(written by Islander)
What are the odds? For the second week in a row one of our Friday premieres fell through at the 11th hour, leaving a hole in our schedule and free time I didn’t expect to have.
As usual when these things happen, I have pivoted to pull together a roundup of new songs and videos, getting a bit of a head start on the usual Saturday column. All four of the following choices are from bands who are proven favorites around here (and elsewhere). Tomorrow I’ll focus more on new discoveries.
BEYOND GRACE (UK)
It’s likely that everyone stopping by here knows that the lyricist, lead vocalist, and bassist of Beyond Grace is Andy Synn, one of our foremost writers and a close personal friend of mine. And if you didn’t know, now you do.
With that out of the way, and sweeping aside any ignorant accusations of nepotism or incest this may provoke, I’m beginning today with something I should have done months ago — helping to spread the word about the latest Beyond Grace EP, Welcome to the New Dark Ages, Part 3, which the band released at the end of July.
As the title signifies, this is the third EP in a trilogy, and it includes three songs. Here is part of the band’s description:
Focussing on topics like the inherent corruption of the rich and powerful (“Reign of Error“), the endless cycle of war and violence (“First As Tragedy“), and the terrible history of workplace abuse and institutional misogyny (“Radium Angels“) – the latter of which features a powerhouse performance from Transgressive’s Bethany “Beef” Pitts – Part 3 is as intense and uncompromising, vocally, lyrically, and musically, as anything the band has done.
“Radium Angels” is a monstrous, multi-faceted experience, detailing the terrible tragedy of the “Radium Girls” of WWI.
Initially it’s very bleak, with an overture that combines slow, caustic riffing, searing tones that wail high above, big rumbling beats, and grim spoken words. And then the music rages, bursting open in an assault of hammering blast-beats, slashing riffage, and absolutely explosive vocals (with Andy and Bethany trading off a litany of ferocious howls, snarls, and screams).
To be sure, the music is still bleak but more turbulently distraught — and the soaring clean singing (Pitts and guitarist Tim Yearsley joining in haunting harmony) that arrives underscores the song’s emotionally traumatic historical inspiration. In fits and starts, the song also becomes a bludgeoner, but then unspools a fleet-fingered, attention-seizing guitar solo and a final amalgam of fury, torment, and pain, culminating in a haunting keyboard finale and the shivers of a Geiger counter.
“Reign of Error” comes next. Its politically inspired lyrics, expressed in a range of cavernous roars and blistering screams, are vicious in their tirades of disgust, and the lyrics’ targets will be quite familiar to people here in the U.S., even without naming names.
As for the music, it’s a heavyweight brawler — pneumatically hard-hitting but also laced with feverishly eviscerating riffage. The drumwork, as ever, is terrific, and so is the soloing, whose fluid and flashing tones contrast with the song’s brute-force beatdowns and grim, misery-steeped melodies.
“First As Tragedy” comes last. Its lyrics about the human condition are profoundly pessimistic but inarguably true. Musically, it’s electrifying but also melodically disconcerting, an extremely intense and hard-charging, hard-slugging assault threaded with shrill, unsettling arpeggios, groaning chords, dismal throbs, savage growls, wrenching clean singing, and a grief-stricken conclusion.
I think it’s fair to say that this newest EP is the band’s darkest one yet — dark music for dark times. It’s available now through Bandcamp, Ampwall, and streaming services.
Beyond Grace has also announced that at the end of February 2027 they will officially release their third album, Anthems for the New Dark Ages. They will support that with an album release show at The Sal in Nottingham on February 27th (joined by Foul Body Autopsy, Desecrator, and Anguish of Gods) and subsequent touring.
https://beyondgrace.bandcamp.com/album/welcome-to-the-new-dark-ages-part-3
https://ampwall.com/a/beyondgrace
https://linktr.ee/beyondgrace
https://www.facebook.com/wearebeyondgrace/
MISERY INDEX (U.S.)
Reviewers have observed the influence of Misery Index on Beyond Grace (the band has acknowledged that as well), and Misery Index also happens to be a unanimous favorite among the writers at our site (including Andy), and so it’s appropriate to follow that Beyond Grace EP with a new Misery Index lyric video.
Well, the video is new but the song isn’t. In fact, the song — “Your Pain Is Nothing” — first appeared on this band’s debut EP Overthrow in 2001, which they self-released on CD through their label Anarchos Records. It’s back on our radar because Time To Kill Records is reissuing the EP on vinyl for the first time.
A quarter-century after its initial release, the song holds up very well, in addition to being a good historical explanation of why Misery Index has been so influential and so long-lasting.
