(written by Islander)
For you music lovers out there who just crawled out from under a rock, yesterday was a Bandcamp Friday, the last one of 2025. During those 24 hours we received more than 300 e-mails in the NCS in-box, at least half of them Bandcamp alerts, and that’s not counting the flood of digital traffic that rolled in the day before. Many of the messages were about music that had just been released.
I figure I have about a 50/50 success rate in getting new-music roundups posted on Bandcamp Fridays, which for obvious reasons would be an ideal time for them. Yesterday goes in the failure column. Just couldn’t get it done yesterday, what with other distractions getting in the way and the desirability of allowing Andy Synn’s list-week pre-launch to be our last post of the work-week.
I do feel guilty, but would have felt guilty anyway: Even rounding up a handful of new songs yesterday wouldn’t have made a very big dent in the wall of new tracks that slammed down this past week. Today’s roundup is just a modest dent too, but hopefully sufficient to start your weekend off with a dented skull. As usual, I’ll attempt to do additional cranial denting (of a more consistently blackened variety) tomorrow.
By way of preview: In listening to candidates for today’s collection I fell down a hellish rabbit-hole, beginning with vicious variants of black and death metal and then taking a turn into a pair of furious EPs, one of grind and one of hardcore. If you’re not feeling pissed-off and/or evil and/or grim today, now would be a good time to make your exit.
NECROFIER (U.S.)
This column is called “Seen and Heard” for a reason — not only because it always includes eye-catching artwork but also because I like to include songs that are paired with good videos. And that’s how we begin today.
The video for Houston-based Necrofier’s new song “Servants of Darkness, Guide My Way I” is a thoroughly gripping thing to witness. The band members themselves come off scary as hell, with cloven feet still stomping in whatever infernal domain birthed them. But the video doubles down on its infernal trappings with an assortment of other nightmarish imagery.
The video is very well-made and also entirely suitable, because the song itself is an explosively savage hell-spawned attack. It erupts in a seething flurry of hornet-swarm riffing, thunderous drumming and scorch-the-earth screams, then segues into a more occult direction with ritual-like beats and soaring chants.
The riffing remains poisonous and predatory but the sounds are also bleak and hopeless; the drums generate neck-snapping grooves; and the music becomes more melodically expansive, ominous, and despairing, more towering and heaving, even as the vocals reach fever pitches of mind-broiling fanaticism. It’s the kind of thing that may leave the whites of your eyes showing all ’round.
The name of Necrofier’s new album is Transcend into Oblivion. It will be released by Metal Blade on February 27th.
https://necrofier.bandcamp.com/album/transcend-into-oblivion
https://www.facebook.com/Necrofier
CONSUMPTION (Sweden)
Last spring we published Zoltar’s interview of the ever-busy Swedish musician Håkan Stuvemark, the focus being his band Consumption, whose latest album Catharsis had been released in January. In the interview, Håkan acknowledged that the primary influences on Consumption were Necroticism-era Carcass and very early Arch Enemy, but that Consumption’s music takes other turns as well, as the spirit moves him — and so it does.
What’s next in today’s collection is a Consumption track that was just released yesterday, kind of a placeholder for Consumption’s next album, which apparently is now in production. It’s also the first song with new Consumption vocalist Matti Mäkelä from Corpsessed. In addition to him (and Håkan on guitars), the lineup includes drummer Jon Skäre, bassist Mathias Back, and a “Super Kung-Fu guitar solo” by Ludvig Johansson.
This new song, “Reap the Past’s Rewards“, features an attention-grabbing overture: it hits like a battering ram but also spins out immersive melodic riffing with a gleaming edge that’s bleak and perilous. Following an even more harrowing bridge, the drums start scampering, the riffing creates a viciously slashing pulse, and the vocals monstrously bellow and rabidly scream the words.
Blast-beats occasionally break out; the guitars occasionally sound like violent convulsions; the lead guitar extravagantly whistles and whirls; the low end slugs hard and will bend necks; the soloing is a flickering and freakish spectacle; and the vocals are never less than gruesome and grotesque. There’s also an air of terrible grandeur about the song, a kind of malignant magnificence.
