AN NCS PREMIERE: LIGATION — “ERUPTION”

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Dec 222025
 

(written by Islander)

“Recommended for maniacs of wildest Pungent Stench, Pan.Thy.Monium, Disharmonic Orchestra, Phlebotomized, and domestic iconoclasts Xysma as well as the heyday of Amphetamine Reptile – this is what it sounds like After Gods!”

And that’s the head-scrambling “FFO” recommendation offered on behalf of Personal Records for the debut album from Finland’s Ligation that they will release on January 23rd. If you know anything about those other bands, it’s a wild combination to consider, but the music’s wild too — which probably shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, given that Ligation’s lineup includes members drawn from the ranks of Profetus, Convocation, Sum of R, and La Murga, among others.

How wild is it? You’re about to find out, through our premiere of a bamboozling track off the new album named “Eruption“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ECTOVOID — “IN UNREALITY’S COFFIN”

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Dec 222025
 

(written by Islander)

In this year-end holiday season many of you are attempting to calm your nerves, to arrange your jumbled thoughts in some orderly fashion conducive to rationality, to find a smidgeon of peaceful reflection in a chaotic world. If so, you’ve come to the wrong place.

You might think instead about being entombed wide awake within a formless coffin, devoid of purpose, transfixed by chaos, bled for eons, your memory fading in clouds of ash, your inner voice becoming a scream, in unreality confined for eternity.

Those words in that last paragraph are drawn from the lyrics of the title song to Ectovoid’s new album In Unreality’s Coffin which we’re premiering today. The remainder of the lyrics are equally nightmarish. So is the music. Find your year-end peace somewhere else. Continue reading »

2025 THROUGH DGR’S EYES: A YEAR END EXTRAVAGANCE WITH PLENTY OF EQUALS: 50-41

 LISTMANIA 2025  2 Responses »
Dec 222025
 

(This is Part I of a five-part year-end list from NCS writer DGR. We’ll have all the remaining Parts coming out day-by-day until hitting the next weekend.)

I’d like to think that every year I manage to keep some sort of schedule when it comes to writing out the end of year events for this website. Usually it’s Andy’s comprehensive autopsy of the year, followed by my bullshit, and then everyone else gets a shot in between. If I manage to time it just right this usually runs just before the holidays and lands just in time so that you could really ruin a Christmas gathering or two with your musical taste were you so determined. I failed in every regard on that front this year.

Life handed me a few raw ones that I am still dealing with and I’m not even sure I’ve completely cleaned off the heaping plate of horseshit I was served so generously last year. That and of course the overall world events so omnipresent that even if you’ve managed to live in a sort of blissful ignorance, the cavalcade of bullshit just seems to be wearing on everybody. Everybody is fucking tired, everyone feels like shit, and my few moments of joy seem to consist of being surrounded by the gaggle of chucklefucks that attend concerts and festivals that I get to talk to.

Every year for at least the past half a decade at this point has opened with me opining about some sort of pessimistic crap, but to be honest, if you ever see me run one of these lists with a semblance of “man, things were just swell this time around!”, you should probably get a wellness check performed on my behalf. At the very least you shouldn’t trust whatever I put for the top ten that year. Or any year, really. The sheer ego of stacking fifty plus albums and expecting people to read it should be disqualifying enough. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: LUNAR AMULET, MISERERE LUMINIS, FYRNASK, BLACK EDIFICE, KASM

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Dec 212025
 

(written by Islander)

Today is the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere. I suppose everyone knows its astronomical significance — that it is a day of transition between the year’s shortest and darkest day into a period of increasing daylight. That is the source of its symbolic and spiritual significance, an annual representation of rebirth that human beings in far-flung cultures have commemorated and celebrated since prehistory.

But obviously, the overnight change doesn’t happen dramatically. Where I live in the Seattle area, on this shortest day of the year the sun will rise at 7:55 a.m. and set at 4:20 p.m., bringing eight hours, 25 minutes, and 25 seconds of daylight — though the term “daylight” is misleading because the skies will be deep gray and sodden. Daylight hours will begin to grow longer, but at first very slowly, only a matter of seconds per day. By the spring equinox in March the change will peak at around three and a half minutes per day.

Apart from how gradually the change occurs, the days will actually seem darker because we will experience less and less twilight as we move through January and February, twilight being the time of day when the sun is just below the horizon, before sunrise and after sunset. Here at this northern latitude, we will actually lose about 10 minutes total of twilight (five minutes on each end) between New Year’s and the vernal equinox. On top of that, January is historically the coldest and cloudiest month of the year. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: SERPENT COLUMN, ENSHINE, SOUTH OF HELL, ZU, TRUTHSEEKER

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Dec 202025
 

(written by Islander)

I started last weekend with a miserable cold, and I’m starting this one with a miserable hangover. Neither affliction is ideal for the usual NCS roundups of new music that I’m responsible for. Unlike the cold, I know who’s to blame for the hangover — me, of course, and secondarily the five other people I was with yesterday.

It was all entirely foreseeable, since my wife and I and the other two couples have been getting together on the last Friday before Christmas for roughly a decade, and the day after is always terrible. Every year we convene at a venerable Italian restaurant in the vicinity of Seattle’s Pioneer Square, moving in at lunchtime and staying until they begin dinner service. Even well after we’re the last customers in the place and they’re in full swing getting ready for dinner, they’ve never asked us to leave or even politely suggested that we move on. Never.

