(written by Islander)
My selections today were guided by strong memories, many of them quite distant and others more recent. And the music below is strong enough to make new memories. I’ll explain as we go along.
P.S. Be forewarned: There’s more than a little singing in this Saturday’s collection, especially in the closing segments, and it’s all very good!
INFERNO (Czechia)
I didn’t start following the Czech band Inferno until coming across their sixth album, Omniabsence Filled By His Greatness, in 2013. I’ve paid close attention since then, and was even able to host a song premiere from their seventh album, Gnosis Kardias (Of Transcension and Involution).
But the strongest memory I have of Inferno was formed when I finally got to see them play live at the final edition of Oration Fest in Iceland in 2018 (before it was re-born as Ascension Festival). Like I said, some old memories, and that show is one I really won’t ever forget. I tried to explain why here.
Three years after that event Inferno released their eighth album, Paradeigma (Phosphenes of Aphotic Eternity), which also blew me away. They don’t churn out music at a fast pace, but now their ninth one is on the way at last. Its title is The Anthropic Sophisms (On the Heights of Despair), and conceptually it’s described as a work that “rejects a human-centered, anthropocentric perspective.” The band explains:
The human being is neither measure nor destination here, only a witness. An infinitesimal point within a field of forces that surpass it. The senses fail, reason loses its footing, and yet something is happening. Something unnameable, existing beyond language and beyond control. This is not music that tells a story or offers consolation in a refrain. It is a movement unfolding regardless of expectation.
Photo credit: Necrohorns
Last week brought us a video for the first song disclosed from Inferno’s new album, “Circulus Vitiosus Deus (The Infinity Ravages All)“. It’s the album’s closing song and the shortest of the four included on the record (the others range between 9 minutes snd nearly 14).
The captivating video made by Fabio Rincones is surreal and frightening. So is the song. It’s powered by booming, muscle-moving rhythms, but the surrounding music creates immense, miasma-like swaths of dangerous and dismal sound, threaded with clarion-clear sonic filaments that flicker and swirl.
The grooves are immense and irresistible, and almost everything else about the song is too. It channels daunting magnificence, demented frenzies, and a kind of horrifying transcendence.
The Anthropic Sophisms (On the Heights of Despair) is set for release by Debemur Morti Productions on July 17th. The stunning cover painting is by Dávid Glomba.
https://pureinferno.bandcamp.com/album/the-anthropic-sophisms-on-the-heights-of-despair
https://www.facebook.com/InfernoCZBM/
SCARAB (Egypt)
Distant memories continued to be revived with this next selection. I first discovered and then wrote about the Egyptian band Scarab in July 2010 in the first part of a feature devoted to “Metal From North Africa”. I continued following and writing about them, and even my pal DGR got in on the act with a review of their 2020 album Martyrs of the Storm.
Since then we’ve had to wait a while for something new, but recently Brutal Records announced they will release a new Scarab EP titled Transmutation of Fate on May 8th. The first single from it is “Vow of the Sphinx (Abo El-Houl)“.
Slow and solemn choral chants open the song, and then pass the vocals on to bestially barking growls backed by viciously pulsating riffage, vividly throbbing bass notes, and bursts of clattering drums. Periodically, choral singing fervently rises up, and the music soars and sweeps as well, carrying exotic melodies that resonate with the band’s ancient homeland in between bouts of unbridled vocal and instrumental savagery.
It’s quite an elaborate and steadfastly dynamic experience. The extravagant variations in the drumming alone are worth the time, but the interweaving of death-metal aggression and mythic Middle Eastern melody really make the song stand out.
https://brutalrecords.com/scarab-vow-of-the-sphinx-abo-el-houl/
https://orcd.co/brut89678
https://orcd.co/brut89677
https://www.facebook.com/Scarabegypt/
A BAND OF ORCS (U.S.)
And the stroll deep down memory lane continues with A Band of Orcs from Santa Cruz, California. We have quite a history with them, beginning with a feature I wrote in October 2010 about “Goblin Metal”. That led to many more features, as well as participation by a couple of the Orcs in our year-end Listmania features. But alas, we’ve had no new music from them since their 2015 EP March of the Gore-Stained Axe Tribe — until now!
A Band of Orcs have announced that they will release a new EP named A.I.rachnocracy on June 17th, so named because it tells a tale of “Rule by artificially intelligent spiders.” What you’ll find below is the EP’s title track, accompanied by a video that provides close-up views of the Orcs on stage, in case you’ve forgotten or never knew what they look like (time has not made them prettier!).
