(written by Islander)
As I did yesterday morning, I began today by again bleakly staring at my enormous list of links for new music. I could hear the list chortling at me. “You fool,” it muttered in between cackles, “you won’t even scratch the surface.” The truth of that mockery made it no less degrading. (Let’s put aside any concerns about hearing voices from a typed list.)
On days like this I often resort to time-savers, one of which is to prioritize recommendations from people I trust, a kind of life-line to a beleaguered soul.
(The Associated Press reports that on this day in 1916 explorer Ernest Shackelton successfully returned to Elephant Island in Antarctica to rescue 22 of his stranded crew members, who had survived on the barren island for four and a half months after the sinking of their ship, the Endurance. I feel this is not a coincidence.)
The recommendations proved to be worthy. Beyond those I resorted to impulse, and fortune smiled upon my scattershot urges. Here are the resulting choices I made for today; if you think of yourself as a trve cvlt listener, be forewarned that many of them challenge black metal orthodoxy in varying (and very interesting) ways:
KOSTNICA (Poland)
Kostnica’s new EP Wind Blows Through Your Bones is the first of the personal recommendations I’ve included in today’s collection. It came out last Friday, and I think it’s this trio’s debut EP. They describe the music as “Meditations on death” — “in a new form built upon a fusion of world music, darkwave and underground metal.”
I’m no one’s idea of an authority on “world music”, but though my knowledge is shallow, the swaying music in the opening song does remind me of the melodies of an Arabia oud — if coated with a thin layer of abrasion; the tones in the third song make me think of steel drums and strummed lyres; and the band helpfully identify the presence of a djembe drum (widely used in West Africa). Even the big head-moving thump of the kick-drum and the snare’s skull-snapping crack conjure images of primitive tribal rituals.
But don’t be misled by what I’ve just written. Take further cues from the song titles — “Kissing a Cold Forehead“, “Wind Blows Through Your Bones“, and “Return to Nothing, Where There Are No Dreams“: while Kostnica creatively interweave strands of non-metal exotics, they simultaneously create a chilling atmosphere:
Their bass tones snarl; their guitars eerily ring, weirdly quiver, dissonantly contort, coldly slash, menacingly heave, and seem to miserably moan. The music is sinister, supernatural, and (especially in the second song) hallucinatory.
Moreover, although the EP’s three songs are primarily instrumental, the vocals are demonic when they appear — providing horrid gasps, beastly howls, and vicious cutting-edge screams.
All three songs are fascinating, and prove to be highly addictive. I give thanks to Rennie from starkweather for recommending this offering of “creepy Polish gloom”, and I will greedily buy it as soon as I finish writing today.
https://kostnicaband.bandcamp.com/album/wind-blows-through-your-bones
LAUGH TRACK (U.S.)
Up next is another recommendation I received from a friend, this time from one of the Austin-based people whom I work with in producing Northwest Terror Fest. Apart from respecting his opinions about music, Laugh Track are themselves in Austin, and that’s where I was born and lived for a lot of years, so we can say the stars aligned in a way that created a strong gravitational pull toward their May 2026 album Atropos.
My Austin friend compared Laugh Track to Invunche and summed up their music as “very cool raw punk bm stuff”.
It’s definitely raw: the vocals are lacerating, something like a cross between a welder’s torch opened all the way up and a firehose spray of needles, a caustic manifestation of fury. The guitar tones are both searing and abrasive (they scald, they vividly ring in piercing tones, they brutally scrape, and they puncture eardrums with shrieking feedback). And occasionally the drums fly into blast-beat torrents.
But at its core Laugh Track’s music is hardcore punk — an often bleak and just-as-often-pissed-off brand of hardcore. The songs are short; they include punk gallops and bouncing jumps that are likely to stir up circle pits of varying speeds; they feature traumatic breakdowns; and the pulse of the rhythm section is heavy enough to get bones throbbing.
Although quick, the songs also have their own individual emotional personalities — damaged personalities, to be sure. They charge and jolt but also brutally claw, coldly heave, and crawl like some dying leviathan. They’ll get your blood up but also make you feel crushed, or like you’re in the midst of brutally crushing something despicable. (The lyrics at Bandcamp are well worth checking out too.)
This music isn’t your friend, but it’s a damned potent catharsis for what might ail you. And yeah, I’m buying this one too.
https://laughtrackhc.bandcamp.com/album/atropos
https://www.instagram.com/laughtrackhc/
OAKENTHRONE (UK)
This next song, unlike the first two, didn’t catch my attention due to a direct personal recommendation, but I still considered it a recommendation from a trusted source: I learned of it through a blast e-mail from Vendetta Records, and in my case their history of releases has inspired a lot of trust.
What’s next is a song called “Monolith” from this Manchester band’s debut album Ad Silvam. It encompasses a changing array of sounds and sensations.
The viciously snarled vocals are hostile as hell; the drums feel like they could run right through you and the walls behind you; and the whirring riffage is capable of cutting like knives. On the other hand, when the pacing slows, the song also rises up like the reappearance of grand towers long lost to the passing of millennia. The music then is glorious and expansive, yet also solemn and haunting, magnificent and ancient in its mood yet shrouded with grief.
On the third hand, the song’s mid-section is an instrumental interlude that sounds even more ancient. It combines gothic organ tones and picked acoustics to generate a different feeling of loneliness and melancholy. After that, the song takes on the mantle of a funeral dirge, a slow and grieving march, but one accented by a striking guitar harmony that’s both shining and stricken.
