(written by Islander)
I’m obviously still doing what I usually do around here, picking out some new songs and videos to share with you this weekend. But in addition to being overwhelmed by the sudden January surge in new music, the task has been especially difficult because I’ve been so infuriated and depressed by the murder in Minneapolis, the outrageous bald-faced lies spouted about it by Trump and his minions, including the fabricated demonizing of the deceased, and the likelihood that the murderer will face no accountability at all. Only ten days into the New Year, and 2026 already looks devastatingly dark here in the U.S.
I haven’t listened to new music over the last couple of days to take my mind off these events, or other terrible events both here and around the world. I do often immerse myself in music for that very reason, as many people do — to get some relief from more awful aspects of existence. But not now. The rage and the sadness aren’t going to be diverted. Now, I’m just trying to keep my head down and carry on because I don’t have any better ideas, even though it seems on days like this that what we’re doing here is unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
Well, sorry for unloading like that. I still want you to listen to all the songs I picked for today. In my humble estimation, they’re all very good, even though I suspect I’ll appreciate them even more on some distant and brighter day.
INCANDESCENCE (Canada)
“[T]heir most dominant and immense album yet.” That’s how Profound Lore Records announces a new album by the Quebecois black metal band Incandescence. Titled Hors Temps, it’s the work of multi-instrumentalist Philippe Boucher (Beyond Creation, Chthe’ilist), who handles all instruments and songwriting alongside vocalist Louis-Paul Gauvreau. Given the proven power of the band’s previous albums, it’s an encouraging claim, and the album’s first single suggests it’s not hyperbole.
Catch a few breaths before you press Play because Incandescence give you no room for air as the song begins. The drums go nuts; the riffing swarms, sears, and dramatically soars; the vocals blow the hinges off sanity’s door. The music is immersive and storming, and generates an atmosphere of frightening grandeur.
Even when the drumming slows down and a rippling lead guitar vibrantly emerges to help channel moods of sorrow and agony, the scale of the music remains daunting, and the vocals soon reach new heights of explosive passion.
The dense riffing and the piercing leads begin to sound like a vast rushing whirlpool of torment and despair, segmented by momentous percussive detonations. Following a whirring bridge the song becomes even more typhoon-like in its violent power — and more emotionally fraught — though in its closing moments the music becomes haunting in a chilling way.
Hors Temps will be released by Profound Lore on February 20th.
https://incandescenceband.bandcamp.com/album/hors-temps
https://www.facebook.com/Incandescencebm
SPEGLAS (Sweden)
The current lineup of Speglas consists of vocalist and guitarist Isak Rosemarin (Sweven, ex-Morbus Chron, ex-Century), drummer Jesper Nyrelius (Sweven), guitarist Alexi Hedlund, and newly added bassist Victor Berg (New Keepers of the Water Towers). Together they’ve recorded a debut album named Endarkenment, Being & Death, their first release since the 2022 EP Time, Futility & Death, which we had the pleasure of premiering here. The album is described as one with an “overarching concept, influenced by Nietzschean philosophy”.
This past week Speglas unveiled the record’s second single, “Dearth“, which is part of that overarching concept. Isak Rosemarin describes it: “‘Dearth‘ deals with a kind of spiritual famine within the human being. In other words a lack or scarcity of values, aim and therefore meaning. Or in Nietzschean terms, which the album holds as a main inspiration – any answer to the question ‘why’ is lacking. The song itself has a bit more weight to it then the rest.”
“Dearth” is indeed undeniably weighty — but maybe not in the way you’re expecting. At first, it delivers a melancholy but spellbinding guitar melody with acoustic-folk accents. That melody continues to sadly sing even after the band bring their weight to bear, and it digs in deeper even as the band shift into a mid-paced rocking groove and vent distressing, caustic snarls.
The song’s heaviness is really emotional heaviness. Speglas don’t bludgeon or crush listeners here (your head will mostly nod rather than cower), but the melodies of grief and yearning are damned penetrating and potent, and so is the scorching intensity of the vocals.
Beyond that, the song shifts into a compulsively pulsating riff backed by a compulsively throbbing bass, which together set the stage for an extended guitar solo that’s both stricken and exhilarating, and completely connected to the song’s melodic through-lines.
The song certainly has depressive aspects, but I hesitate to brand it with that term because it’s also just viscerally full of life and energy.
Endarkenment, Being & Death is due out on February 27th via Trust No One Recordings.
https://speglas.bandcamp.com/album/endarkenment-being-death
https://www.tnor.se/speglas/
https://linktr.ee/speglas
https://www.facebook.com/SPEGLAS/
https://www.instagram.com/speglas
PIGPEN (U.S.)
Following that last song you’d best prepare for a case of whiplash before listening to this next offering.
The Seattle band Pigpen caught my attention almost one full year ago with their album Agony and Irony. It was so unpredictably multifaceted and so frequently unhinged that trying to describe it wasn’t easy. I tried this in my sort-of review:
Sometimes the music sounds proggy, sometimes tribal, sometimes jazzy, sometimes funky, sometimes hallucinatory, sometimes like the product of electroshock therapy (mostly like the product of electroshock therapy). As they say in the trade, this definitely won’t be for everyone — the vocals are especially rude and ruinous — but if you’re in the mood to dump your brain in a lysergic acid blender and hit “puree”, you’ve come to the right place.
