(written by Islander)
Getting a late start today. In yesterday’s roundup I mentioned that I had a cold. I took some over-the-counter stuff last night to help me sleep through it. I woke up 10 hours later, so I guess it worked, and hence the late start.
I picked all of today’s recommendations yesterday, and though my head is infected, these songs proved to be both more viral and more virile than the rhinovirus. I’m very happy with the choices and hope you will be too.
By way of preview, things begin in what we might call avant-garde territory, and then move in more punk-influenced directions, and then you’ll get blistered and beaten. At the end is an album that’s outside the usual boundaries of this column, but I didn’t want to wait any longer to give it a further push.
HEIDEN (Czechia)
Even though I had the honor of premiering Heiden’s last album, 2022’s phenomenal Andzjel, I had forgotten how long the band have been around until being reminded by a press release for their forthcoming 10th (!) album, Cma: They’ve been releasing music for more than 20 years, which is impressive longevity for a band who for a long time have marched to the beat of their own drummer, trends be damned.
Regarding their newest album, I want to begin by quoting from that press release:
Once again, HEIDEN’s music flows through the landscape of the Carpathian Mountains — not as a backdrop, but as an inner terrain where memory, guilt, and fear merge into a single current…. This is not an album that offers catharsis, strength, or comfort. It is a record of brooding reflection, heavy sorrow, and quiet dread, born from stories of the borderlands of occupied Czechoslovakia, where humanity slowly eroded under the pressure of fear and hatred.
The music video for the album’s first single, “Temnoplodec” (Darkbearer), grabs attention right away and holds it, from the first bitter puffs straight through all the strange goings-on in snowy woods. The video stars the members of the band and a crow-like creature whose purpose is obscure, but seems to symbolize the song’s lyrical theme — of a person for whom “life is a cage and time a conspirator,” with no redemption and no end in sight.
The song holds attention too, very dark but intensely captivating. As it evolves through its own strange goings-on it rings and moans, pounds and shimmers, wails and thrusts, furiously blasts and mysteriously warps. It seems to express confusion and fury, torment and agony, menace and mystery.
The changing vocals are incredibly expressive as well, but harrowing in all their aspects, and the grooves will get your head moving up and down even as your mind is spinning in unexpected and unnerving directions.
Cma is set for release on 24 April 2026 via EPIDEMIE Records.
https://www.facebook.com/kapelaheiden
https://www.instagram.com/heiden_kapela
https://heiden.bandcamp.com/album/andzjel
http://www.epidemie.cz
FARSON (Germany)
I didn’t know what to expect from Farson’s new music, but I knew I had to find out because of ^^^that cover art^^^. The new single from their forthcoming second album proves to be almost as mind-warping as the artwork. A press release we received captures the music pretty well:
Unconventional structures and dissonant tones also dominate the upcoming album Ein stumpfes Instrument (“A Blunt Instrument”), which will be released in 2026 via Revolvermann Records. Although the band’s roots in the melancholy and aggression of post-black metal remain recognizable, FARSON now unleashes their raw creative energy in a mixture of technical death metal, jazz fusion, and avant-garde madness. The album’s eight tracks oscillate between odd time signatures, dissonances, and memorable melodies, appearing at once uncompromising and conciliatory, cerebral and devastating.
The new single, “Selbstgerecht“, begins strangely mutating from the first moment as piercing, dissonant notes peal and plunge around adventurously variable beats, monstrous growls, and berserk screams. The bizarre fretwork generates a multitude of minor-key tones that seem to writhe, blurt, and squeal in madness, putting nerves on edge and continually dialing up tension and turbulence — but with no release. Not to be outdone, the rhythm section speedily veer in equally unpredictable directions, demonstrating a lot of technical aplomb in the process.
A maddening and uncomfortable song to be sure, but a fascinating one.
https://revolvermannrecords.bandcamp.com/album/ein-stumpfes-instrument
https://www.facebook.com/Farsonofficial/
MALAURIU (Italy/UK)
Here’s another example of attention-grabbing (and perplexing) cover art, though this time I was familiar with the band’s music — or at least familiar with what they’ve done in the past. As the next song demonstrates, Malauriu (born in Sicily and now located in London) continue to evolve.
The song is “Empowerment Rites” and it’s the first single from Malauriu’s third album The Third Nail. It proves to be a slashing and bounding black/punk romp, feral and menacing, with vicious snarls and scorch-the-earth screams adding to the fury.
The riffing also hellishly blazes and miserably contorts, and the song also suddenly stops and starts, brutally pounds and cruelly throbs, and sends ecstatically swirling and strangely wailing and quivering guitar (and/or keyboard?) solos spiraling toward the rafters, embellishing the music with an occult aroma.
A viscerally compelling and diabolically dangerous song, it’s likely to get its hooked claws buried in your head.
The Third Nail includes eight original songs and a cover of “Abuse Myself, I Wanna Die” by GG Allin. It will be released on April 3rd by Adirondack Black Mass.
https://adirondackblackmass.bandcamp.com/album/the-third-nail
https://www.facebook.com/malauriuofficial
GALARE (U.S.)
Back in 2017 and 2018 we wrote about the music of this New Jersey band on four occasions, including two premieres. The last time we wrote about them, they had changed their name to Gallery. Time passed, and now they have re-emerged, and gone back to their old name Galare. Their re-emergence takes the shape of an EP released not long ago named De Anima Post Ignem (“Of the soul after the fire”).
