(written by Islander)
Technology is treacherous. I had this post written five hours ago, but a glitchy security feature prevented me from accessing the site and posting it. Our web host fixed the problem just minutes ago. Which is why this roundup is appearing so late.
Other than weeks ending on a Bandcamp Friday and weeks that include Halloween, my perception is that weeks ending on a Friday the 13th tend to be the most bulging with new metal. That was certainly true of the past week (and the few days before it began). You want proof? Well, here are 10 well-known bands who released new songs and/or videos during that period:
ALLEGAEON (U.S.)
EMPLOYED TO SERVE (UK)
HELLRIPPER (Scotland)
IMMOLATION (U.S.)
INFERI (U.S.)
MONSTROSITY (U.S.)
PORTRAYAL OF GUILT (U.S.)
SARCASM (Sweden)
SIX FEET UNDER (U.S.)
VOMITORY (Sweden)
I easily could have included any of those songs and videos in this column, because they’re all damned good. And you won’t go wrong going after them, which I’ve made it easy to do via those hyperlinks. But I decided instead to do what we often do around this place, and that’s dig deeper under the ground.
As you can see from the post title, my digging unearthed an abundance of gems, and I found enough time to write about all 8 of them this morning. They will likely do some damage if you swallow them all, or even one of them, but your eyes will… sparkle.
LAIR OF THE MINOTAUR (U.S.)
I nearly fell off my chair when I saw that Chicago’s Lair of the Minotaur had released a new song yesterday, and that on May 1st they’ll release their first album in sixteen years. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t have been shocked, given that they’re confirmed to appear at Maryland Deathfest this year, and they did release a couple of singles in 2024, but I was still very pleasantly surprised.
That new song, “I HAIL I“, is the title song from the new album. Like the album, it features the work of founding guitarist/vocalist Steven Rathbone, longtime drummer Chris Wozniak, and new bassist Sanford Parker (and surely you know who he is). Rathbone describes the song as “a rebellious declaration from Prometheus to defy the Gods and bring fire to humanity.”
Just 2 1/2 minutes long, the song is nevertheless a reminder of just how fucking heavy and enraged this band’s music can be. The riffing sounds like the jarring pulse of a distorted siren that’s sounding a warning which comes too late. The drums slug hard, boom loud, and crack necks. The vocals flip from raging howls to wild cries and monstrous roars, sometimes doubled for extra intensity. It’s not fancy — the raw and rebellious fury is all that counts.
https://lairoftheminotaur.bandcamp.com/track/i-hail-i-2
https://www.instagram.com/lair.of.the.minotaur
SKAPHOS (France)
A word to the wise among bands: Never underestimate the attraction power of cover art. I mean, just look at the cover art for the new Skaphos album, and admit you would listen to it even if you had no idea who Skaphos are.
I mean, I would listen to it even if it had a solid black cover, because I do know who Skaphos are and I’m familiar with the kind of scary and crushing music they’ve previously released, but I still greatly appreciate the artwork — another spine-tingling and blood-congealing triumph by Paolo Girardi. And as for what this album includes, here’s a description:
“After the release of ‘Cult of Uzura‘ last year, SKAPHOS will already return in 2026 with ‘The Descent‘, a new album revisiting the band’s early works. The record will feature four tracks from ‘Bathyscaphe‘ and four others from ‘Thooi,’ the band’s first two albums. For the occasion, these songs have been re-recorded, reworked, and fully remixed….”
The first advance song from the album and the video that accompanies it are as striking as the cover art. “Mireborn” is its name. At first, it resembles an obliterating avalanche in progress, spiked by blurts of weirdly yowling sound, and then it surges and pulsates in a different way, joined by viciously quivering chords, malignant roars, berserk screams, spasms of crazed drumming, and distressing swirls of anti-melody. Overlays of dismal symphonic sound near the end add to the music’s viscerally unsettling impact. And as if the music alone weren’t enough frightening enough, the video (and the bandmembers’ visages) double down on the fear factor.
The new album is named The Descent. It will be released by Les Acteurs de L’Ombre Productions on April 10th.
https://ladlo.bandcamp.com/album/the-descent
https://www.facebook.com/skaphosofficiel
WITCH RIPPER (U.S.)
This past week also brought us another immediately memorable song from Through the Hourglass, the forthcoming third album by Seattle-based Witch Ripper. This one’s called “The Clock Queen“. Here’s the comment about it from vocalist and guitarist Curtis Parker:
“In our story, it represents the big reveal of who our antagonist meets in this world they’ve found themselves in. Throughout the album, we peppered in what we call “the clock queen’s theme,” a melody that sneaks its way into almost every song at some point. This song is the culmination of that tension and it’s when we finally meet the driving force of the album: The Clock Queen herself.”
This new song follows the album’s first single, “The Portal”, which showcases the wizardry that has caused Witch Ripper’s music to appeal across a broad swath of listeners with varying genre preferences. That song is plenty heavy — you can feel the bass in your bones, and the drumming will rattle your skull — and its wailing guitar melodies are desolating. Its chugging riffage also sounds menacing, and the ensuing howls and screams are beastly. But the song also gloriously soars, elevated by spine-tingling singing, brightly swirling tones, and terrific guitar soloing that goes sky-high. “The Portal” is menacing and even monstrous, mad and magical, spectacularly grand, and loaded with melodic hooks.
