(written by Islander)
Here we have the first Saturday NCS roundup of new songs and videos in 2026. It’s a temporal and stylistic mix of things. Temporally, some of it is from records released in 2025 and some from releases slated to happen this year. Stylistically, it will jump you around like popcorn kernels getting hot, including one new song and video that’s well outside our usual musical focus and a closing selection that’s beyond categorization.
I don’t expect everyone to enjoy everything I’ve assembled here, even though I do. That would be too much to expect. I do hope you’ll find at least one thing to brighten your day (i.e., to darken it like a storm cloud).
FROST (Hungary)
My first selection is a new video that surfaced last weekend, although it’s for a song off an album from this long-running Hungarian black metal band that was released last September. That album, Age of Fading and Doom, is one of many 2025 releases that eluded my attention, though the song in this new video makes a convincing argument that I ought to investigate it further despite the turning of so many calendar pages.
The colorless but still artistic video is in some ways a simple one, but its imagery suits the music and doesn’t distract from it. The song itself, “The Gate“, is compelling in multiple ways.
The riffing, simultaneously heaving and harried, generates a dark and desperate atmosphere. The music menacingly stomps, and the vocalist’s deep growls are imperiously commanding, but the song is distressingly laced with shrill guitar frenzies, crazed percussive outbursts, vivid bass-lines, cutting screams, and swirling melodies that seem to cry out in grief.
Those piercing and heart-breaking lead-guitar melodies have staying power, especially the closing solo, and the song’s recurrent dynamism in its renditions of emotional darkness also helps it stand out.
https://frosthungary.bandcamp.com/album/age-of-fading-and-doom
https://www.facebook.com/FrostHungaryOfficial/
EXCAVATED GRAVES (Poland)
Now we move from Hungary to Poland, from black metal to death metal, and from 2025 to 2026 — because the EP that’s my next recommendation was just released yesterday. Ominously titled Life Isn’t For Everyone, it’s the debut of Excavated Graves, a band that shares three members with another group, Death Endorser (labeled by M-A as brutal death metal and grindcore), that also made their debut release last year. But the band’s members aren’t really newcomers — their resumes include such groups as Parricide, Dissenter, Squash Bowels, and two former live members of Behemoth, among others.
The EP’s opener “Soil” seizes attention right away, thanks to a scratchy and quirky overture that seems lifted from some old phonograph recording, and the band continue grabbing attention with groaning and massively distorted riffing over a heaving rhythm that actually seems melodically connected to the overture.
The band also introduce rhythmic stops and starts, miserably wailing guitar harmonies, skull-popping beats, cacophonous vocals (and clapping applause?), racing gallops, viciously churning fretwork, and hoarse bellowing vocals. The song is monstrous, a savage mauler, but with frequent changes that will keep you on your toes, including a completely freaked-out fret-melter of a solo that caps the experience.
The other four songs display similar songwriting dynamism, with frequent shifts in tempo and drum patterns (including punk beats here and there), thoroughly abrasive riffing that veers from circle-saw savagery to blood congealing crawls that ooze decay, relatively clear-toned leads that sound morbidly creepy and miserable, shrill soloing that often sounds ecstatically berserk (but also miserable), and tag-team vocals that ignite from gruff roars into haughty howls and hair-raising screams.
It’s all thoroughly ghastly, brutalizing, and exhilarating — and damned catchy too. To get a further idea of what you’re in for, Selfmadegod recommends the EP for fans of Grave, Gorefest, Cadaver, Carbonized, and Thanatos.
https://selfmadegod.bandcamp.com/album/life-isnt-for-everyone
https://www.facebook.com/Selfmadegod
DWELLNOUGHT (Italy)
Staying with 2026 releases, my next pick is the first single from Dwellnought’s debut album Monolith of Ephemerality, which is slated for release by Caligari Records on February 20th. The track’s name is long and intriguingly strange — “Crystalized Flesh Identities Condensed Into Wombs of Matter” — and so is the song itself.
At the outset, insanity reigns, thanks to wildly clattering drums, wildly writhing riffage that’s scathing in tone, and wild, bestial howls. In the midst of the churning and hammering chaos, weirdly wailing tones slowly spiral up and out, and quiver, like apparitional presences.
The band also slow the pace, but don’t retreat from the overarching aura of madness. The guitars seem to miserably ring like warped chimes and to feverishly shiver through the dense waves of abrasion, while the drums are constantly in flux, sometimes sounding out military cadences, sometimes brutishly pounding, sometimes racing as if on fire.
The song also includes a very strange closing phase. While ethereal tones shimmer in the background (and perhaps choral voices wail), the band combine crackling noise with macabre spoken words, distorted so they sound horrifying as they gasp and bark the words. This phase creates a different kind of nightmarish hallucination to close out a song that’s already hallucinatory in other ways.
https://caligarirecords.bandcamp.com/album/monolith-of-ephemerality
https://dwellnought.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/dwellnought______
A LIGHT WITHIN (U.S.)
Now we come to the song I mentioned at the outset, the one that’s well outside our usual musical focus. It’s the latest single (released last month) from the Kansas City group A Light Within. I saw a press release recommending the music for fans of Porcupine Tree, Failure, Katatonia, Tool, and Pink Floyd, and that was enough to make me curious (this particular song includes a performance by Failure drummer Kelli Scott).
