SEEN AND HEARD ON A FRIDAY: TESTAMENT, EVOKEN, DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT, MASTIFF, WEREWOLVES, TERZIJ DE HORDE

(written by Islander)

The year is almost two-thirds finished, 63.84% done and dusted as of today, to be precise. (I didn’t do the math, but relied instead on this extremely helpful website, which shows that the year will be 66.03% complete on August 29th.) We know from experience that the remainder of the year is going to rush by like a flood, even with a bunch of holidays bobbing along in the froth. We’ll be in year-end season before we know it.

Speaking of a churning froth, this past week included a big surge of worthy new songs and videos, and fortunately I had enough time to get a head-start on the usual Saturday roundup. I seem to be renewing a habit of leading off with some large names most of you will know and then falling down a crevasse into lesser-known territory, comparatively speaking. If you know all these names already, congratulations, you have excellent (though possibly deranged) taste!

 

TESTAMENT (U.S.)

Fourteen is the third distinct semiprime number, the third companion Pell number, the fourth Catalan number, and the first even nontotient number. It’s also the number of equilateral triangles that are formed by the sides and diagonals of a regular six-sided hexagon. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

In metal circles it’s an even more special number, because not many metal bands have lasted long enough to release 14 albums, putting aside the bedroom acts that release a new album every month. Testament have lasted long enough to release 14 albums, the 14th being the forthcoming Para Bellum.

I may have mentioned once or twice or 14 times in the 15+ years of this site’s existence that I’m not a big thrash-head, but Testament still regularly manage to hook me, and the first single from Para Bellum did that again. Interestingly named “Infanticide A.I.“, it surfaced yesterday with an engrossing video directed by Joey Durango.

The song opens with a pyrotechnic guitar solo backed by dark, towering chords; segues into vicious, eviscerating fretwork and plundering blast-beats; then segues again into a pulse-punching gallop and mosh-fuel thrash riffing as Chuck Billy comes in with his distinctive snarls and gritty singing.

The song as a whole is definitely high-grade mosh fuel, and keeps the energy up in the red zone with yet another fret-melting solo, hard-punching grooves, and sequences of superheated riffing and fast-swirling leads.

Para Bellum will be released on October 10th by Nuclear Blast. The stunning cover art is a painting by Eliran Kantor.

https://testament.bfan.link/infanticide-a-i
https://testament.bfan.link/para-bellum
https://www.facebook.com/testamentlegions/

 

EVOKEN (U.S.)

I won’t delve into the qualities of the number seven, but in discography terms it’s still significant, especially when a record is not only a band’s seventh full-length but will arrive almost seven years after their last one, which is what is true of Evoken‘s new album Mendacium. Let me first share a report about what the album is about:

Thematically, Mendacium bestows an intriguing concept and story. It tells the tale of a fourteenth century elder Benedictine monk with malady from illness preventing him from leaving his room within the monastery he dwells within. His faith and service to God can never be satiated. Slowly declining in health and sleepless from continuous pain, the monk encounters a hideous entity emerging through a tear in reality. The story questions, is the torment of this monk by each passing hour being inflicted by this entity or is it all within his own mind?

Perhaps the answer comes in the first single from the album, “Matins,” which the band describe as “a peek into a reality.”

This song, if you couldn’t guess, is a 180-degree pivot from the first song in today’s collection. It’s a nearly 10-minute nightmare of dread and devastation.

Shrill, frantically swirling tones mix with massive, heaving chords, slow granite-heavy stomps, and horrifying growls of abyssal magnitude. Evoken perpetuate the contrasts, joining in glimmering gothic keys and mournful piano notes that ring in the rafters while the riffing heaves and grimly writhes in the depths below.

But the horrors have just begun, and they begin to shape-shift as Evoken accelerate the drums and bring forward grisly, eviscerating riff-swarms, ghastly howls, and tunnel-boring bass-lines. The music also coldly lurches with titanic heaviness, eerily rings, swarms like feeding maggots, and oppressively drags, still interspersed with elegant but doleful organ accents and a miserably wailing but nonetheless riveting solo.