As bamboozling as that album was, it left a mark, and so I couldn’t resist delving into their new album Cloth Mother, which came out on January 6th. Based on the credits, they once again use only bass guitars, drums, and vocals (with one song that also includes a trombone).
It’s possible to identify various genre ingredients within these songs — aspects of hardcore, psychedelia, funk, proggy rock, and maybe even death metal — but it’s still damned tough to describe how they interact. Even the vocals, which are mostly larynx-rupturing, ear-shredding, and as cacophonous as an asylum for the unmedicated criminally insane after all the guards and caretakers have fled for the hills, sometimes get woozy and wailing or mutter in muted tones (and there are female spoken-word samples here and there too).
The big bass lines and vibrant drumming in the songs are capable of taking over your muscles, or of gouging grooves through quarries of stone, but the band also torture the bass into expelling sounds of sizzling abrasion and screaming madness, and the tracks include some terrific drum-fills too.
Yet in the drum-less opening of “Home To Roost” the bass also generates a mysterious and menacing melody, and along with what might be the shimmer of keys it provides the dark backdrop for a kind of singing that seems to splinter and fracture. But the song gets a hell of a lot heavier and more harrowing when the drums do come in.
Based on the credits, the band’s three members switch up their usual roles in the fourth song, “Possession“. That’s the one that includes a trombone, though it may not sound like what you expect. The effects-laden vocals are often ghostly in their singing, and strange electronic emanations surface and subside.
That’s probably the most dreamlike and hallucinogenic song on the album (though later on “Tin Can” gives it a run for the money), and it’s a well-placed interlude before Pigpen start messing with listeners’ minds in other ways. The follow-on track “Final Seconds” carries forward the trippiness of “Possession“, as well as the singing (in the song’s back half), but the rhythm section get their grip back again, while the vocals mostly lose theirs. I think it might be the album’s best example of the ways in which Pigpen are prone to stretch themselves.
This album is undoubtedly too weird and experimental for most people. It even presses its luck with me. But in such a mad world, it hits the bullseye often enough that most of the time I thought it perfectly suited as a soundtrack for what’s happening all around us.
https://pigpen1.bandcamp.com/album/cloth-mother
https://www.instagram.com/pigpen_pnw/
HEIR CORPSE ONE (Sweden)
This next song is an example of synchronicity, or at least serendipity (I always have to look up the definitions of those words because I forget the difference): Yesterday we published Comrade Aleks’ interview of Leo Stivala, vocalist of the multinational doom band Anchorite, whose veteran lineup also includes the prolific and seemingly ubiquitous Swedish musician Peter Svensson. And then later that same day I discovered a new song from a new album named Destination: Domination by Heir Corpse One.
Of course, serendipitously, Svensson is part of that lineup too — along with the also-prolific-and-seemingly-ubiquitous Rogga Johansson (guitars, vocals), plus Kjetil Lynghaug (guitars) and drummer Marcus Rosenqvist (who is also a member of Anchorite, among many other bands). Originally formed by Johansson and Svensson during the pandemic year of 2020, they’ve been following a macabre narrative through their releases, described in these terms:
The band’s debut album presented a full-fledged concept story about wealthy passengers fleeing the pandemic in a private jet, only to crash, descend into cannibalism and trigger a zombie outbreak… Picking up the narrative thread from the debut of the band led by Rogga Johansson, the [new] record follows the undead survivors of the doomed luxury-jet crash as they embark on a grotesque mission toward the heart of power. Their macabre flight sets loose a plague of undeath across the land, transforming farms and towns into slaughtergrounds. As brutal survival machines rise to resist the onslaught, the dead continue their relentless advance. With humanity collapsing under the weight of the black infection, a blasphemous Undead Nation emerges – an age where death claims absolute rule.
The first single from the album that Heir Corpse One revealed last week is the record’s penultimate track, “The Last Supper“, which predictably describes a different event than the biblical one.
It’s an offering of Swedish melodic death metal whose opening guitar melody generates a dismal and sorrowful mood, even as it stomps and slugs — but with a spooky guitar solo leading the way, the band take off, discharging buzzing swaths of gutting riffage, galloping beats, and Johansson’s distinctively monstrous growls.
The music continues to dismally wail as well as feverishly jitter, and to morbidly throb and moan as well as squeal and hammer. Speaking of hammering, the rhythm section lock into a pulverizing groove as the backdrop for a soaring and vibrantly swirling guitar solo that’s both eerie and thoroughly electrifying.
The song is produced to generate tremendous power, and its dynamism is impressive, proving to be haunting as well as savage. It’s also very catchy.
Destination: Domination will be released on February 6th by Emanzipation Productions.
https://heircorpseone.bandcamp.com/album/destination-domination
https://www.facebook.com/HeirCorpseOne/
DEADWOOD (Canada)
Here’s another band that, like the one just above, came together during the pandemic year of 2020 and has managed to persist since then. Just yesterday Innerstrength Records released a new EP named Rituals of a Dying Light by these Canadian deathcore brawlers. I had heard part of it previously, but decided to get run over by the whole thing late yesterday. No reason why I should be the only one with splinted fractures and abdominal wounds this morning, so here you go.