Ad Silvam will be released by Vendetta on November 20th. The remarkable cover art is an original oil painting created for the album by Simon Chognot.
https://vendetta-records.bandcamp.com/album/ad-silvam
https://www.facebook.com/Oakenthrone/
I HELVETE (Finland)
Now we start moving into music selected mainly through impulse. In the case of this next song by i Helvete, it was the album’s cover art that triggered my listening — though I also remembered being impressed by their second album Yksi Yhteinen Yhteiskunta (“One Common Society”), some of which I wrote about here.
This song, “Nälkätalvi“, is the first single from i Helvete’s upcoming third album, Halla, which is due out on November 6th. Like Oakenthrone’s song above, it creates a changing and captivating experience.
A lilting acoustic guitar with a near-medieval resonance establishes the initial melody, and then i Helvete carry it forward with guitars that both ring and abrade, pairing that with militaristic beats and a hard bass-punch. As the music begins to throb and sizzle more urgently, ethereal tones slowly ring like chimes or bells high above.
Just as harsh vocals arrive, the drums begin blasting and the riffing swirls, leading into an attention-seizing guitar solo that shines just as brightly as those chimes and bells but spins into an exhilarating fever.
The changes keep coming. Deep growls arrive, and then the music becomes panoramic and symphonic. Brittle strings ring and keyboards ping, and the music surges again. In the song’s closing moments the band reprise its many stirring and sorrowful motifs, causing one’s heart to both swell and sink.
The cover art for the song, by the way, is credited as the work of Abdur Hafidh, based upon Hugo Simberg’s 1901 original, “Kelkanvetäjät”.
https://ihelvete.bandcamp.com/track/n-lk-talvi
https://open.spotify.com/album/02rpkZbcKh4KNHOXDWoiOR
https://www.instagram.com/i_helvete/
https://www.facebook.com/iHelveteband
THERMIDOR (U.S.)
The impulse that led me to this next EP derived from the location of the Thermidor duo (Seattle, a ferry ride to the east of where I live) and their name, which was the eleventh month in the French Republican calendar, “named after the French word thermal, derived from the Greek word thermos ‘heat'”. (So says The Font of All Human Knowledge, though I have no idea whether that has any connection to this Thermidor’s choice of band name.)
They describe their music as “blackened/shoegazy/prog metal”, and their self-titled debut EP (released two weeks ago) is indeed a stylistic amalgam, and one that for the most part holds together well. Traces of all those genre ingredients are spread across all of the EP’s five songs, but not evenly in each one; some are more dominant than others, depending on where you are.
The shapeshifting instrumental opener “Noblesse Oblige” features an electrifying, prog-oriented drum performance and a riff that menacingly throbs behind it. The guitars also vibrantly ring, swirl, jubilantly soar, and become dissonant and disturbing as the drums blast away. Grumbling electronics also surface, as do swaths of viciously cutting fretwork.
On the other hand, “Fragile” mounts a brutishly surging (and highly headbangable) chug, accompanied by another electric drum performance. That’s fronted by gruff growls and then by rampant screams. But the music also sizzles and slogs; rough-toned guitars create dreariness; and gloomy singing ensues around mid-paced rocking beats, reminiscent of dark post-punk.
From there, “Unsung” gallops, peals like a warped siren, expels gargoyle snarls, and feels like it’s slowly drowning. There’s singing in that slower phase too, but it’s processed in a way that makes it quiver, and afterward the music races and wrecks nerves.
“Old King” and “White Glint” continue Thermidor’s shapeshifting ways, both instrumentally and vocally. The former comes across like a very unsettling dream, which leads to a dangerous seizure marked by swaths of boiling and twitchy riffage, while the latter (which is probably my favorite of these) both leans into extreme prog and features Morrissey-like singing.
It’s an interesting EP that encompasses a lot of ideas, and I’ll be buying this one too.
https://thermidorband.bandcamp.com/album/thermidor-ep
https://www.instagram.com/thermidorband
HALO OF TEETH (Australia)
My daily activities for NCS keep me very busy. On a lot of days it feels hectic. Scurrying tends to be my normal pace. And so when I see an album that consists of four ultra-long songs totaling 47 minutes of music, which is what Halo of Teeth’s Meditations on Dying presents, I’m daunted by the prospect of listening to it.
Honestly, I was still daunted even after reading my friend Andy Synn’s favorable review of it in June, not long after the record was digitally released. However, my thoughts returned to it when we got word that earlier this month it was released on double-LP vinyl by Burnt Seed Records.
And honestly, only then did I decide to delve into the music, especially after again seeing the album’s great cover art and all the gushing comments on the Bandcamp page. I decided to devote not 47 minutes but 13 1/2 of them in order to hear the album’s opening song, “Unsilent Unseen“.
In a nutshell, that song floored me, and it pulled me into the others, which kept flooring me. Because Andy has already provided a vivid review, I won’t add to it, and have written this closing segment mainly to give the album one more push, especially for people who like their music on vinyl.
Later I learned more about Halo of Teeth. They refer to their location (Perth) as “the unceded lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people; traditional owners and custodians of Boorloo and Walyalup (Western Australia).” They write: “There is no theology here, only human experience and cynical hope for a better world for all.” They tout their “clear queer representation” and their opposition “to the toxic culture of ‘traditional’ black metal.” They identify their inspirations as “genre expanding bands such as Altar of Plagues, White Ward and Liturgy, as well as Boorloo/Walyalup contemporaries such as Bolt Gun and Drowning Horse.”
The album’s cover art, which contributed to luring me in, is the work of Alex CF (Fall of Efrafa, Lightbearer, Archivist). The album was mastered by Colin Marston.
https://haloofteeth.bandcamp.com/album/meditations-on-dying
https://burntseedrecords.bandcamp.com/
https://open.spotify.com/album/0oadW3In6UOna6M30WTlJj
https://www.instagram.com/halo.of.teeth/