“The Clock Queen” is another multi-faceted affair. Launched by sinister but intriguing guitar reverberations and tumbling beats, it picks up the opening melody and spins it higher through an opening solo. The song then begins to pulsate and slug, while the throaty vocals sound ravenous. A slowly slithering melody rears its viper-like head while singing flies in and goes up to the rafters once more. The music also seductively flows and caresses, though it might be a witch that’s stroking our flanks, because the song becomes more feverishly sinister. And it continues to twist and turn in head-spinning fashion.
Listening to this is like having a front-of-stage seat to a piece of elaborate and otherworldly theater, a pageant of fiends and snakes, of beasts and sorcerers, of deception and revelation — and like “The Portal”, it will get stuck in your head very damned fast.
Through the Hourglass will be released by Magnetic Eye Records on April 10th.
https://spkr.store/collections/witch-ripper
https://witchripper.bandcamp.com/album/through-the-hourglass
https://www.facebook.com/Witchripper
SISYPHEAN (Lithuania)
Now we turn to black metal with a video for a song called “In Divergence” from a new album by the Lithuanian band Sisyphean, whose last album (2022’s Colours of Faith) was enthusiastically reviewed here by our Andy Synn.
Sisyphean waste no time blowing open the doors with a tempest of thundering drums, viciously roiling and savagely surging riffage, cut-throat howls, and crazed cries. The fretwork vividly whirls in ways that generate sensations of menace and misery, and it also uncages rapidly jolting pulsations that sound demented.
It’s a relentlessly dynamic song, and so the band also pull back on the pace to make room for ringing melodies of haunting bleakness and depressive hopelessness (but with no relent in the bloody-minded savagery of the vocals), and they cause the music to methodically hammer, dissonantly blare, and to writhe in pain. On top of all that, the video provides great views of what the band’s stage shows must be like.
“In Divergence” is the second single from the album. Below, I’ve also included a stream of the first one, “Black Bird That Brings No Joy“.
The title of Sisyphean’s new album is Divergence, and it will be released by Edged Circle Productions on April 3rd.
https://edgedcircleproductions.bandcamp.com/album/divergence
https://www.facebook.com/sisyphean13/
https://open.spotify.com/artist/0Xy7774MgfGvyRPGJZVABN
https://sisyphean.bandcamp.com
VOID OF LIGHT (Scotland)
Being unfamiliar with the music of Void of Light, I didn’t know precisely what to expect when I checked out this next song and video, though I was tempted by PR descriptions of the music as “operat[ing] somewhere in that vast sonic territory between Neurosis’ tectonic power, Cult of Luna’s cinematic sweep, and the shimmering haze of shoegaze.” As I watched and listened to this song, I gradually fell deeper and deeper into its well of emotional power and came out immensely impressed.
The song is a 10-minute piece called “Mirrorings“, which had its streaming premiere at Decibel. I’ll resist the ever-present temptation to linguistically map every ingredient and turn in the song’s elaborately evolving pathway. In brief, it creates moods of bleakness and growing tension, of introspective confusion and charging anger, of fervent yearning and deep sorrow, of haunting wistfulness with glimmers of lilting beauty, and of crashing catastrophe. The pacing and the volume levels continually change as the music moves from dark troughs to brilliant crests. Like the music, the vocals also change, switching from caustic and cutting assaults to singing that’s deep and doleful but also climbs.
“Mirrorings” is from an album named Asymmetries, which is set for release by Ripcord Records on April 3rd.
https://ripcordrecords.bandcamp.com/album/asymmetries
https://www.facebook.com/voidoflightband/
DEPRESSION NAP (U.S.)
Depression Nap is a three-person band from Milwaukee who wrote us about their two-track debut release, a 7″ EP whose title bears the names of those two songs — Your Beauty Is a Broken Mirror Reflection / Corpse Dysmorphia. They said their music is hard to pinpoint genre-wise, but “falls into the realm of Screamo and Black Metal/Noise Rock”. That was intriguing enough that I decided to find out what that might sound like.
The first of the two songs grabs attention fast with a riotous drum solo and a flurry of slashing, swirling, and densely boiling guitars. The music sears, and so do the unhinged screaming vocals. The drum progressions continue seizing attention (and so do the burly bass maneuvers) while the acid-strength guitars drench the listener as they burn, throb, painfully swirl, and brazenly surge.
The second song begins much more gently — just the brittle and kind of desolate ring of picked guitars — but that wandering muse gets blasted to atoms by the music’s sudden vulcanism. When the lead guitar returns by itself in interspersed segments, it sounds much more miserable and mutilated. So do the more abrasively piercing tones, which might make you think of an open vein pumping out blood. The gasping vocals that join in don’t sound healthy either, although the drumming is still full of vibrant life.
