(written by Islander)
I slept for a very long time last night. This is becoming more common on Friday nights. One key factor is that I’m convincing my restless mind that I don’t have to roll out these Saturday roundups as soon as I used to. I can sleep late instead, having realized that the world won’t end if this column arrives near mid-day in my time zone. Our weekend visitors will catch up when they can, or so I tell myself.
I did succeed in making almost all of today’s choices yesterday. The one exception, which comes last in the order, arrived via a recommendation I saw this morning that I couldn’t ignore. I’ll explain when we get there. The five bands that lead up to it are significantly different from each other in the music they make. Which is to say, I’m again satisfied that this collection will keep your head on a swivel as you move from one to the next, and maybe it will spin all the way off!
IRREVERSIBLE MECHANISM (Belarus)
The Belarusian band Irreversible Mechanism are masters at the spinning of heads. That seems to be their joyous objective within the confines of individual songs. Their compositions are somehow both wild and structured, and they have the technical skills that are necessary to bring their bamboozling ideas to life in sound.
The band’s newest album is Infinite Fields (Re-Wired), so named because it is a complete re-imagining of their 2015 debut album Infinite Fields (reviewed here by our old friend Austin Weber). For the new album, they reconstructed and re-recorded each of those songs from the ground up. As they describe: “Every riff, every melody, every scream — re-recorded, re-imagined and re-wired. New guitar and bass tracks. A brand new vocal performance. A completely different mix and mastering.” And then they added two new songs.
I was so taken with the first advance track from Infinite Fields (Re-Wired) that I devoted one entire weekend column to it — the Sunday column devoted to shades of black metal, because I didn’t want to delay my linguistic spillage until I could find a more logical place for it. If you missed that song, “Into the Void“, you should jump over to this location and check it out (it’s packaged there with a terrific video).
And now we have a second song from the album, this one named “The Agony“. They describe it as “the heaviest and most claustrophobic track on the album — a slow, crushing descent into everything we tried to bury a decade ago.” It too is adorned with an excellent video.
Of course, words like “slow”, “crushing”, and “claustrophobic” are highly relative terms in the world of Irreversible Mechanism. “The Agony” is still jam-packed with wildly veering and darting fretwork, bursts of eye-popping percussive athletics, and raw and raging vocal intensity, as well as soloing that would be quite at home in realms of avant-garde prog and jazz.
On the other hand the song also includes cascades of eerily swirling and shimmering melody that are haunting, and perhaps even claustrophobic, and the song’s ringing final moments are soft but unsettling.
Infinite Fields (Re-Wired) is scheduled for release on January 15, 2027. For that reason, among others, I hope the world survives that long.
https://irreversiblemechanism.bandcamp.com/
http://www.facebook.com/IrreversibleMechanism
https://www.instagram.com/irreversible.mechanism/
DÄMMERUNG (Ukraine)
What a wretched news week we have just finished, one that saw the corrupt megalomaniac who squats in the White House illegally sell out Ukraine to the mass murderer who squats in the Kremlin. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can find out via this AP News report and this one. It’s disgusting, it’s disgraceful, it may be devastating.
To be clear, I would have included this next song in today’s collection even if the band weren’t Ukrainian, but their circumstances gave me an added reason. Dämmerung were founded in the autumn of 2001 in the port city of Kherson, but I assume they aren’t there any more. Since the Russian invasion, the city has been brutalized and its population has fallen from about 280,000 in 2021 to 60,000 or fewer now (per this Reuters report). I’ve also seen photos of one or more Dämmerung members in combat gear on the line somewhere.
Before the war Dämmerung released three albums. In 2020-21 they began work on a fourth one, Son of the Mourning Star, but the Russian invasion halted that work. At last, the album has been completed and is now set for release on November 27th. This next song, “Sulphur“, is the first single from it.