Gasping and growled spoken words also become manifest, as do other sonic ingredients that seem to bespeak the presence of wraiths and wonders, but Evoken leave us with a solemn and stricken piano refrain to end it all.

Mendacium will be released by Profound Lore on October 17th, with cover art by Worthless.

https://evokenofficial.bandcamp.com/album/mendacium
https://www.facebook.com/evokenhell

 

DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT (Germany)

Der Weg Einer Freiheit‘s new album Innern is one that many of us here have been awaiting with great eagerness, and our appetites were further whetted last month by the release of its first advance track “Eos“. Now we have a second one, the album’s opening song “Marter“, accompanied by an astonishing lyric video.

This song in some respects follows naturally from Evoken‘s, because it begins with eerily shimmering ambience and blasts of unsettling sound that seem to represent the parting of veils between the here and now and some cold and hostile dimension. Even when exhilarating drum progressions enter in, the effect is chilling, and the sounds become increasingly frightening.

As glimmering riffage whirs and celestial keys play out, the song’s expanse broadens and remains vast even when the drums begin blasting and scalding screams fanatically vent the frightening words. Symphonic strings and angelic choirs enhance the music’s towering and wondrous scale, carrying it to a blazing crescendo near the song’s midpoint.

A lot more is yet to come — head-moving beats and ringing riffs that seem both anguished and defiant; further swells of eye-popping magnificence; further explosions of percussive fury and acrobatics; unsettling electronic pulsations and melodies that moan and wail; and breathtaking firestorms of devastation with vocals of spine-tingling intensity.

The words are fascinating, though harrowing; the visuals match extremely well with the music.

Innern comes out September 12th on Season of Mist

https://orcd.co/derwegeinerfreiheitinnern
http://www.facebook.com/derwegeinerfreiheit

 

MASTIFF (UK)

Mastiff is one of those bands that have commanded the support of all three of us who’ve been toiling at NCS the longest. Their latest album, 2024’s Deprecipice, elicited these comments:

Andy Synn: “snarling sludge mongrels”, “the leanest, meanest version of the band yet”, “bruising, bare-knuckle riffs and punky, piss ‘n’ vinegar viciousness”

DGR: “an album that charts very high on the acidic scale and isn’t anything remotely close to friendly”, “gnarled, intense, and otherwise intangibly violent”, “you can definitely find a groove and headbang along in a good eighty-percent of the songs on Deprecipice but you’re not going to feel good about yourself afterward”

ME: “vocals as bleeding raw as roadburn”, “the drums here might make you think think you’re on the back of a galloping thoroughbred, and the riffing might make you think there are weirdly wailing goblins on your back digging their claws into your shoulders, and then your steed seems to collapse… and then into quicksand you go….”

So, we were all pretty stoked to see that Mastiff are quickly following Deprecipice with a new EP coming this fall named For All the Dead Dreams, and this week brought us its lead single “A Story Behind Every Light“. Here’s what Mastiff said about the song:

We picked “A Story Behind Every Light” as the lead single because it pretty unanimously became our favourite track, not just on this EP but in the band’s entire catalogue. It does some pretty heavy lifting thematically, as the song deals with Jim’s very real suicidal ideations in the aftermath of losing his son, but being pulled back from the brink by his daughter. Sonically we were channelling the kind of driving death metal that bands like Gatecreeper do so well, but being us we also threw a couple of skronky meat-head breakdowns in there too.

You’d best prepare to get mercilessly mauled, because that’s what its viciously churning riffage accomplishes, fronted by rabid howls and cauterizing screams and backed by knee-capping drum-strikes and maniacally swirling leads.

Also prepared to get beaten senseless, because the song also inflicts enormous, booming bass-lines, and it does indeed include a couple of thuggish breakdowns of pulverizing intensity, as well as dismally squirming lead-guitar tortures. Somehow those screams also flare in ways that make it even more likely that they were followed by a trip to the ER.