It’s fast, vicious to the point of being frenzied, skull-battering, and vocally blistering, but it also includes a plethora of nasty little hooks, both rhythmically and melodically, including intrusions of rapidly squirming arpeggios that don’t sound entirely sane and bursts of fast-jabbing and frantically braying fretwork. It’s raw and explosive but also technically impressive in its execution of sharp twists and turns.
Time To Kill will release the Overthrow reissue on December 15th. It includes three bonus tracks recorded by Misery Index a year after the Overthrow release, which appeared on the 2002 split with Commit Suicide.
https://timetokillrecords.com/collections/misery-index
https://miseryindex.bandcamp.com/album/overthrow
https://www.miseryindex.com/
https://www.instagram.com/miseryindex.official/
https://www.facebook.com/MiseryIndex
ARTIFICIAL BRAIN (U.S.)
Like Misery Index, Artificial Brain is an east coast U.S. band that has been a favorite of many of us around here. Now based in Richmond, Virginia, the revised lineup currently includes vocalist Mike Paparo (Inter Arma) and drummer Alex Tomlin (Battlemaster), along with founding members Dan Gargiulo (guitars) and Samuel Smith (bass), and guitarist Oleg Zalman.
They have a new album on the horizon named Antillia, and as of this week they debuted a remarkable animated video for the album’s second single, “Planet: Carrion“. As the band themselves have previewed about the song, “it may surprise longtime fans with how it breaks from tradition”. Among other things, they’ve said it’s “our slowest song, until the end where it kind of explodes.”
Coming right after that Misery Index convulsion, “Planet: Carrion” may give you a case of whiplash. It is indeed slow, but more than that its quivering and whining melody is saturated in dismal moods. The grit-choked growls are even more abysmal, and even when the band accelerate the percussive pacing and induce occasional fretwork fevers, it’s still an unsettling thing to hear.
The gnashing vocals grow increasingly intense, and the guitars dissonantly screech and slither as well as hopelessly moan. Ultimately, the song does kind of explode, driven wild by a spectacular drumming display and layered guitars that seem to be self-immolating. Yet even then (as before), the music is hallucinatory, not quite real, and definitely unnerving even though it will give your pulse-rate a swift kick.
Antillia will be out on November 13th via Profound Lore Records.
https://linktr.ee/artificialbrain
https://artificialbrain.bandcamp.com/album/antillia
https://www.facebook.com/ArtificialBrainMusic/
https://www.instagram.com/artificial_brain_band
OPHIS (Germany)
You could say this has been Fvneral Fvkk Week at NCS. On Monday we premiered a full stream of their new album Indecent Idols (which is being released today), and yesterday we published an interview with two of the band’s members.
As you may know, Fvneral Fvkk’s lineup overlaps with that of the German death/doom band Ophis, and as it happens, Ophis also has a new album for us, one that will be released in November. And so it seemed fated this week that I should include a song from that album as the closing selection in today’s roundup.
Despite the lineup overlap and the affinity of both bands for doom, Ophis and Fvneral Fvkk provide very different takes on the genre. The vocals are one stark difference, but there are others. Suffice to say, both bands are extremely good at what they do.
This new Ophis song, a long one named “Astral Tombs“, is enthralling but it will take you apart emotionally (and might do so physically if you play it loud enough). “Crushing” feels inadequate as a description of just how emotionally devastating the song is.
The gruff growls and raw howls are massive (and wrenching), the riffs are massive (and abyssally deep), the drums are massive (and bone-fracturing), and the melodies are steeped in feelings of misery and loss. It’s as if a towering funeral obelisk began taking long slow strides and casting long shadows. And yet there’s nothing remotely monotonous about the song’s progression, in large part because of how the melodies change.
Those melodies range from slowly wailing expressions of terrible grief to shivering sirens of pain, worming arpeggios of decay, a Middle-Eastern-sounding lament that’s magical, a gentle guitar instrumental backed by cosmic shimmers that’s lonesome, wistful, and yet wondrous, and blinding melodic rays of apocalyptic scale.
Also magical is the way Ophis have so carefully connected all those melodies to each other so that the song’s through-lines hold firm, and how well they have introduced rhythmic and percussive variations to keep a listener’s attention firmly in place right up to the very bitter end.
The new Ophis album is named Encased In Deathlike Layers. It follows Spew Forth Odium, released in 2021 and reviewed at our site here. It includes six songs spanning almost one hour. It will be released by FDA Records on November 27th.
https://fda-records.com/en/
https://fda-records.bandcamp.com/album/encased-in-deathlike-layers
https://www.facebook.com/OphisDoom/