Galare describe their new music as an “intersection of cathartic black metal and bleak post punk desolation” that explores “themes of psychic ruin, isolation, spiritual decay, and emotional combustion”, and draws influence from Lifelover, Silencer, and post-punk minimalism. “Each track,” they say, “functions as a scar rather than a statement.”
Across the opener “Where The Body Ends, I Begin” Galare deploy clanging and throbbing riffs edged with abrasion, vividly throbbing bass-lines, and neck-cracking back-beats, coupled with maniacal screams and wild yells. Both the stripped-down riffing and the bouncing grooves definitely channel a dark post-punk influence, but it’s slathered with black metal hostility.
The second song, “Unhollowed Pyre“, immediately dials back the feral intensity as isolated notes dismally ring and echo, shifting the mood in very depressive directions. Some of those ringing arpeggios become more shrill and piercing, almost mesmerizing but even more emotionally stricken.
And following the moments of silence that end that soul-sinking interlude the EP concludes with “Departure“, a song in which Galare kick up the energy, both bouncing off the walls and searing the senses. The music burns but also vividly ripples, and the vocals are utterly unhinged.
As the riot subsides and the music pounds and squirms, the mood becomes dramatically more dismal. As the riffing pulsates and the grooves hammer, the music becomes a beastly menace, and then the grit-edged guitars seem to cacophonously whirl. As the pace falters into a stagger, agony blooms. Through it all the vocals are so explosively insane they send shivers of fear down the spine.
https://galare.bandcamp.com/album/de-anima-post-ignem
https://www.instagram.com/galareusbm
LYSERGIC (Canada)
Next up is a new EP from a band named Lysergic. This is definitely not the Portuguese melodic death metal band Lysergic whom we’ve written about in the past. This Lysergic is an over-the-top grinding black/death war machine created by Calgary-based Kyle Ball (formerly of Wake).
The EP, titled Towering Altars of Misanthropy, is six songs long (including a concluding cover of Blasphemy’s “Atomic Nuclear Desolation”), and the music is most definitely misanthropic — hateful in its intensity and devastatingly destructive, but a near non-stop adrenaline rush.
The intro track “Under the Dying Sun of Golgotha” is creepy and foreboding but it also lowers the boom, crushing and crashing against the listener and spewing shrill streamers of musical napalm, backed by weirdly echoing and thoroughly unsettling spoken words.
After that, “Necrotic Desecration in the Flesh of the Nazarene” continues the abrasive bludgeoning but quickly injects an ingredient that becomes a hallmark of most songs — a spidery fret-melter of a guitar solo that’s maniacally ecstatic. That song also introduces the full force of Lysergic’s vocal barbarism, a combination of flesh-eating screams and horrid bellows, and inflicts bouts of blizzard-like pummeling, radioactive gale-storms, and episodes of heaving monstrosity, all of it dialed into the red zone of abrasion.
I won’t continue going track by track at this point. Suffice to say that the remaining songs sound like being in the vicinity of ground zero for nuclear annihilation. Things detonate; things burn; the earth splinters at the speed of sound; flesh melts; madness reigns.
It’s horrific, but it’s hard to look away. A great EP for those times when you want something to just blank out your mind and send any troublesome thoughts careening into oblivion.
The EP was released on February 5. Lysergic recommends it for fans of: Revenge, Gravesend, Concrete Winds, Knelt Rote, and Abysmal Lord. You can’t say you weren’t warned.
https://lysergicblackdeath.bandcamp.com/album/towering-altars-of-misanthropy
LIGATION (Finland)
Late last December we premiered a song fittingly named “Eruption” off After Gods, the debut album of the Finnish band Ligation. Now that the album is out (it was released by Personal Records on January 23rd), I wanted to do something further to call attention to it because it’s so out of the ordinary. Even though its genre ingredients don’t fit very well within this column’s usual boundaries, I didn’t want to let any more time pass without banging our drum for it.
In that premiere feature I described their music as “boundary-warping forays into realms of death, doom, and experimental noise.” “Eruption” was a good example of how wildly unpredictable the songs are, but it’s really necessary to run through all of After Gods to full appreciate just how far Ligation get off the usual beaten paths. As a further sign of that, I think I’ll quote from a recent recommendation by Ron at MachineMusic:
Such a strange album, in the best way. Sometimes it goes slow, sometimes it goes nuts, and at all times it feels real and raw and – yes – weird. Like a person being suffocated, but it’s pretty. Oh, and the sax. THE SAX.
I won’t add much to that, or to what I wrote on the occasion of our track premiere, but these points are worth emphasizing:
While the music is definitely mercurial and quite often unconventional in its permutations (both instrumentally and vocally), don’t be misled into thinking the elaborate quirkiness is all there is. On the contrary, these songs will activate your muscle reflexes too (you’ll figure that out right away when you hear the opening title song). And they’ll also fiendishly spawn a whole panoply of waking nightmares.
Moreover, much of the quirkiness is well-calculated. Instead of coming off as self-indulgent or too “precious”, it’s directly tied to the differing horrors Ligation are sketching through their music, and they’re also just damned exhilarating to experience — except when the changes put big chills down your spine (but I guess that’s kind of exhilarating too, in a different way).
Okay, ’nuff said: Just set aside 40 minutes and run this mind-scrambling and bone-busting gauntlet straight through. I think you’ll be glad you did.
https://www.personal-records.com/product/pre-order-ligation-after-gods-cd/
https://personal-records.bandcamp.com/album/after-gods
https://ligation.bandcamp.com/
https://ligation.bandcamp.com/album/ligation-after-gods