(written by Islander)
I’m getting a very late start this morning. I wrote an explanation and then deleted it because my late start is the result of a level of stupidity that’s kind of embarrassing even for me. Better to just dive in.
What you’ll find below is a truncated version of what I originally planned. The collection begins with a single and then continues with three EPs, the last of which is a rehearsal demo that’s the band’s first release.
DAUÞUZ (Germany)
The opening song today is from the German miners Dauþuz and their forthcoming sixth album, Todeswerk: Uranium II. For this album the duo enlisted a session drummer and brought back acoustic guitars to enhance their moods of melancholy and despair. Here’s a description from the press materials about the album’s themes:
As the title suggests, the lyrical work of Todeswerk: Uranium II focuses once again on uranium mining and the years following the Second World War. This time, however, the attention is directed towards the tormented forced laborers and victims in the Joachimsthal region and Bohemia. The inhumane conditions in the mines, industrial plants, and camps run by the Soviets and later the Communists, as well as the creeping decay of an entire landscape, are brought to light here. Thousands of miners, destroyed and worn to death, had to pay for the Soviet race for the atomic bomb with suffering and torment.
The first song released from the album is “Joachimsthal – Jáchymov“. It arrived with a video of Dauþuz performing the song in their natural habitat.
The acoustic guitar melody that opens the song is beautiful but haunting, elegant and ancient. The melody doesn’t vanish when the music explodes, but it becomes orders of magnitude more harrowing, and the vocals are spine-tingling as they furiously range from screams to cries to roars to song.
The music thunders and sweeps in broad waves of guitars and synths, indeed wrenching in its moods, and the haunting and desperate aspects of the music deepen even when the drumming shifts into steadier cadences and the singing solemnly soars.
The impassioned intensity and dramatic variations in the vocals really are stunning, but so is the song as a whole.
Todeswerk: Uranium II will be released by Amor Fati Productions on May 29th.
https://dauthuzbm.bandcamp.com/album/todeswerk-uranium-ii
https://www.facebook.com/DauthuzBM
VYR MUK (Ukraine)
Continuing with a theme of atrocities perpetrated by Russian tyrants….
I first delved into the wrenching black metal of Vyr Muk through this solo project’s 2024 EP Тіні, що Падають на Мертві Міста (Shadows Falling on the Dead Cities), reviewed here. That was one of four EPs Vyr Muk released that year, and it was followed by another EP and two albums during 2025. Now Vyr Muk has discharged its first release of 2026, an EP named Mens Devastata. I’ll quote the English-language text on the EP’s Bandcamp page:
Emerging from the shadows of war-scarred consciousness, a new three-track EP delivers an unflinching exploration of psychological trauma, mental illness, and the lingering horrors of combat. Blending oppressive atmospheres with relentless aggression, this release is not merely music — it is an auditory manifestation of a fractured mind.
Drawing directly from themes of post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and dissociation, the EP channels the internal battlefield that persists long after physical conflict ends. Each track functions as a chapter in a descent: from the echoing memory of war, through the suffocating grip off anxiety, to the complete distortion of reality itself.
Three songs long, the EP opens with “Тіні Битв” (Shadows of Battles). It heavily booms and it convulses in trem-picked flurries that sear. The vocals are shattering in their raging and tormented expulsions. The music itself often sounds like warfare, but also slows and descends into melodic hopelessness and oppressive gloom, creating panoramas of pain — though the vocals remain explosively terrifying throughout.
In the second song, “Голоси Порожнеч” (Voices of the Void), the words come forth in roaring gutturals, and frenzied riffing creates feelings of anguish and despair around heavily vibrating bass-lines and beats that both stagger and blast. It feels like being caught offshore in a powerful, frothing undertow that threatens to sink the listener.
You might briefly get your head above water when the music briefly slows, and a guitar miserably rings and eerily warps, but then Vyr Muk ramps up the song’s turbulent and traumatic intensity once more.
The last of the three tracks (and the longest) is an instrumental “Outro“, but probably not what you might expect from such things. It’s chilling and haunting at first, but then it starts booming, jolting, and unfurling shrill and slithering guitars.
The music swells into maelstrom-like proportions of madness, a surreal and unsettling experience even though the hard-slugging grooves persist. The music also slows and dismally claws its way forward until chill winds blow.
The EP as a whole is a disturbing experience, and the songs do indeed seem to powerfully capture the themes quoted above.
https://vyrmuk.bandcamp.com/album/mens-devastata
https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/vyrmuk/mens-devastata
GOD SHELL (U.S.)
For many years running, a group of incredibly personable and talented gear techs from central Texas have flown up to Seattle to manage the stages at Northwest Terror Fest. That tradition began when some of them delivered a set of Worshipper cabinets that the festival bought when it became clear we were going to continue producing it for more than just a couple of years.
Last year some younger dudes joined that traveling crew, and were back again this year for the 2026 edition of the festival — a great event that concluded last weekend. Those younger folks are members of an Austin band named God Shell, and God Shell performed during this year’s festival. I made a point to watch their set, and it left me floored — almost literally.
After the fest ended and they had helped us get our backline gear back into storage for another year, the God Shell crew drove off for the next date in a tour they had planned. They passed me a CD-R that includes four songs, all of which were also released on Bandcamp in late April under the title Tour Tape. Even without the volume and physical force of a live performance behind it, it still floored me.