Definitely more going on here than Carcass or old AE worship, a particularly diabolical, viscerally compelling, and hook-laden rendering of melodic death metal.
https://wombbathofficial.bandcamp.com/track/reap-the-pasts-rewards
https://www.facebook.com/consumptionsweden/
EXIMPERITUS (Belarus)
My next choice is “The Untimely Fruit of the Unsaid,” the first advance track from a new album named Meritoriousness of Equanimity by the Belarusian band Eximperitus.
Gruesome, abyssal gutturals announce the song, backed by militaristic drum tattoos and riffing that corrosively boils and burns. The riffing also viciously jolts and miserably whines, setting the stage for a freakishly contorting guitar solo.
Though instrumentally feverish and spiked by vivid drum-fills and blast-beat flurries, the song continues to carry a very tormented and miserable mood. The music seems to dismally moan and hopelessly wail, though accented by high-toned fretwork-seizures and slowly weeping lead-guitar melodies. The dual-guitar soloing really seizes attention, heart-broken and anguished in its melodies.
It’s emotionally a very intense and dark song, but it also includes a closing phase that sounds like corrosive jackhammers bent on busting skulls, punctuated by squealing and squirming string-tortures. Get your neck loose for that final minute and a half.
Meritoriousness of Equanimity is set for release by Willowtip Records on January 30th. They describe it this way:
Eximperitus’ forthcoming third album, Meritoriousness of Equanimity, contains nine independent compositions united by the idea of searching for inner support in an era of turbulence. Exposure and scourging of social dogmas and morbid tendencies on the ruins of the old world…
https://eximperitus.bandcamp.com/album/meritoriousness-of-equanimity
https://www.facebook.com/eximperitus.official
https://www.instagram.com/eximperitus_official/
DER ROTE MILAN (Germany)
Now we’ll turn in blacker metal directions with “Aus der Finsternis“, the first single revealed from Der Rote Milan’s new five-song EP Verlust, which is described as a record devoted to capturing themes of grief, suffering, despair, and anger — but with moments of hopefulness. Here is how the press materials describe this first song:
“Aus der Finsternis” establishes the mood for the album. Through sonic manifestation, DER ROTE MILAN focus on the initial shock and the first stage of loss in this track. The powerful and heavy instrumentation reveals a sense of destruction, of desolation, as the reality of the loss hits. Through the melodic elements, there is fragility but also a very faint touch of hope entwined amongst the gloom.
The song comes with a suicidal video that’s a harrowing and haunting match for the song’s darkness. And the song is undeniably dark and depressive. It’s often anchored by muscle-moving rhythmic grooves, but as the tremolo’d riffing slowly rises and falls it generates sensations of grieving and despair, while the vocals howl in torment.
The band torque the torment to an even higher level of intensity with blasting drums and frantic riffing that sends its melodic waves higher, seeming to wail in agony (along with the vocals). The band also create a feverish, jolting pulse, and they further infiltrate the music with shrill lead-guitar agonies that send the music to zeniths of pain, even as the momentum slows toward the video’s final drop.
(There’s no hope to be found in this song.)
P.S. I learned not long after posting this column that Der Rote Milan have recently released a second song from Verlust — “Où allez-vous” — and I’ve now included that below as well.
Verlust will be released on December 12th by Unholy Conspiracy Deathwork.
https://derrotemilan.bandcamp.com/album/verlust
https://www.facebook.com/derrotemilan/
SMEARING (U.S.)
Earlier I forecast that we’d be taking a turn into furious grindcore, and now’s when that happens, thanks to a new song by Seattle-based Smearing from their forthcoming second EP, Acts of Service.
What you’ll get in this sub-two-minute “Domain Lapse” is an onslaught of dense, high-abrasion riffing that vividly surges and maniacally swarms, coupled with drumming that both bounds and blasts, and gut-slugging bass-lines. The vocals deliver screaming, asylum-strength madness, all hinges ripped off the doors, in keeping with the song’s often boundless violence.
