again, spiked by truly shattering vocal pain and delivering waves of high-flown riffing that also sound like pain, they also bring in crashing bursts of grim and mind-scouring fretwork and heavy groaning tones, as well as further moments of lonely ringing strings that contrast with the immensity of their staggering low-end momentum.
But still, there’s more: Shrill whirring chords, near-clean in tone and searing in effect, seize attention as the song nears the end, along with guttural roars, wild cries of torment, vividly rumbling drums, and chords of grim grandeur.
The emotional intensity of the song, in both its most explosive and most forlorn phases, is powerful and authentic, and that becomes the hallmark of the four songs that follow. Those songs also perpetuate the contrasts and complements among, on the one hand, viscerally powerful drumming and vividly prominent bass performances, and on the other, the shining and searing impact of the guitars and the throat-shredding and roaring intensity of the vocals.
Those other songs also continue punching damned hard, and they continue diving deep into dark moods, moods of rage and desperation, of confusion and agony, but there’s a lot of fight in the moods as well, like a refusal to succumb to what drags souls down.
On “Tchnienie” Asteriæ also work in immense low-frequency pulsations, ethereally shimmering sensations, skull-smacking snare-beats, and horizon-spanning melodic brightness, along with ingredients of earth-shaking heaviness and grimly churning abrasiveness.
In fact, every song brings something new. “Uwolniłem się“, for example, initially leans more into hardcore and even includes some rap-like vocals (along with splintering screamo cries), but it also hits like a battering ram and drenches listeners in waves of vibrant melody that sound hopeful, while the closer “Toń” includes one of the album’s most attention-seizing bass performances, some of the record’s most despairing guitar melodies, and some of the album’s most gentle, wistful, and poignant moments — all of that surfacing in the midst of a musical smashing machine.
Probably more so than in Gasnąc, Asteriæ‘s new album moves in ways that probably won’t be quickly embraced by fans of black metal (those ingredients sound more diminished), but will be more quickly embraced by fans of post-metal. The screamed vocals aren’t par for the course in either genre, but they’re in keeping with the heart-felt emotional intensity of the music, and I wouldn’t change them.
https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/asteri1/miejsce-ktre-nazywam-sob
https://asteriae.bandcamp.com/album/miejsce-kt-re-nazywam-sob
https://www.facebook.com/asteriae
https://www.instagram.com/asteriae_official/
OPPRESSION (France)
Oppression is a relatively new Bordeaux band formed by vocalist G.S.V and guitarist Tom L, and then rounded out by guitarist Predark, and brothers John (Otargos, Lifestream) and Désert (Lifestream) on drums and bass, respectively. They’ve finished work on a debut album named No Safe Place that’s set for release by Folter Records on December 12th.
What I’ve heard so far is the first single, “The Call of the Night“, and man, it made a very strong impression.
Cold winds whisper at the outset, and guitars miserably ring and whine, dampening the mood immediately. But that just makes the detonating power of what comes next even more overpowering.
When the explosion happens it sounds like an avalanche in the low end, and the riffing pierces the mind with rapidly roiling and writhing intensity. The music sounds vast as well incendiary and distraught. The shrieked and howled vocals sound even more distraught, right on the brink of mind-blown insanity.
Oppression break things up with mandolin-like melody and dour spoken words, but also cause that rippling melody to burn and those spoken words to become stridently passionate. The band ramp up the traumatic intensity again, but also create other dynamic diversions and additions, including desperately sizzling chords, haughty pronouncements (like some high priest of darkness), acrobatic rhythm-section adventures, and grand symphonic overlays that seem both celestial and catastrophic. Through it all, they don’t lose the distressing melodic thread, but bury it deeper and deeper in their listeners’ heads.
https://folterrecords.bandcamp.com/album/no-safe-place
https://www.facebook.com/oppressionblackmetal/
WORM (U.S.)
I hope you saw the 2026 lineup announcement two days ago by the NCS-sponsored Northwest Terror Fest, which will take place in Seattle next May. I hope you saw that the lineup includes an appearance by the Floridian “Necromantic Black Doom” band Worm. Coincidentally, just the day before that announcement Century Media announced that it will be releasing Worm’s sophomore album Necropalace on February 13th, and to help pave the way they also released a video for the album’s lead single and title track.
The video is a hell of a thing. It’s like an excerpt from some B-scale horror movie from the ’70s involving the vampiric perils that beset a beautiful but helpless young woman in an ancient necropalace, with the band’s two members playing as co-stars (and doing a very good job of it too). (It was directed by Norman Cabrera (Danzig, Walking Dead, Fright Night II), produced by Maya Kay, colored by Alex Nicolaou (Drab Majesty) all with direction from Ted Nicolaou (TerrorVision, Subspecies)).
The song itself could be the score to an old-school horror movie as well, itself unfolding like a chilling but thrilling theatrical narrative. Among its many baroque ingredients, which cross multiple genres of metal and many decades of influence (and are too numerous to identify exhaustively) are:
…slowly writhing riffs that conjure haunted houses and demon kings; elegantly rippling piano keys and rapidly rippling fretwork; dancing acoustic arpeggios; brazenly blasting drums and frenzied organ keys; big booming low-end thrusts that shake the walls and bursts of grand symphonic bombast; clashing swords; blood-lusting vampiric howls and werewolf growls; waltz-like spins; gently ringing guitar reverberations; feeding-frenzy guitar vibrations; and a gloriously shred-tactic guitar solo with a supernaturally ecstatic aura (and an extended duration); along with dramatic changes of pace and intensity.
Is it over the top? Oh hell yes it is. Is it a fantastically fiendish fantasia? Hell yes, it’s that too, and all you ghouls out there should flock to it. I can’t wait to see and hear this performed on stage next May in Seattle.
Necropalace was produced by Charlie Koryn (Morbid Angel) and mixed/mastered by Arthur Rizk (King Diamond, Blood Incantation, Sumerlands). I’ll conclude by sharing Century Media’s evocative encapsulation of the album’s music:
“Necropalace lives in a world of its own. A world of lush velvet and ostentatious gold, covered in the dust of time. A world where shadows seem to move in your peripheral vision, yet the loneliness never ceases. A world where wounds of the flesh may heal, but those of the heart never do.”
https://Worm.lnk.to/Necropalace-Album
https://wormgloom.bandcamp.com/album/necropalace-24-bit-hd-audio
https://www.instagram.com/wormgloom