It really gets its claws buried in a listener, thanks to urgently throbbing riffs, flowing cosmic overlays, and a vibrantly flickering clear-toned sonic pulse that seizes attention every time it surfaces. Dämmerung tie themselves more closely to first wave black metal than to the second wave (as those preceding ingredients will begin proving), and so the drumming also mostly punk-rocks and neck-snaps instead of blasts, and the bass heavily thrums.
The screamed vocals are utterly vicious, however, and as furious as devils bent on revenge, and the song further includes bits of grim and grieving melody, militaristic drum attacks, shrieking guitar solos, and grand chord fanfares. To repeat, this one is likely to get stuck in your head after only one listen.
https://dammerung-ua.bandcamp.com/track/sulphur-3
https://www.facebook.com/dammerungband/
https://www.instagram.com/dammerung.ua
KORPSESOTURI (Finland)
In 2018 we had the pleasure of premiering Korpsesoturi’s debut album Malus Corpus. I struggled to express just how explosively powerful it was, eventually characterizing the songs as a demonstration of the band’s “prowess as war-bringers from beyond the grave, engaging in super-heated, heavy-grooved attacks that are almost overpowering in their intensity and persistently electrifying in their impact.”
In 2020 the band released their second album Korpskrist, and followed that with a short EP named Tahtoisin kuolla in 2025. Now they have a second full-length named Korplish Sedamon that Brutal Records plans to release on November 20th. The first song on the track list is the album’s title song, and it’s also the first one from the album that has been revealed so far.
It’s difficult to pick out which ingredients of the song are the most shockingly unhinged, because so many of them are, but the vocals probably take the prize (and I’m not talking about the scary spoken words that open the track). They include rough, almost chant-like singing, fanatical snarls choked with grit, berserk cries, monstrous growls, and strangled screams. (And something about the Finnish language, when voiced so insanely and as heard through ears like mine, makes these performances sound even uglier.)
Apart from the vocals, the song opens in a way that’s slow, massively heavy, and melodically like the entrance to a haunted house of horrors. But after that creepy, floor-shaking overture it gradually ramps up. It brings that supernatural melody along for the ride, but inflicts thundering and blasting percussive propulsion, sizzling hornet-swarm riffage, bursts of battering-ram thuggery, a particularly infectious but still barbarous riff that lustfully surges and soars, and a freakishly whirling solo.
For something so incredibly savage and generally demented, the song still manages to be an infectious thing too.
https://brutalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/korplish-sedamon
https://www.korpsesoturi.com/
https://www.facebook.com/korpsesoturi/
SONIC MOON (Denmark)
I did warn you that this collection would cause heads to swivel, and the next song is dramatically different from the ones that have preceded it. But it’s a song I’ve gone back to repeatedly since first hearing it last week.
The song’s name is “Weightlessness“, but the song is far, far away from airy. The beats mostly move slowly but feel like they could still pop tendons apart or create spinal ruptures. The riffing is thick, fuzz-bombed, and corrosive; it moves like some dying beast dismally dragging its way to a final resting place.
The vocals, as you’ll eventually learn, are a well-earned exception to our site’s mostly tongue-in-cheek forbiddance of singing, but they’re not weightless either, at least not emotionally. They grimly sink low and rise very high, wailing up in the rafters. They don’t relieve the chilling aspects of the riffing, but make it chilling in a different way.
The music changes after the drums deliver a ritualized interstitial, becoming even more desolate and despairing but also spectral, and in that closing phase it will be hard for you not to move.
The song is the opening track off a new Sonic Moon album named In Lack of Clarity. A second song, “Beneath You“, has also been made available for streaming, and I’ll include that one below too. It’s significantly longer than the first one — even spookier, more psychedelic, more narcotic, and even more compelling than the first one too.