I ought to admit that one reason I enjoyed this next song and video is because it carries me back to a sillier and more innocent time in the world of metal and my enjoyment of it. But I don’t mean to suggest that the fun of “A.I.rachnocracy” is wholly rooted in a fond nostalgia. It’s also rooted in a plethora of skull-rattling and gut-slugging beats, violently unhinged riffing that slashes and sears, berserk soloing, and a cavalcade of slaughtering screams and haughty roars. It gets nerves firing on all cylinders and might leave abdominal bruises too.
Hail Gzoroth!
https://abandoforcs.bandcamp.com/album/a-i-rachnocracy
http://abandoforcs.com/
http://www.facebook.com/abandoforcs
[4672] (Poland)
Looking back at our archives, I’m reminded that I have written about individual songs or complete releases by the constantly surprising [4672] nine times since 2019. So, not as long a history as I have with the first three bands in today’s collection, but nothing to sneeze at either.
I somehow managed to fall down on the job earlier this year when [4672] released their [apex9] album and I failed to write it up. But here we are just three months later, and we have a new [4672] EP named [apex8].
The title seems to be going backward although time has moved forward, but I’m sure there’s an explanation – and a connection between these last two releases. Time being short on my side, I didn’t investigate and won’t make any guesses but will only encourage you (once again) to open your mind and take the plunge into the ever-spinning [4672] musical whirligig.
I’m sure I’m made the point more than once that trying to describe a [4672] release is both difficult and probably foolish, because the songs are often so different from each other that carefully and thoroughly devoting words to each of them would risk tedium, and that’s true again here. Just to touch on a few things (this isn’t close to being comprehensive):
As you make your way through the EP you’ll encounter industrial-strength grooves that will bounce your floors if played at sufficient volume, as well as gleefully squirming and squiggling notes and possibly under-the-influence singing. You’ll also encounter frantic drum escapades, hulking stomps, chaotic instrumental convulsions, madhouse screams, unexpected stops and starts, sounds of mechanistic gnashing and gouging, blaring and brazen chords, and filaments of deliriously wailing melody.
Some of the songs sound like fragments of something longer that might have been cut short too soon. Some of them are more conventional in their length. But really, none of them are musically conventional. Despite the fact that you’ll have plenty of chances to get your groove on, you’ll also have plenty of chances to get your head spun, or caved in.
(To be clear, I don’t know for sure if there are any vocals in these songs, or just electronics or other instrumentation that resemble field recordings at an asylum that ran out of medication last week.)
https://4672.bandcamp.com/album/apex8
https://www.facebook.com/4672x
EX CINERE (U.S.) / IEROFANIA (Italy)
Memories are still playing a part in my choices today, but they’re not quite as old in this next case (or the one after).
Ex Cinere is the solo work of Joe Waller, who has also created music under the name Sarasvati and with Adora Vivos and Amiensus (among other projects and groups). The first time I wrote about Ex Cinere was near the release of a 2024 debut single called “Ācennan“, which was followed later that year by a second single named “Eorþblód“, and then in the fall of 2025 I eagerly premiered a third one named “Negative Commemoration” — a song and video designed to document Waller’s disgust over the sanctification of Charlie Kirk.
The newest Ex Cinere song is a thoroughly breathtaking one that appears on a split with the Italian band Ierofania that was released on April 29th. That song, “Blōt Þām Steorrum“, puts a chill on the skin immediately and then suddenly blazes like a nova, wondrous but frightening, very much like the cover image on the split.
The drumming begins to riotously thunder, and those searing and soaring swaths of sound become even more apocalyptic and expansive. The densely layered music frantically swirls and brilliantly dazzles, but might make you run for shelter in fear of the earth burning along with the skies.
Yet it also manifests astonishing celestial glories — at its zenith you can imagine a heavenly host singing at the limits of their passion, even though something is dismally throbbing far down below. At the very end, cosmic mysteries unfold.
Ierofania’s song on the split is “Ogni Cosa Sconosciuta è Sublime“. Like Ex Cinere’s song, it too sounds extraterrestrial, very chilling and haunting at first and then swelling into an immense slow-moving tide of groaning and grievous sound, heaving movements coated with abrasion.
Shrill sonics flicker and sparkle around those bleak, heaving undercurrents, and they flare and burn. A heavily humming bass and relatively steady drums are about all we have to hold onto as we get visions of ragnarok all around us (though the drums do become furious). Near the end, the music becomes eerily futuristic but also kinetically crashes like comets.
