(written by Islander)
As you can see, I have a lot of new music to recommend today. I hope the volume won’t deter you from investigating each entry. I will say that I’ve arranged the selections in a way that my cause your head to whirl around as you move through them. At least I hope that will happen!
Because there’s so much to discuss, I’ll dispense with further introductory comments and get right to it.
LABOR OF THE NEGATIVE (Int’l)
I, Voidhanger Records has launched another wave of albums, three of them scheduled to crest and drop in August. One of those is a debut album by an international quartet who call themselves Labor of the Negative. The members are located in Portugal, the UK, Norway, and Egypt. I have an idea who some of them are, but they’re just using their initials so I won’t publish my guesses. Let’s just say they’ve got skills and reputations that precede this new venture.
And what an interesting and unusual venture it is. I think this description by the label is worth quoting in full:
The name of the project is inspired on something they read in the preface of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: “The life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative.”
The name of the band’s first full-length album, “The Triumph of Time and the Disillusioned,” is instead inspired by Händel’s piece entitled “The Triumph of Time and Disillusion.”
With such premises, it is easy to imagine how LABOR OF THE NEGATIVE’s black metal sounds harsh and intellectual, adventurous and creative, dark and illuminating, all at the same time. A philosophical investigation inspired by a wealth of different thinkers like Epicurus, Hegel, Hume, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Durkheim, musically “The Triumph of Time and the Disillusioned” is rooted in the avant-garde black metal of VIRUS, ARCTURUS and DODHEIMSGARD, among the others.
The first song revealed from the album is “Epoché III“. The lyrics are powerful and evocative, and you can find them at Bandcamp. The expression of the words is equally striking — an intensely impassioned collage of malignant roars, vicious howls, wild yells, and unhinged screams, sometimes separated and sometimes layered together in especially frightening ways.
The music is also layered, and also frightening. Anchored by very heavy bass undulations, and accented by sharply popping drums, the music flows in vast waves of deleterious grandeur, within which other ringing tones wail and quiver. The riffing also periodically convulses, and the bass feverishly throbs. In these ways and others, the music manifests a daunting delirium.
But more than halfway along, the song suddenly changes. The music seems to drift away, and then a trumpet takes the lead role, behind which a voice cackles. The trumpet remains in the lead even after the surrounding music begins to swell and sear again, and its morphing is both mesmerizing and very strange, seizing attention every bit as powerfully as the vocals did before the trumpet took their place.
I suspect the rest of this album, which I haven’t yet gotten to, will be equally fascinating.
https://i-voidhangerrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-triumph-of-time-and-the-disillusioned
https://www.facebook.com/i.voidhanger.records/
AURI (UK)
There is a well-known Finnish progressive folk band named Auri. This is not that Auri. This Auri is a British duo (Simon Longe and XIII) who released their second EP on July 5th. It includes two truly remarkable songs, “Glorious” and the behemoth title song “Promachos“, which includes some additional performers on bass and choral vocals.
“Glorious” storms immediately, both hammering the listener and drenching us in dissonant riffing that swarms but seems queasy, kind of confused and kind of unhealthy in its manifestation. Wild vocals howl and scream, and a very adventurous rhythm section does very adventurous and fast-changing things within the surrounding musical miasma.
Listening to “Glorious” feels like being caught within a spinning musical kaleidoscope — an ingenious, technically impressive, yet bizarre cavalcade that alternately seems drugged, deranged, distraught, and jubilant.
Past the halfway point, the vocals vanish, the intensity subsides a bit, and the rhythm section really put on a show in front of glimmering ambient sounds. In the closing phase, they really get muscles moving while the music begins to resemble a brass band, and then the ringing of warped bells.
I really can’t say enough about how inventive and electrifying the drumming and the bass work is in this song, or about how deliciously macabre everything else is.
With such a quickly proven avant-garde extravaganza behind us, you have to wonder what these idiosyncratic experimentalists would do with a 16 1/2 minute song, which is the length of “Promachos“. Perhaps needless to say, it’s even more kaleidoscopic, or labyrinthine if you prefer, and like a classical composition it unfolds in movements.
It begins slowly and dismally, although the ranging vocals are still crazed and the ranging mix of surrounding sounds is still carefully calculated — calculated to unsettle and immiserate. In that opening phase, the rhythm section content themselves with steadiness — a very heavy steadiness — and this time the vocals take on a new aspect, choral singing that goes high, sounding like the wretchedness of deep grief.