For All the Dead Dreams will be out on October 24th via Church Road Records.

https://mastiffhchc.bandcamp.com/album/for-all-the-dead-dreams
http://facebook.com/mastiffhchc

 

WEREWOLVES (Australia)

I probably should have leaned on my fellow NCS slave DGR for the introduction to this next song, since he has made it his mission to chase after every one of their releases like a mad dog after a speeding car. It’s a mission that requires (rabid) dedication, since the band’s own mission is to release ten albums of hideous death metal in ten straight years. And while I’m sure DGR will eventually be vomiting forth words about the newest album, I decided to vomit my own about its latest single today.

This year’s full-length abomination (the sixth one in the planned sequence) is named The Ugliest Of All, and once again Werewolves have turned to Mitchell Nolte for some grotesque cover art. What we got this week was a lyric video for the newest single, “Fools of the Trade“. And you’ll understand which trade that is when you see the words.

Werewolves have already repeatedly earned their name and already could have trademarked the phrase “pissed off”. It’s not just the words of this song that are enraged, it’s also the maddened swarm and feverish nail-gunning pulse of the riffage, the jet-fueled batterings administered by the drumming, and the lycanthropic malignancy of the fast-barked and gutturally gruesome vocals.

Oh, the band do throw in a slow-moving stomp, some queasy-sounding riffing, and a ghastly variation on the vocals, as well as inflicting jackhammer brutishness — before they return to their merciless fretwork feeding frenzies and bloody stabbings.

The Ugliest Of All will be released on September 19th via Back On Black (and Direct Merch). I’ve also included a video for the previous single, the well-named “Skullbattering“.

https://www.werewolvesdeathmetal.com
https://www.facebook.com/werewolvesinhell

 

TERZIJ DE HORDE (Netherlands)

If you’ve made it this far your reward is probably the most viscerally disturbing song in today’s collection. Why would you listen to such a viscerally disturbing thing? Well, we all have our own reasons, but one of them in this case is the cathartic effect of the music.

The song’s name is “The Shadows Of Prefiguration“, and we have this description of its themes from Terzij de Horde vocalist Joost Vervoort:

Prefigurative politics are about making a desired future something that can be experienced in the present. Much of this future is built in the shadows of power, in underground networks and communities. Long term strength and capacities form the backbone for revolutionary action when the time is right. The fight against capitalist fascism is long and requires deep roots.

There is a need for an alchemical transmutation of the world from the chokehold of modernity to something that is more truly connected to life. This transmutation is a threat, because it opens us up to a world that is infinitely larger, more challenging and more invigorating than what the powerful want us to experience in our disempowerment.

How do Terzij de Horde express these insights and desires in the song (which is presented through a lyric video)? In the vocals, they’re expressed in a screaming fury of blast-furnace intensity. The riffing is equally ferocious and searing, a blur of tremolo’d intensity that’s gutting but also glittering, and sounds both fierce and despairing.

There’s a big undulating bass in the mix, as well as wretchedly moaning chords and variable-speed drumming that finds different ways to chop and obliterate, with bits of militaristic groove as well. The riffing wails in pain, conjuring fevers of hopeless agony, and it boils, writhes, and warps, as if desperately seeking for something critical to survival.

Before the end, the music does hauntingly and mystically ring out, as if manifesting the transformation, and it becomes almost jubilant (but frighteningly so), nearly matching the shocking fanatacism of the vocals. Though the song again burns like wildfire at the end, there is something about it that really is disturbing, and not just because of the hair-raising intensity of the vocals. But maybe that’s the point — to body-check people out of their comfort zones.

“The Shadows Of Prefiguration” is from Terzij de Horde‘s new album Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone, scheduled for release via Church Road Records on October 10th. The band’s name is old Dutch for “set apart from the horde.”

https://terzijdehorde.bandcamp.com/album/our-breath-is-not-ours-alone-2
https://www.facebook.com/terzijdehorde