The song’s name is “Dying Clock“, and a clock hypnotically ticks in its accompanying lyric video. The music is hypnotic too, and haunting. The music rings and shimmers, creating a melancholy but also astral mood, eventually joined by a musing bass and steady beats.
I found the lyrics fascinating though disturbing, and vocalist Kyle Brandt’s wide-ranging singing (yes, singing!) is captivating. His voice is low and forlorn, but also rises up along with the flaring of the surrounding sounds, carrying a haunting and also harrowing melody in a style reminiscent of dark post-punk, and his voice gets ragged too.
The music shimmers like strings and panoramically shines like a full moon through mists; the bass moans and snarls; the drumming evolves in carefully crafted ways, providing an earthy grounding for music that generally sounds out of this world. The shivering and glittering melody that draws the song to a close as the clock ticks down to silence is especially mesmerizing.
https://alightwithin.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ALWaudio
GROS ENFANT MORT (France)
Now we go back to music from a record calendared for release in 2026. The band here, Gros Enfant Mort, is located in Poitiers, France. They have a new album named Le Sang des Pierres that will be released on January 23rd by Moment of Collapse Records and No Funeral Records. Three songs from the album are now streamable at Bandcamp.
I don’t profess to be an expert in screamo, but I’ve dabbled enough to know that over time the label has been applied to a crazy range of music, to the point that maybe the only defining quality now are the vocal histrionics. In that respect, Gros Enfant Mort have roots in screamo, but their music also holds to hardcore punk and post-hardcore roots.
These three songs often pack a hard-charging and skull-rattling punch, with lots of dynamic work by the rhythm section, and they’re embellished with both scathing and slashing riffage and doses of unnerving, tension-inducing, angst-expressing guitar-dissonance.
But they also bring forward brightly ringing arpeggios of varying moods and crashing instrumental catastrophes, like pent-up rage unleashed, both of which you’ll find in the explosive “Merci les genres“, which includes strident singing as well as the usual unhinged firebrand screams.
https://nofuneralsound.bandcamp.com/album/le-sang-des-pierres
https://store.nofuneral.ca/products/gros-enfant-mort-le-sang-des-pierres-vinyl
https://linktr.ee/momentofcollapse
https://linktr.ee/grosenfantmort
https://www.instagram.com/grosenfantmort/
https://www.facebook.com/grosenfantmort
NEON SCAFFOLD (Russia)
To close, as promised at the outset, is a debut album released on December 31st by Pest Productions that defies conventional categorization. The band’s description of what the music channels (you can attempt to read it at Bandcamp) is itself mind-scrambling. Here is one of the more intelligible parts of that text:
Featuring core members from Cage of Creation, Затемно, and Licho, Neon Scaffold’s musical world has always been defined by a clash of delirious ideas: jazz-infused walking bass, total gone-bats saxophone, jestering chord progressions—a weird spiral into a hope-drained dissonance that marks the clamour of this Joke-of-a-World…. A prime example of Virus/Ved Buens Ende-inspired Blackened Avant-garde Metal—or a disastrous divergence? We will leave the right to judge to you, and your wasted sanity.
I first encountered Neon Scaffold through their 2020 split with the also-unorthodox Polish band Gruzja. I discovered that release through a recommendation from Rennie of starkweather, and it was this write-up at his starkweather substack that also alerted me to Neon Scaffold’s debut album Noir:
ahahahahahahahahahaha… just knew there would be another in under the wire AOTY contender. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury I present Neon Scaffold’s Noir. Somewhat akin to Virus, Pogavranjen and Yurei given brass accompaniment. Being under the Meshuggah catch 33 rule this is just shy of the cut for me. Nonetheless, it cuts deep.
I’ve confessed on previous occasions that I’m a sucker for brass instruments in metal, and they play a role in Noir, but so do jazz-influenced piano melodies and the afore-mentioned bass-quirks. But even the more usual metal instruments get used in unusual ways, and the vocals are equally divergent, mostly wild, and sometimes downright cacophonous.
The songs are quite intricate and persistently head-spinning in their freakish twists and turns, each one of them like a strange musical carnival spawned by fever dreams or opium inhalations or performed by high-functioning alcoholics.
But, to be clear, these lunatic sessions include plenty of hooks, even if many tend to be bizarre, which means that while your brain is whirling your toes will often be tapping and your head bobbing. That happens not only when the very adept rhythm section lock into some kind of groove (of which there are many kinds) but also when the odd instrumental motifs turn out to be perversely catchy.
Sometimes the songs have an improvisational quality (see the opening of “Old Eclipse“, for example) but as crazed as these excursions are, it’s also pretty clear that they’re mostly very well-planned — the twists and turns are just too sharply executed and carefully patterned to be entirely the result of unrestrained, adventurous impulse.
But to be further clear, this really is adventurous music, and not to be missed by adventurous listeners. (If I had to pick one song that best represents what’s going on here, it would probably be “The Noose of the City“, though the closer “In Neon Bites” is probably the biggest muscle-throbber.)
https://pestproductions.bandcamp.com/album/noir
https://www.facebook.com/neon.scaffold/