In the next movement, the drums pick up the pace (eventually blasting), the vocals ruinously scream, the riffing feverishly shivers, and a guitar perniciously peals and seems to plead. Here, the rhythm section again show off their very impressive prog-oriented chops and layered voices make ardent exclamations. It’s all a simultaneously spectacular and unnerving escapade.
The song proceeds to yet another movement, one that begins only after the music nearly stops. This one is a beautifully performed classical piano instrumental, occasionally joined by vibrant strings. I’m the wrong person to make comparisons to classical composers; all I can say is that the instrumental is as “out there” as the preceding metal movements.
Auri have one final movement left, one in which the metal instruments and harsh vocals dominate again. It’s again slow and again quirky, but dangerously sinister, one might even say infernal.
I’m left amazed by both “Glorious” and “Promachos“, and I owe thanks to Rennie (starkweather) for pointing me to them.
https://aurixiii.bandcamp.com/album/promachos
https://www.facebook.com/aurixiii
TEARS OF NEMAN & СХИЗМА (Belarus)
My next selection today is a collaboration between vocalist Alexander Goncharov from the Belarusian metal band Схизма (Schizma) and the one-person post-black musician Tears of Neman. I confess I didn’t know about either of them until Rennie (yes, him again!) linked me to this next song, “Лимб“. Before listening to it, I was absorbed by these words accompanying the song at Bandcamp:
Sometimes, there is nothing more desirable than surrendering to the pull of alluring nostalgia. And it can even feel uplifting and inspiring. But the moment you choose not merely to visit that feeling, but to remain there — to start longing for everything to return as it once was — nostalgia reveals its other side: the bitterness of loss, doubt, and suffering. Where does inspiration end, and the suffocating swamp begin?
Those eloquent and perceptive words left me with high hopes for the music, and those hopes were rewarded, because the music itself seems to authentically capture and manifest all those thoughts.
In its overture, “Лимб” brings a slow, ringing melody that’s mesmerizing but quite melancholy in its mood (and indeed nostalgic), as well as big burly bass notes and cracking beats. The music quickly swells and intensifies as screamed vocals arrive — screams that seem to manifest a shattering degree of torment. That ringing, melancholy melody returns, just before the song becomes more violent — more furiously clobbering, more gut-loosening, and more intensely searing.
The performers torque the tension to a red edge, and break it only with the flow of distressing musical waves and vocals that, if anything, are even more ruinously tortured — though that heart-aching opening melody, which has now already sunk itself deeply into a listener, makes one final appearance at the end.
https://cxuzma.bandcamp.com/album/–7
https://www.instagram.com/tearsofneman
MIASMES (France)
Miasmes grabbed my attention with their debut demo Vermines in 2021, which I reviewed here. They followed that with a debut album named Répugnance in 2023, and now they have a second album on the way titled Violence, Blasphème et Pourriture. Their label (Les Acteurs de l’Ombre) recommends it for fans of Darkthrone, Impaled Nazarene, Motörhead, Midnight, Whiskey Ritual, and Toxic Holocaust, and those are good clues about the music.
The album’s first single, “Déchéance“, is an even better clue. I did promise that I arranged today’s music with the objective of spinning your head, though after that Auri song this one might give you a case of whiplash.
“Déchéance” is a sub-three-minute riot, a fast-paced romp made of vividly hammering beats, riffage that’s feral and boiling, rabid screams, and pungent grunts. Miasmes also mix in punk beats and ecstatically screaming fretwork, including a wild guitar solo. There’s also a quick bass solo, pick-sliding freakouts, blast-beat flurries, and riffing that seems to levitate like witches and warlocks spinning around bonfire sparks.
LADLO will release Violence, Blasphème et Pourriture on September 18th.
https://ladlo.bandcamp.com/album/violence-blasph-me-et-pourriture
https://www.facebook.com/miasmesofficial/
HAMMERFILOSOFI (Norway/Italy)
The Norwegian/Italian duo Hammerfilosofi decided to “reforge” two songs from their October 2025 album Signum. By “reforge”, they mean “both songs have undergone a brand new mix and master, alongside the complete re-recording of the drums performed by Dystopian at the Dystopian Studios”. They’ve released the two new songs as an EP named Secundus Adventus. They also released a video for the reforged version of “My Blood Is My Voice“, which I’ve included below along with the EP’s Bandcamp stream.
Well, it’s unusual to see a band releasing revised versions of songs so close in time to the album that originally included them, but in this instance it pays off, because both songs in their reforged state are worth having.