But after a blood-congealing interlude, the song begins to lurch, stomp, and ruinously claw, like some hulking netherworld beast (though the drums back that with a maniacal blast-session). Smearing describe their music as “Nightmare grindcore for the class war,” and that seems like a fucking fitting description of this song.
I happen to have heard the rest of Smearing’s new EP. It includes 8 songs, of which “Domain Lapse” is the penultimate one, which rampage for a collective 16 minutes. The 7 that aren’t out yet are just as furious and lethal as the one you’ll hear below.
They discharge feral punk chords slathered in grit and paired with d-beat energy, as well as outbursts of tremolo-picked and blast-fueled insanity. They also fire up spine-busting jackhammer sessions with brutish intent and spit out acetylene-hot guitar freakouts. Through it all, the amalgams of bellowing roars, fanged snarls, and hair-on-fire screams sound completely crazed, like a pack of the most rabid big dogs you can imagine.
Smearing do some other things to keep listeners white-knuckled, offering strange bass burbles, bits of miserably braying melody, slow-lane movements of oppressive ghastliness, bursts of screeching feedback, and clear-toned guitar spasms that sound completely mind-gone.
Listening to this EP, it’s real easy to imagine most pits with all caution thrown to the winds — though the closing track “You First” sounds so apocalyptically bleak that it’s easier to imagine people stunned and frozen in place in fear while listening to that one.
More background: Smearing was formed in the winter of 2024 in Seattle, and its lineup includes veterans of such PNW metal bands as Nurser, Heiress, Cult Sickness, and Void Dancer — vocalist Clint Gee, drummer Nate Pennington, guitarist/vocalist Wes Harrison, and bassist/vocalist Mat Houot. The new EP follows up their 7.5-minute self-titled debut assault from last January.
Acts of Service will be released on December 12th.
https://smearing.bandcamp.com/track/domain-lapse
https://linktr.ee/smearinggrind
https://www.facebook.com/p/Smearinggrind-61571413810504/
MARTIRIO (U.S.)
I’ll let the proprietor of Transylvanian Recordings begin the introduction to my last choice in today’s collection, an EP named Fuerza Ancestral by the band Martirio (which translates to “Martyrdom” in English):
Brash, Abrasive, & Seething Hardcore Punk from Fresno(CA). Angry and trend free, the way it’s meant to be. Just killer, furious, rabid hardcore done right!! When I first heard this I was absolutely blown away, I reached out immediately to work together and get this properly put out into the world.
And here are some words from Martirio (vocalist Ivonne Martinez, drummer Andres Gonzalez, and guitarist/bassist Nestor Rodriguez):
This collection of songs is a testament to the strength, resilience, and struggles of “undocumented” indigenous people, whose experiences often go unheard. Through our music, we aim to shed light on all of our stories, amplify the voices of those who often go unheard and to give you an understanding of the struggles many of us face.
Martirio move away from the EP’s starting line with “Bronco“, a song that begins slowly and bleakly, featuring an enormous bass, clobbering drums, and feverishly whirring guitars. It becomes a primitive, cold-hearted stomp-fest accented by a shrieking guitar, as a prelude to the advent of high-pitched punk yells, d-beat leaping, and miserably writhing riffage. And the song keeps changing, slowing down (led again by the iron-shod brutishness of the bass), and with vocals that scream in a display of tortured extremity.
You can tell from just that opening song that Martirio are capable of packing a lot of changing moods and momentums into their compact tracks, and they keep doing that over the six songs that follow. It’s not “easy listening” by any means, but nor should it be in these distressing times.
The music is furious and defiant, as well as desolate and desperate. It hits with pulverizing and electrifying power. It’s capable of jump-starting a listener’s adrenaline. The songs are also threaded with riffs that have staying power, and it’s interesting how they announce and then adapt them in ways that alter the mood (“Ciclos” in particular is an excellent example of that, but it’s true of all the songs). And that big clanging bass never loses its appeal, or its ability to make you check your floors for fractures.
https://transylvanianrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/martirio-fuerza-ancestral
https://www.facebook.com/TransylvanianRecordings