In Lack of Clarity will be released on November 6th through Ripple Music.
https://ripplemusic.bandcamp.com/album/in-lack-of-clarity
https://sonicmoondenmark.bandcamp.com/album/in-lack-of-clarity
https://www.facebook.com/SonicMoonDenmark/
HVRT (Germany)
In the fall of 2025 my friend and fellow NCS slave Andy Synn turned me onto HVRT‘s new album Cancerbloom when he reviewed it here, and then later named it one of 2025’s Great Albums and also put it at the No. 4 spot on his year-end Personal Top 10 list (here). I was so taken with the album that I included a song from it (“The Wait, The Weep, the Woe”) on the only year-end list I’m capable of making.
Thanks to Andy, I learned that HVRT released a new EP two days ago. Titled As Live As Life Gets, it’s a recording of HVRT’s Cancerbloom release show at the MTC in Cologne at the end of December 2025. Here’s part of what they wrote at their Bandcamp page:
We know live records aren’t really what people are asking for right now. We did it anyway, because the live versions of these songs are a different animal — dirtier, rawer, considerably more violent than what ended up on the album. That’s the side of this band we wanted on tape, so nothing got fixed afterwards.
The EP is four songs long, and I’m so happy that the first track is “The Wait, The Weep, the Woe“. Everything about that song which hooked me when I heard it on Cancerbloom is still present and accounted for, from the gut-busting grooves and skull-rattling beats to the abrasive, slashing fretwork, the grit-choked howls, the dismal near-sung snarls, the accelerated burst of blackened viciousness, the jackhammering slug-fest, and the miserably writhing and feverishly vibrating solos. But the live version is indeed more raw and dirty, as well as more corrosive and even more floor-shaking in its heaviness.
The live versions of the other three songs on the EP are also killer, and when you hear them I think you’ll understand why HVRT decided to have them recorded and released. It brings to the fore dimensions of the music that are even more unchained and destructive than what the album delivers. And although it’s mostly a massive and mauling experience (apart from the haunting interlude in “Heather †”), it was produced in a way that allows all the performances to stand out with distinct separation, without softening the raw and rampaging nature of the music.
Just don’t play it too loud or you’ll have to check the foundations of your crib for fractures.
https://hvrt.bandcamp.com/album/as-live-as-life-gets
http://www.facebook.com/hvrtband
FAKE DUST (U.S.)
After I began to caffeinate and nicotine-ize myself this morning I saw a message from one of our occasional contributors who now uses the nom de plume Obsolete Mystic. He wrote: “It has been a very long time since I have heard a Grindcore record that captured that feeling of having your testicles smashed with a hammer at light speed. This was delightfully one of those albums. It’s putrid and unhinged and a good time.”
Having seen that message I felt the urge to listen, despite the fact that the record is now five months old, and I rarely look backward in these columns. Having listened, I understand the message.
The record is Decrepitizing Din Of The Cerebral Psyopticon. It’s the debut album of a PDX band named Fake Dust, released last May by Iron Lung Records and Headsplit Records. It blasts its way through 19 tracks in less than 20 minutes. It is indeed putrid and unhinged.
The drumming is also indeed a light-speed riot most of the time, so fast and so destructive that it’s eye-popping. The riffing is dense and the guitar tones are abrasive and toxic, like a hurricane-force blast of sandpaper, acid, and shards of flint. The vocals veer from hair-on-fire screeching to bellowing roars, while the bass rumbles and slugs with granite-like heaviness.
Fake Dust do occasionally slow down, pulling back from their brazen and brutalizing rampages in order to pour bleakness into the listener’s ears, like some tarry ichor, or to mercilessly rip and slash or thuggishly pound. Also occasionally, the drummer inflicts brutalizing booms or shifts into galloping punk beats. And things get soft and strange in the penultimate track “Envisaging Psychosomatic Operations”.
But mostly the songs are mass destruction events that catch listeners in the blast front. It’s fantastic.
P.S. I am now super-excited to see Fake Dust at the 2027 edition of Northwest Terror Fest in Seattle and so happy that my friend/co-conspirator Joseph booked them!
https://ironlungrecords.bandcamp.com/album/decrepitizing-din-of-the-cerebral-psyopticon-lungs-320
https://www.instagram.com/popular/fake-dust-band/