As in the case of Ex Cinere’s song, I can’t tell whether this one includes vocals, or just instrumentation that represents unearthly heralds of catastrophe.
The two songs go together very well, and collectively make for a pretty astonishing experience.
https://excinere.bandcamp.com/album/ex-cinere-ierofania-split
https://ierofania.bandcamp.com/album/ex-cinere-ierofania-split
BEWARE OF GODS (U.S.)
Like my memories of Ex Cinere, my recollections of Minneapolis-based Beware of Gods are of relatively recent origin, based upon my premiere early last year of a song from this solo project’s second album, Upon Whom The Last Light Descends II: Amnesia Island. But it was a damned powerful memory, and so I wasted little time jumping into the next song in today’s collection
As you’ll soon discover, this song also unexpectedly led me down into a blues burrow, and I continued burrowing with the next recommendation today.
As I warned at the outset, “Disenchanted Enchanter” includes singing, and very good singing at that, very strongly influenced by the blues. The guitar-work is also blues-influenced (and at times trippy), but immensely heavy and doom-influenced too.
And to be clear, the song is a very sinister affair — and becomes increasingly hellish and scary as it progresses and the pace picks up. It includes crazed and narcotic wah-wah guitar soloing that would probably make Hendrix smile, and even those bluesy vocals (which get doubled up) eventually splinter into screams in the song’s convulsive finale.
“Disenchanted Enchanter” is from the next installment in Beware of Gods’s unfolding trilogy, an album named Upon Whom The Last Descends III: Behead The Oracle. It will be released by Invoke Records on July 10th.
https://bewareofgods.bandcamp.com/album/upon-whom-the-last-descends-iii-behead-the-oracle
https://www.facebook.com/bewareofgodsband
THE DEVIL AND THE ALMIGHTY BLUES (Norway)
Now the memories get really old again, but the blues aren’t going anywhere.
I was turned on to The Devil and the Almighty Blues thanks to our friend Grant Skelton’s excellent review at NCS of their 2015 self-titled debut album. I enjoyed that one, and probably enjoyed the follow-up Tre even more.
But that was 2019, and there’s been nothing from them since — until now! Now we have a new single named “Lied To“. It’s described by their label Ripple Music as the first of three singles set to arrive throughout 2026, leading up to the release of a new album.
As on today’s preceding entry, “Lied To” includes singing. It happens to be tremendous singing, else you wouldn’t be seeing it at a site with a name like ours. Vocalist Arnt Andersen’s high gritty wail is the song’s star, especially when he really sends his voice into the rafters, but the rest of the song is good too, especially if you’re an admirer of Delta blues, Southern guitar twang, fuzzy riffs, and moonshine by the bucketful.
And lest you wonder, the devil comes out in his finest raiments in the song’s final couple of minutes.
https://orcd.co/liedto
https://thedevilandthealmightyblues.bandcamp.com/track/lied-to
https://www.facebook.com/thedevilandthealmightyblues/
STYGIAN BOUGH (U.S.)
I think many of you probably know of Seattle’s non-commercial radio station KEXP, and of the many fantastic live studio performances they’ve hosted and videotaped over a lot of years. But if you don’t know, you should at least investigate the station’s long-running Saturday night metal show Seek & Destroy, hosted by my old friend Tanner Ellison.
The most recent live studio performance hosted by Tanner and Seek & Destroy was by Stygian Bough, filmed on March 5th and just released last week for viewing and listening. That 40-minute video is my last choice for today’s collection.
The video features Aerial Ruin’s Erik Moggridge on lead vocals and guitar, as well as the Bell Witch duo of bassist Dylan Desmond and drummer Jesse Shreibman. The two songs they collectively perform, “From Dominion” and “King of the Wood“, were included on Stygian Bough: Volume II, the second collaborative album by Aerial Ruin and Bell Witch, which was released last November.
All I really want to say about this, and all I really have enough time to say, is that it’s a completely captivating experience.
And to loop everything back around to where we started, I’ll mention that Tanner Ellison was with me and other Seattle friends when I saw that Inferno performance at Oration Fest in 2018, and my write-up about it included his photos.
https://bellwitch.bandcamp.com/album/stygian-bough-volume-ii
https://aerialruin.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/BellWitchDoom/
https://www.facebook.com/aerialruin/
https://www.kexp.org/shows/Seek-&-Destroy/
https://www.facebook.com/SeekAndDestroyOnKEXP