(written by Islander)
As you can see, I had time to beef up this roundup. Though why we talk about enlarging things as beefing them up, I don’t know. Photos of gigantic pumpkins are circulating this time of year, and to get sea-borne we could also suggest that you’ll have a whale of a time, just like Jonah did. Or like the black mold that rapidly covers your bathroom crevices, we can say that we’ve broken the mold of the usual 4-6 songs today.
Anyway, there’s a lot here, seven songs from forthcoming albums and one complete release that will knock you down, burn you down, and leave whatever’s left moaning for help.
I also arranged these things, as I often enjoy doing, to prevent you from getting settled into any kind of comfortable flow, but instead to experience a loss of balance and perhaps even a jolt of whiplash. I’m just trying to model modern life.
SERPENT SKIES (Sweden)
When I first arranged the songs in this collection I put this one last, because its appeal to me was so strongly a matter of personal nostalgia for Swedish melodic death metal of a particular era. I’m not saying the song isn’t a good one, I just wondered if it might sound like such a throw-back to other people, as it did to me, that it might lead to scorn from the cynical.
And then I thought, well, some people might be experiencing this kind of music for the first time, and it might make a big impression on them. And then I thought, who gives a fuck, don’t overthink things, don’t apologize, you love this, so fucking share it!
The vocals are one of the strongest features of “The Colors of My Truth“. The Serpent Skies frontman has an enviable ability to scorch listeners and then send his powerful voice up to the borderline of melodic clean singing in the choruses without crossing all the way over for more than a moment.
As for the music around him, the rippling and ringing guitar instrumental that opens the song creates a lonely depressive vibe, but when the drums kick in, the band intensify that melody and then begin surging, with the beats galloping and the riffing generating a fiery pulse.
The music swerves between those vigorously jolting verses and more melodically panoramic and melancholy chorus phases, undergirded by big bass throbs and dynamic drum rhythms. At the end, those ringing guitars beautifully bring us back to the beginning. The video by Daniel Wahlström that accompanied the song is quite good too.
“The Colors of My Truth” is the first single from Serpent Skies’ upcoming second album (we don’t have a release date or a title yet), which follows their first one (A Claim to Reality) by more than a dozen years.
https://open.spotify.com/album/2nxGbCNtLRDyy7Ecbrw8I5
https://www.instagram.com/serpentskies/
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063598901266
DREAM UNENDING (Canada/U.S.)
20 Buck Spin will be releasing a new Dream Unending album on October 30th. Their PR materials introduce it in terms with which I don’t disagree: “With their first two albums DREAM UNENDING transformed the familiar architecture of Death Doom into a place of their own making. A language where cavernous heaviness could coexist with progressive rock, ambient music, jazz-informed improvisation and a disarming emotional candor.”
The new album, Certain Uncertainties, is again the work of guitarist/bassist Derrick Vella (of Tomb Mold) and drummer/vocalist Justin DeTore (of Innumerable Forms, Sumerlands, and Magic Circle), but this time it also features guest appearances by vocalist Brendan Radigan (Sumerlands, Magic Circle, Battle Ruins), and Leila Abdul-Rauf (Vastum) on trumpet.
The first single, “Strained Sincerity“, is the kind of fascinating musical kaleidoscope that all by itself justifies the description quoted above. Slow, woozy, dismal, and doomed at first, it segues into music that’s much more dreamlike, and ghostly singing joins in with cavernous gutturals.
As time passes the band lock into a chugging groove as the foundation for a twanging and crystalline guitar instrumental that’s part high plains drifter and part high-shelf lounge jazz. The harsh vocals rabidly howl as well as monstrously roar, and the layerings of dancing and darting notes become jubilantly trippy (and mesmerizing), while others seem to miserably wail. Throughout this fascinating escapade, the rhythm section change what they’re doing in ways that beautifully match everything else.
https://20buckspin.bandcamp.com/album/certain-uncertainties
https://www.instagram.com/thedreamisunending
https://www.facebook.com/20buckspin
SHEVILS (Norway)
Time does fly. Until I looked it up, I didn’t realize that nearly 5 1/2 years have passed since the last time I put our grimy spotlight on the Norwegian band Shevils. That last time was when they released a new album named Miracle of the Sun, which I reviewed here. I summed up the music as a “hook-filled and dark-hued amalgam of noisy punk, hardcore, and post-rock”, but that was only after I spilled a whole lot more words about the music’s ingredients and the album’s twists and turns.
It seems that Shevils are returning with a new album (their fifth one, I believe) named Sect Resurrection that’s going to be released on February 19, 2027. That’s gambling with fate, given that by mid-February we may be begging our AI overlords to let us listen to something other than what they choose, assuming anyone is left to listen by then. But at least we have something from the album we can listen to now — a single named “Father In The Sky” that Shevils released just yesterday.