The fact that we were still ordering wine four hours after being seated and long after the dessert plates had been cleared away (this happens every year) probably has a little something to do with the restaurant’s indulgence of us. I won’t tell you how many bottles the six of us consumed before we finally stopped, only that the number is outrageous. So is this hangover. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2025: A YEAR-END TOP 25 LIST FROM NCS WRITER CHILE

 LISTMANIA 2025  4 Responses »
Dec 192025
 

(Norway-based metal writer Chile joined our cadre roughly 13 months ago, a bit too late (or too soon) to participate in last year’s LISTMANIA orgy, but he does so this year with an excellent list of 25 albums that helped make 2025 a great year for metal.)

2025, eh? Bloody hell. We’ve felt the dissociation induced by the constant barrage of whatever was going wrong with the world on that particular day. We’ve felt the joy of new beginnings and the desperation of old wounds clawing at our serenity. We’ve felt compassion for the suffering of others, but were sometimes too helpless to act. There was 4 AM whiskey-soaked wisdom, there was bloody-knuckled politics.

We’ve made mistakes, and tried making some of them right again. Some by the grace of others, some we will take to our graves. The clouds passed by, and the days beneath them are passing still. We’re only human, after all. And in the midst of it all, there was the pure, thaumaturgical elation that metal brings to our lives and like all addictions compels us to come back for more. So here we are again. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FAYENNE — “PRIMORDIAL SURFACE”

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Dec 192025
 

(written by Islander)

This marks our second encounter with the Swedish black metal band Fayenne. The first occasion (and one not soon forgotten) was their 2019 demo Ancient Womb of Mercury, about which I frothed at the mouth thusly:

“In these three tracks, Fayenne come for your throat, teeth bared and blood boiling. But while the light-speed drum blasting, beautifully vibrant bass, wild, spinning riffs, and howling, hate-filled vocals burn like a wildfire out of control, there’s a lot more going on in the songs than a soundtrack to the Wild Hunt.

“The reverberating leads (both darting and sinuous) are exhilarating, and have the sorcerous feel of black magic incantations, and there’s both classic heavy metal bombast and blood-pumping thrash in the riffing. The songs also manifest rhythmic dynamism as the momentum turns from racing to d-beat-like gallops or the stateliness of a grim but solemn procession.

“Ancient Womb of Mercury is a great blend of styles, black metal being only one of them, and even at only three tracks it will kick your adrenaline into overdrive.”

I and many others hoped for more Fayenne tirades, but we’ve had to bide our time. At last, however, Fayenne are returning, and with a debut full-length that’s now set for an MC release on February 26, 2026, by Void Wanderer Productions. The album’s name is The Calling From The Depth. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: EARD — “QUIESCENCE (YULE)”

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Dec 192025
 

(written by Islander)

This coming Sunday, December 21st, is the Winter Solstice, a day of both practical and mystical significance. In scientific terms, it marks the beginning of astronomical winter in the northern hemisphere. When the sun is out, the shadows will be the longest of the year because of the sun’s low angle above the horizon, and the night will also be the longest. Above the Arctic Circle there will be no daylight at all. After this solstice the days will slowly begin to grow longer until the Summer Solstice arrives.

In less verifiably measurable terms the day is a symbol of rebirth and the beginning of light’s return. It has been identified and commemorated by ancient civilizations (witness the alignment of such monuments as Stonehenge in England, Newgrange in Ireland, the Goseck Circle in Germany, and the Temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak) and celebrated for many millennia with festivals, including Yule (a word whose origins and forms are likewise ancient).

To honor the day and celebrate Yule in their own way, the Italian atmospheric black metal duo Eard will release a new song on the Winter Solstice this year. Its name is “Quiescence (Yule)“. As they explain, “Yule marks the return of the light at the heart of the year’s longest night, and the song embodies the hush before rebirth.” Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: OLDE OUTLIER

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Dec 192025
 

(Today is the day when Iron Bonehead Productions releases the debut album by the eldritch Australian death metal band Olde Outlier, and coincidentally it is the day when we publish the following excellent interview by our Comrade Aleks of the Olde Outlier songwriter and current drummer Beau Duer.)

The Australian group Olde Outlier is the successor to the disbanded death-black metal act Innsmouth, whose members already had years of experience cutting extreme metal. The names of these underground scene veterans are Beau Duer (drums), Ben Askew (guitars), Mark Appleton (vocals), and Greenbank (bass). Together they bring back to life the spirit of early ’90s death metal, with a lean toward rough death-doom in the spirit of early Tiamat, resulting in four solid, well-developed tracks.

The first track, “The Revellers,” is a good start: eight minutes of inventively performed, focused, old-school death metal, but with pure, abstract, atmospheric melodies. The ravenous mid-tempo “The Sounding of Hooves” quickly transports us into the catacombs of Paradise Lost-esque death-doom, and it’s not the only time Olde Outlier changes the track’s direction in its 11-minute runtime. “Swept” doesn’t disappoint either, captivating us with its unabashed retro charm, embedded in the instrumentation, the melody, and the vocalist’s raspy growl. The technically proficient “From Shallow Lives to Shallow Graves” exudes the innocence of the extreme metal scene’s early years, as does the closing track, “All Is Bright.”

But I’m not going to do another review, as we had a conversation with Beau himself, so here’s a better narrator regarding Olde Outlier and everything around it. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: INVICTUS — “WANDERING ASHDREAM”

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Dec 182025
 

(written by Islander)

We’re about to spill a considerable volume of words about a single song of death metal that ends just shy of the four-minute mark, because it is such an explosive reminder that even the last month of the year is a bad time to sleep on new music.

The song is “Wandering Ashdream” and it’s from the forthcoming second album by the Japanese band Invictus which will be released next month by Memento Mori and Me Saco Un Ojo. As mentioned, it’s the kind of track that inspires a great flooding of words, but the album as a whole does the same thing, witness these portions of the labels’ press statement about the record: Continue reading »

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