As represented on this Tour Tape, God Shell’s music reflects experimental hybridization of genres, a changing amalgam of raw and blistering black metal, bludgeoning death metal, catastrophic doom, distressing noise, and folk music (among other ingredients) — with surprises lurking around many corners.
The drumming is tremendously good, and quite variable (and sometimes just as demented as the other instrumentation). The screamed vocals are incinerating, and the roared vocals are monstrous. The riffing abrades like steel wool. The bass often feels like an earthquake in progress. Electronics are wielded like torture implements.
To mention just a few of those surprises (without spoiling all of them), the EP’s long opening song “Not Long For This World” seems to suddenly stop, only to resume with the clear ringing of a slow and quite forlorn guitar melody — which itself repeatedly seems to stop, only to resume.
Even when the more bludgeoning and flesh-scarring instruments return in that song, the dour melody persists — with more stops and starts. The music evolves in surreal and unsettling directions, interspersing crazed bits of shrill and demented dissonance among blast-furnace episodes of scathing and bone-smashing intensity. You’d best get a firm hand-hold because the song will throw you around like a rag doll while sticking quivering needles in your brain.
It’s interesting that God Shell chose to begin with that song, since it’s both the longest and the most challenging of the four, especially in what happens after that sorrowful guitar interlude. The other three songs are a bit less brain-scrambling, but they still charge off in a multitude of different directions as they evolve.
They’re capable of brutally pounding listeners straight down into the ground, methodically hacking off limbs, exploding in spasms of flesh-shredding violence, or morphing into something like the internal experience of machine minds losing all grip on reality and forgetting their functions.
And speaking of surprises (again), “What Choice Do We Have?” begins with acoustic picking and strumming that sounds like dark hill-country music (maybe there’s even a banjo in there?), while “Drunk” seems to begin with a vivid metronome tick — the only thing you can hold onto after many other very strange and hallucinatory shapes begin to form up; even when the music destroys that metronome and inflicts much more catastrophically punishing grooves, the song remains hallucinatory — nightmarish but fascinating.
(For what it’s worth, “Drunk” is my personal favorite among the four.)
https://godshell.bandcamp.com/album/tour-tape
https://linktr.ee/God.shell
https://www.facebook.com/godshellofficial/
EMBER VALE (U.S.)
To close out today’s truncated column I’m recommending a quintet from Portland, Oregon named Ember Vale and their genre-bending debut EP, Memoria MMXXVI. It consists of two ultra-long songs. They describe it as a rehearsal demo. It includes this dedication, which seems to explain the title: “For my mom: I miss you, I love you.”
In the first of those songs, “Rolled In Flowers“, Ember Vale begin gently, with animated sounds from the natural world, perhaps frogs, and the distant tinkle of what might be chimes. They add a slow and sorrowful guitar harmony, gradually layering notes that twang, glint, and glimmer. By adding further accreting layers of sludgy, abrasive chords and punchy bass, the music becomes heavier — but doesn’t leave behind the wretchedly wailing guitars.
Near the five-minute mark, the grieving misery transforms into harrowing turmoil, a change powered by blasting drums, heavily undulating bass tones, feverishly roiling tremolo’d riffing with a cutting tone, and scorching, jagged screams. Still layered, the guitars create an emotionally wrenching experience, seeming to pour out agony in submersive waves.
The music changes again, briefly slowing but still raking the senses with tormented melody, and then powering up again into an exhilarating firestorm (or violently spinning whirlpool) of raw pain. At the end, the band drive the grieving melodic harmony even deeper. It hurts the heart to hear it, but it will also stay with you.
The second song, “A Vanishing: A Visitant“, leaps into the fray immediately with vibrantly whirring guitars, a vivid bass-pulse, and frantically bolting drums. The drumming shifts into bounding jumps, and you can really hear the vibrancy of the bass then. In tandem with those changes the riffing somehow seems to straddle a line between ecstasy and anguish — though the vocals are again incinerating.
It’s easy to get swallowed up by the firebrand intensity of this song in its opening minutes. But of course it changes too, beginning with a lurching and craggy-toned bass solo that paves the way into an enormous sludge-doom stagger that moans and groans. The lead guitar intrudes, feverishly drilling away, but the song slows even more, and abyssal growls add to the suffocating oppressiveness of the ruinously distorted stringed instruments.
In the midst of that phase, which is a serious crusher, a clear-toned guitar solo spins out an increasingly afflicted but also exotic melody. A bit later, two voices have a serious but disturbing conversation softly backed by astral ambient frequencies. And then the crushing, soul-draining oppressiveness and shattering screams return.
The pace slows and slows, creating a death march of absolute bleakness, and somehow the vocals become even more frighteningly ruinous, a cauterizing cacophony of madness and pain. Near the end the music becomes hallucinatory and improvisational-sounding, and seems to be coming apart at the seams.
The EP isn’t “easy listening”. It challenges and in some ways is ruinously confrontational. It dwells in some very dark places, both sonically and emotionally. But it’s damned powerful.
P.S. Ember Vale leave this message on their Bandcamp page: “Black is beautiful, trans is beautiful, queer is beautiful. No human being is illegal. If you are troubled by this in any way, please do this one favor for us – leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our shit.”
https://embervale.bandcamp.com/album/memoria-mmxxvi
https://www.instagram.com/embervalepdx/