Any ardent metalhead who doubts that punk vocalists can generate broiling temperatures hasn’t heard the fiery yells and shattering screams of Shevils’ vocalist Anders Voldrønning — and the rest of the song is a fiery but also unsettling romp too.
The rhythms batter and bound; the guitars punch, pulsate, and flicker; the soloing beautifully swirls and soars. And again, Shevils’ talent for embedding their songs with hooks comes through, especially in the choruses; among those are the escalating clean vocal melodies that take command then. Shevils also let their rage pour out in a phases of unnerving instrumental bleakness when the music seems to heavily snarl, growl, and blare in tandem with those shattering screams.
And by the way, this is the second single released from the new Shevils album so far. Below I’ve also incliuded the first one, “Mind Control“, which surfaced last spring.
https://open.spotify.com/album/6WqZDplslIJu1LsPuytx1G
https://shevils.bandcamp.com/
https://www.shevils.com/
https://www.facebook.com/shevils
FIMIR (Finland)
We have already had some clean singing in today’s collection, and we are about to have a lot more (along with some monstrous growls). Both forms of vocal expression are present in Fimir’s new song “Pain of the World“, which arrived last week with a lyric video. Fimir describe the lyrical theme as a cheery reminder “that while our structures may falter and our spirits may break, the universe remains indifferent, eternal, and unrelenting”.
The song’s overture, which includes frightening spoken words, is an ominous and scary experience, but after that Fimir will bring your reptile brain wide awake. Such is the effect of the compulsive back-beats, the deeply humming bass throbs, and the slash and swirl of grit-edged riffing, all of which create an immediate musical infection.
Then comes the clean singing, which voices the mythic, occult, cosmological, and apocalyptic words in stirring (and menacing) fashion, occasionally trading places with those macabre growls. Fimir also break up their highly infectious and head-moving riffage with a mid-song instrumental digression that is both sinister and ecstatically freaked-out.
Another break arrives in the song’s back half, a guitar-and-bass instrumental that’s mysterious and melancholy. That sets the stage for an electrifying guitar solo with an unearthly ring, and further soloing that seems to bring other old folk instruments into play, in tones that bring to mind a vibrant flute, a clarinet, and something stringed.
That extended closing phase, instrumental only, is marvelous, so much so that I didn’t even regret that Fimir chose not to reprise their reptile-brain nutrients one last time.
“Pain of the World” is off Fimir’s second album Cosmic Heavy Doom, which is due for release on November 20th via Argonauta Records.
https://www.argonautarecords.com/
https://fimir.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Fimirofficial
https://www.instagram.com/fimirband/
APOTHECARY (UK/U.S.)
Please raise the headrest on your chair and make sure it’s right up against your skull so as to reduce the severity of the whiplash that’s coming your way. With that Fimir song still in your head, it’s about to get severely jolted by the sudden shift to Apothecary’s new song “Recalibrated Incarnate Forms“.
To first tenderize their listeners, Apothecary flood the zone with unnerving electronics and a needling lead guitar that seems bent on drilling into our brains with a diamond-coated point. When the drums arrive, they’re frantic, and have the kind of pop that leads you to imagine someone with well-developed fast-twitch musculature hammering on an overturned trash can.
Apothecary don’t have much use for low frequencies; a few tom-drum breakouts are as close as they get for much of the song. The riffing is shrill, searing, and maniacally writhing, and the vocals are right up there with them, screaming like a torture victim. You might begin to wonder if you’ll make it to the end. The percussive spectacle might be enough by itself to carry you along, but if you leave too soon you’ll miss some other attractions.
The riffing begins to descend a bit, and to become more dismally tormented; ragged snarls roar their madness; the patter of a kick drum can be heard; and the music switches into a phase of ambient nightmare before the caustic guitar returns in a lower frequency, grimly chewing and churning.
As the end nears, the abrasive guitar miserably wails and moans, desperately roils, and feverishly shivers, like a manifestation of dangerous dementia. That closing phase is so powerfully (and psychotically) hallucinatory you might even forget the drumming for a bit.
The song is the first one revealed from Apothecary’s new album Spiritual Pareidolia. It will be released by Centipede Abyss on October 29th. In case you’ve forgotten or never knew, the participants in Apothecary are The Spiral Eyed (Ar’lyxkq’wr, Lyuaoien) and Plaguehammer (Dandelion, Ambulacrum). If you want to know their human names, M-A will help you out.
https://centipedeabyss.bandcamp.com/album/spiritual-pareidolia
https://www.facebook.com/TheCentipedeAbyss/
HAGEL (Mexico)
A headrest will probably be of less help to you the next incidence of musical whiplash, because it’s more likely you’ll be slammed forward by the deceleration and doomy melodiousness of the music rather than slammed backward.