Propelled by light-speed blast-beats, “My Blood Is My Voice” blazes and blisters, channeling a ferocious ecstasy, and the screamed and yelled vocals are as furiously driven as the music. The song also includes bursts of feverish bass notes, riffing that wildly writhes and desperately contorts, and quick changes in pace, pattern, and mood, even to the point of seamlessly segueing into melodies that sound almost hopeless accompanied by vocals that seem to cry out in pain.
When the music’ intensity briefly subsides, the vocals are even more shattering, even more terrible in their agonies. When it subsides again, and the drums boom and execute military beats, the music eerily shimmers and the vocals sound vicious but near-strangled. The band unleash phases of madness and they unsettle listeners with music of unnerving menace and gloom.
The second reforged song, “A Dance Above the Abyss“, is equally incendiary and equally insane in the vocal department, but it too leads the listeners through a multitude of changes, creating wholly immersive phases of violent delirium, soul-sinking catastrophe, miasma-like hallucination, and agony on a vast scale — all of them accented by continual shifts in the rhythm section’s work. And it bears repeating that the vocals truly are eye-popping and jaw-dropping.
https://hammerfilosofi.bandcamp.com/album/secundus-adventus
https://www.facebook.com/hammerfilosofi/
DRAPE (U.S.)
Over the last nine years I’ve written repeatedly about the black metal band Galare from Elizabeth, New Jersey. Recently I learned that Galare’s guitarist Emilio has a solo side project called Drape, and that last month Drape released a new EP named Dissipate In A Vermilion Blaze, on which Emilio is joined by bassist K.S (from Galare and Keefchamber).
Drape describes the music on the new EP as “taking elements of New York post-punk, early 2000’s dsbm and 80’s drum sound” in an effort to put out Drape’s “most intense release to date”.
All of those ingredients do converge in the four songs on this new EP. Elements of DSBM present themselves not only in the song titles (the closer, for example, is called “Someday You Will Want To Die Too“) but also in the apparitional howls that vent the words, the dismal melodies expressed by gritty sizzling riffage, and miserably wailing lead-guitar arpeggios. A prominent bass performance in the slow-moving opener “A Red Spring Blooms” also seems to express lonely mournfulness.
On the other hand, “Frozen In Stimulant Depressants” turns up the heat in the scratchy riffing; the percussion booms, bounces, and rhythmically clacks; and the bass does avail itself of post-punk throbs; though even the blurting and siren-like pulsations in the riffage still sound unwell.
“Heaven Hangover” sets up an even more compulsive New Wave beat, and then melds that with slowly surfing synthwave shimmers in the stratosphere. Beneath that, the bass prominently throbs and moans; the riffing still abrades; and the vocals still sound like wraiths being tortured. Periodically, this song also hits the high point of the EP’s pacing and vigor.
That dismally titled closing song initially slows and falls back closer to the amalgamation of sensations revealed in the opening number, but the bass eventually gets very nimble and energizes the song, as does the percussive beat and the soaring swirl of the riffing – though it still sounds like it’s on the precipice of despair.
https://drapeblackmetal.bandcamp.com/album/dissipate-in-a-vermilion-blaze-ep
https://www.instagram.com/p/DZv0lZtkSsB/
ORANSSI PAZUZU (Finland)
One of the great personal benefits of my work in helping to produce Northwest Terror Fest is that I get the chance to sit right up against the main stage whenever I want to. I can’t do that for every band because I occasionally have something else to do, and I don’t always take advantage of the opportunity even when I can. Makes me feel a bit guilty/embarrassed, even though the people I work with insist it’s silly for me to feel that way.
The performance of Oranssi Pazuzu at NWTF this year was one where I took advantage of that stage-side seat. I had seen them perform before elsewhere, but from a much greater distance. I knew they would spin my head again, and this time I wanted a better-than-bird’s-eye view, to try to comprehend how in the world they do that. Their set became one of my favorites of the whole festival.
The day before Oranssi Pazuzu performed at NWTF 2026 they performed live in the KEXP studio in Seattle, and the performance was filmed. The show was hosted by my friend Tanner Ellison, who’s also the host, DJ, and producer of the Seek and Destroy metal show which he curates every Saturday night at KEXP. My last selection for today is that filmed performance by Oranssi Pazuzu at KEXP. It gives everyone a stage-side seat to an amazing performance — actually much better in both the sights and the sounds than a stage-side view.
The songs are “Voitelu“, “Muuntautuja“, “Kuulen ääniä maan alta“, and “Bioalkemisti“, in that order. Enjoy!
https://www.kexp.org/shows/Seek-&-Destroy/
https://linktr.ee/oranssipazuzu
https://www.facebook.com/oranssipazuzuband/