Eventually, the music becomes a screaming, ear-shredding convulsion of sound before it catches a bit of rhythmic footing and dismally churns with serrated-edge knives. Near the end the drums vanish, and the music flows like a cesspool of congealing rot and degradation. Or at least that’s how I hear it!
https://depressionap.bandcamp.com/album/your-beauty-is-a-broken-mirror-reflection-corpse-dysmorphia
APOSTLE (U.S.)
My next picks are two songs and videos by the Atlanta band Gospel. Like Depression Nap, there’s no shoving Apostle into any neat genre box. Their music entwines elements from grindcore and hardcore, post-black metal, shoegaze, and atmospheric post-rock. As that description implies, these two songs don’t follow a straight line, but their intensity (and their surprises) sure did grab me by the throat and put me in a head-lock.
The most recent of the two songs, “Distortions of Light“, begins with a recording of the poet E.E. Cummings offering advice to students and aspiring writers, and the words are well worth hearing. The lyrics of the song, shown in an accompanying spider-strewn video, are also well worth reading — and may need to be read, because they’re expelled in shattering screams high above ragged and screaming guitars. It’s a distressing, disturbing, and increasingly desolate experience, and the heavily undulating bass and hard-slugging drums don’t offer much comfort either.
The earlier song, “Swine”, is equally uncomfortable but even more challenging. The vocals are again incinerating in their intensity, and the riffing is again a boiling cauldron, but its frenzies are even more frantic and searing. The guitars also vividly ripple and whirl, peal and spasm, and the rhythm section launch into bouts of hammering and rumbling turbulence. Apostle torque the tension and the agony in the riffing to the breaking point of intensity and then keep it there, on the bloody red line of madness and pain.
Both songs are from an album named A Splinter in the Infinite Noumenon, which is set for release on June 5th by Terminus Hate City.
https://www.terminushatecity.com/product-page/preorder-apostle-a-splinter-in-the-infinite-noumenon-lp
https://apostlesucks.bandcamp.com/album/a-splinter-in-the-infinite-noumenon
http://www.facebook.com/apostlesux
NOISE AHOLIC (Finland)
This closing selection is very much a case of “last but not least”. I put it last only because it’s a full album (released March 4th) instead of one or two songs, and because I wanted to stop scurrying among other things before deciding how to describe it while listening one more time. Here’s how the Elitbolaget label depicts it, before recommending the album for fans of Skitsystem, Wolfbrigade, Totalt Jävla Mörker, Disfear, Anti Cimex, and Martyrdöd:
Dirty. Fast. Uncompromising. Noise Aholic’s mission remains the same: keep crust punk raw and alive, while opening the door for fellow punks to join the chaos. Welcome to En Värld Styrd Av Lögner; a soundtrack to a world collapsing under its own bullshit.
These 12 songs are definitely fast, and hell-bent on blasting away the bullshit instead of adding to it. Only three of the songs crash through the two-minute mark, and several don’t even get close to that.
In the rhythm department, d-beats dominate, along with bowel-loosening bass-throbs. This is punk, but it’s very heavy punk, like punks in charge of an attacking tank squadron. On the guitar front, the riffs slash like crowbars encrusted with grit while the lead guitars often brightly (and maniacally) swirl. Fury fuels the music, and comes through as well in napalm-strength vocal tirades and serrated-edge snarls.
But charging drums, raging riffs, crazed soloing, and disgusted vocals are only part of the story here. That becomes clear in just the second song, which happens to be the album’s title track. Its opening moments are tremendously bleak; the lead guitar wails in pain above bomb-like detonations. Even when Noise Aholic punch the accelerator the song’s throbbing fretwork sounds grim, and the vividly whirling and high-spiraling solo itself sounds stricken.
The songs don’t fuck around. With visceral intensity, they get blood rushing and muscles moving, a catharsis for pissed-off moods, and sometimes tremolo’d chords and furiously hammering drums send the music into convulsions of raw violence. But the songs also return to episodes of grief, despair, and hopelessness, channeled by despairing guitar melodies that spear out and up, anchored by undercurrents of staggering heaviness (“Självhat” is a particularly powerful example of this).
The album also switches things up in other ways. Some guest vocalists pitch in with larynx-shredding screams, and in one of those songs (“Den dödsdömda generationen”) the music actually sounds gloriously resilient.
In all these respects, throughout all the continuing push and pull of momentum and mood, the songs’ emotional intensity is raw and authentic. You’ll have a tough time finding a more cathartic reflection of how fucked-up the world is today, straight through to the short and savage but tremendously hopeless closer “Döda mig” — “Kill me” — whose lyrics translate to “I just want to die / Nothing is worth anything anymore / Kill me”.
P.S. An online translation tool reveals that the album’s title translates to English as “A World Ruled by Lies”.
P.P.S. If you don’t already know, Noise Aholic is the solo project of Owe Inborr from Ondfødt and Dispyt, accompanied by a changing array of allies. This new album includes guest vocals from Kjell Simosas and Otto Kaalikosksi (Bob Malmström), Mari Luoma, and Petter Haukland (known from Kaos, Kris och Helvete among others) and “solos and licks” from Marco Lindholm.
https://elitbolaget.bandcamp.com/album/en-v-rld-styrd-av-l-gner
http://www.facebook.com/elitbolaget