This next song, “The Withering Tongues“, is from a forthcoming EP titled The Veil of Shadows by the black/doom metal band Hagel from Monterrey, Mexico.
In this song Hagel intertwine dual guitars to create a mournful but kind of reptilian melody that seductively slithers its way around a deeply humming bass and sharply cracking mid-paced drums. Hagel front that grief-stricken harmony with the fury of raw, serrated-edge howls, and they also begin to create variations of their miserable central melody, one of which is beautifully performed with classical influence on an acoustic guitar.
Big booming and clattering drums accent that instrumental, and the conventional metal instruments join back in, though the acoustic-guitar melody persists. The harsh vocals also return near the end, and then the music begins to sound more feverish, more desperate, more distressing — a seeming manifestation of fear, toward which the song has been building all along.
The Veil Of Shadows will be released by Personal Records on November 6th.
https://personal-records.bandcamp.com/album/the-veil-of-shadows
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063703533638
SQUAMATA (Australia)
Now we turn to the complete release I mentioned at the outset, a debut album that came out earlier this month named From Within, Without by the genre-blurring Australian trio Squamata. The band themselves have described their music as incorporating ingredients from “sludge, doom, black metal, and shoegaze, with moments of folk and psychedelic influences peeking through the mire”, and I’m here to verify that this is true.
The album’s opening song, “Stoned Ape Fury“, forcefully pulled me in, due to its own opening. There, a guitar feverishly and disturbingly vibrates; humongous rumbles of the rhythm-section come and go; and eventually the music crashes, pounds, and sizzles, with wild yells, larynx-shredding screams, and gargantuan growls escalating the music’s deranged intensity.
The music is primitive, bleak, and brutal, and the vocals are berserk, but Squamata have some other ingredients to add to this black-eyed concoction, including miserably screeching and squirming lead guitars; eerily quavering arpeggios that ring across the channels; doses of squalling and pile-driving punishment whose pulsations will also get heads moving; massed chants; a snarling bass that sounds like it’s chewing through concrete; and the return of that frantically drilling guitar which by now might be close to getting to the other side of your skull.
Five more songs come after that ruthless (and ruthlessly mind-bending) opener, the last of which is the album’s shortest song by far, a demolition-strength cover of “Animal Farm” by Clutch that includes fanatical (and possibly alcoholic) yells and near-sung vocals. The four songs in between are also quite often demolishers.
The ingredients announced in “Stoned Ape Fury” are present and accounted for throughout, including the corrosive timbre of the riffing, the enormity of the bass, the skull-fracturing impact of the drums, the tandem of crazed and monstrous vocals, and the generally fraught nature of the music’s emotions, which sometimes come through in attention-seizing and almost clean-toned guitar solos as well as the gnarly and gnashing riffage.
The songs also persistently shift gears, disgorging both bursts of blackened violence and choking death-crawls at opposite ends of the tempo scales, as well as one song (“Grief In Quantum“) that includes strange episodes of psychedelia.
I guess you might call this album ugly and hopeless music for ugly and hopeless times, though the lyrics of “Scale“, a song that includes a gloomy clean-vocal harmony and some of the album’s most uproarious upheavals, do urge people to “forge on”.
https://squamatasludge.bandcamp.com/album/from-within-without
https://tidal.com/album/559668194/u
https://www.facebook.com/SquamataDoom/
MAGEC (Canary Islands)
And now we come to the end, with one more sharp turn in today’s musical path.
I’ve always been attracted to the music of metal bands from exotic locales, and by exotic I mean places that are alluring but that I know I’ll never get to, and which aren’t the best launching pads for a metal band. Which is why I paid attention to Magec, who are from Tenerife in the Canary Islands. That’s what led me into their new song and video, and I thought I should lead you there too. Here is part of what the band wrote us about “Dissonant Coexistence“:
The song draws from our own experiences in the Canary Islands and from the social, environmental and political concerns that surround us. The release is accompanied by a music video directed and filmed by Laura De Sousa, where we also explore our relationship with the culture and traditions of the islands.
The sheer passion of Javier López’s howled vocals is a big part of the song’s attraction, and that fiery passion is evident not only in the sound but also in the very good video (by Laura De Sousa Vieira) that accompanied the song when it appeared last week.
In addition to the compelling vocals, the song includes riffing that’s both pulse-pounding and grim, both feverishly twitching and anguished, as well vivid drum progressions, jolting grooves, and prominent bass rumbles. It’s not a happy song, but it is a viscerally gripping one, and I’m happy to share it now before sending you on your way.
https://magecmusic.bandcamp.com/track/dissonant-coexistence
https://www.facebook.com/magecmusic/
https://www.instagram.com/magec_music/