As I write this, only three of the five songs from the EP are streaming at Bandcamp. Those three pull together violently thundering barrages, even more violent hornet-swarm riffing, berserk soloing that dissonantly screams and feverishly convulses, episodes of thuggish slugging, and vocal belligerence that’s both monstrously roaring and asylum-strength rabid.
The other two songs, “Whispers of Death” and “Echoes of the Fallen” carry forward the conjoined experiences of pile-driving brute-force trauma, hair-on-fire fretwork mania, voracious vocals, and eerie melodic spasms.
However, “Whispers of Death” also melodically generates a more dismal and oppressive mood and brings in ethereal keyboard swirls that contrast with the brutal iron-shod grooves, along with a strangled and gasping vocal variation. And “Echoes of the Fallen” further extends the band’s dynamism in even more nightmarish and even vaporous directions with mournfully wailing guitar-leads and gently glistening notes, but also includes the most attention-seizing guitar solos on the EP, an extended two-part spectacle.
Those two songs, which hopefully you’ll be able to hear soon, are the best on the EP, but the whole thing is solid.
https://innerstrengthrecords.bandcamp.com/album/deadwood-rituals-of-a-dying-light
https://linktr.ee/Deadwood.band
https://www.facebook.com/Deadwood666/
PATRIARCHS IN BLACK (U.S.)
I’m older than you probably think I am. One clue is that the first album I ever bought with my own money was Led Zeppelin II. Eventually, I bought everything else they recorded. To this day they are one of my all-time favorite bands. So when I saw the news that a duo named Patriarchs In Black had recorded a cover of Zeppelin’s “The Ocean“, I knew I would have to check it out. But it was more a case of “just for the hell of it” than any expectation that I’d want to listen to the song more than once.
To explain further, the song is from Houses of the Holy. I wouldn’t say that’s Zeppelin’s best album (though it’s a great one), but I happened to listen to it more times than I could have counted during a key period in my life, and so to me it’s definitely one of the most important of all their records. And “The Ocean” might be my favorite song on that album.
So, you can see why I listened to this cover with some trepidation. On the other hand, I hoped it would at least briefly lift my gloomy spirits, just like the original did so many times. On the other hand, it’s near-impossible to displace any Zeppelin original with a cover.
The cover was recorded by the Patriarchs duo of Johnny Kelly (Type O Negative, Danzig) on drums and Dan Lorenzo (Hades, Non-Fiction) on guitars, with their guest Mark Sunshine (Unida) doing the vocals.
Compared to the original, the cover adds fuzz, grit, and extra weight to the riffing, a bit heavier punch to the beats, and a beguiling squall to the soloing. While anyone would need a lot of guts to stand in the shadow of Robert Plant’s singing, Mark Sunshine does a remarkably good job.
The original briefly makes a quirky vocal shift, and shifts again at the end into a kind of ’50s rock episode that bears little resemblance to what comes before. The Patriarchs follow suit but put their own trippy mark on those changes. Nicely done! This one I’ll listen to again.
I see now that these two northeastern U.S. dudes have released a lot of other music before this new single, bringing in different bassists and vocalists. I see now that I need to get my ass in gear and listen to more of what they’ve done.
https://patriarchsinblack.lnk.to/theocean
https://www.instagram.com/patriarchsinblack
https://www.facebook.com/people/Patriarchsinblack/61559097640883
EXHUMED (U.S.)
Now to close out with a bonus.
Looking back at the intro paragraphs to this column, I can see why readers would conclude that all the fun in my life has been poisoned. Which is very close to the truth, but not entirely true. I didn’t want to have fun when I watched the video for Exhumed’s new song “Unsafe At Any Speed“, but it’s so wacky and so well-done that I think most metalheads will get a kick out of it, and maybe even a few belly-laughs, just like I did, even though I felt morose and hateful again not long after.
In the video, the song doesn’t start until about 3 1/2 minutes in. Those first 3 1/2 minutes are a hoot, especially the crazed rants of the burrito-chewing projectionist Greenblatt vividly performed by J.R. Foster, though I think I chuckled loudest at the close-up of the salival slop being exchanged by Romeo and Juliet.
The song is a hoot too, a gory hard-slugging musical mauler replete with maniacal screams, guttural roars, eviscerating fretwork-swarms, bouts of squirmy but still neck-moving riffage, and ecstatically freakish soloing. Art for art’s sake! 🙂
“Unsafe At Any Speed” is from a new Exhumed album named new Red Asphalt that will be out on February 20th via Relapse Records. I’m guessing the video is age-restricted because it includes a quick view of a stiff penis — surely not because of the vomit and the gore!
https://www.relapse.com/pages/exhumed-red-asphalt
https://exhumed.bandcamp.com/album/red-asphalt
https://linktr.ee/exhumed_official
https://exhumed.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ExhumedOfficial/