(written by Islander)
Just like this same time last week, I’m feeling overwhelmed by the volume of new music I want to recommend, and just like last week I’m resorting to some shortcuts so as to pack more into this column. It’s usually called SEEN AND HEARD, but you’ll probably understand why I change the title on Saturdays like this one.
I suppose it’s up for debate whether I’m really doing a favor to bands when the collection is this large. Maybe if I just focused on the usual four or six selections, more people would listen to all of it. Maybe most listeners won’t make it to the end or will skip over some of the music. But if I leave out something, it’s guaranteed that no one will find their way to it through their visits here. (Of course, I’m not vain enough to believe that coming here is the only way anyone discovers music.)
There’s probably no right answer, only doing what feels right in the moment. So, off we go….
AZIMUT (Ukraine)
I’ve written about Azimut on a couple of previous occasions, the most recent of which was in the context of premiering a song and video earlier this year from their split with the Ukrainian project Octopus Kraft, but I didn’t know about this next song and video until Rennie Resmini (of starkweather) pointed me to it this morning (and I’m very glad he did).
The song’s meandering opening riff slowly rings and quivers in a way that’s a bit unsettling. The whole band then pick that up and carry it forward with greater intensity, backing it with heavily throbbing rhythms and fronting it with throat-stripping screams.
The music is hallucinatory. It seems to squirm as it ticks, and to raggedly slither and eerily wail as it also hums. The throbbing is primitive and compulsive; the vocals are ruinous; the shrill, dissonant guitar pulsations sound a bit mad. The visuals are more than a bit mad.
Song: “Manifest”
Album: Znak
Label: Robustfellow Prods.
Release date: not yet announced
https://too.fm/ae9zr08
https://robustfellow.bandcamp.com
https://www.instagram.com/azimut_band_ua
https://www.facebook.com/azimutbandua
ONUS VITAE (U.S.)
Here’s a new name, but with some recognizable names in the lineup: songwriter and vocalist Shaun Lautzenheiser (maybe best known as the founder of Trve Kvlt Coffee, he also performs guitars and keyboards here), drummer Thomas Haywood (the head-guy at Redefining Darkness Records and Seeing Red Records), and Caleb Bingham (ex-Zonaria, Athanasia) on bass, backing vocals, and guitars.
Their first single was inspired by the vampire Lestat from Anne Rice’s famous novel The Vampire Chronicles. It melds high, shimmering synths and big battering-ram grooves that will get heads moving damned fast. It delivers gut-punching and skull-rattling beats, bone-throbbing bass-lines, extravagant singing, gritty growls, and lead guitars that both frantically flicker and mournfully wail.
It includes a dual-guitar melody that underscores the song’s melancholy aspects, clean/harsh vocal duets that magnify the music’s intensity, and a brightly dancing keyboard denouement. It is also highly infectious.
Song: “The Flame Still Burns”
Release date: June 16
https://onusvitae.bandcamp.com/track/the-flame-still-burns
HAINTGROVE (U.S.)
Yesterday was Juneteenth. On the off-chance that you don’t know the history of the holiday, Heather Cox Richardson wrote a great column about that yesterday (here) — and about efforts over time and continuing today to subvert the civil rights achievements that the holiday commemorates.
I’m sure different artists in different genres released new music yesterday with Juneteenth in mind. One such artist is Texas-based Haintgrove, who released the project’s debut single “Starless Passage“. We received this introduction to the music:
“Starless Passage” serves as the opening chapter of a larger concept centered on the experiences of enslaved Africans in the colonial South. Rather than presenting history as a straightforward narrative, the project approaches it through atmosphere, landscape, memory, and emotional perspective. Coastal shorelines, flooded forests, forgotten crossings, and the natural world itself play a central role in the music’s identity.
The eloquent lyrics of “Starless Passage” are wrenching. They express the agony and fear of an enslaved African chained below-deck on a ship bound for the New World — and they tell of a rebellion.
Haintgrove tells the tale through surging melodic black metal, oceanic in its tidal rise and fall but also punchy and swirling, and accented by some very nimble bass-work and rapidly skittering arpeggios that seem to channel desperation.
The near-strangled screeching vocals may take some getting used to, but they briefly trade off with guttural roars. The song also includes a soft interlude, a duet of rippling guitar and deftly picked bass — perhaps functioning as a vision of beauty in the midst of horror — as well as a finale that’s gloriously fierce and heart-pounding.
https://linktr.ee/haintgrove
https://haintgrove.bandcamp.com/track/starless-passage
https://www.instagram.com/haintgrove
FLEHMEN POSITION (U.S.)
I paid attention to this next song after learning that the person behind Flehmen Position is Joe O’Malley, the Portland-based guitarist of Hissing and bassist in Horse Butcher. It requires a fair amount of attention, because it’s more than 19 minutes long. It is also, shall we say, a brain-scrambler.
The overture sounds like a strange conversation among electronic entities, perhaps robotic creatures contemplating what they’ll do with us, or perhaps their signals in our direction. Without warning, warfare explodes in violent and maniacally mangling riffage, the vivid pop of sharply rattling drums, and horrifically distorted roars.
A lead guitar mercurially slithers and squiggles through the dense and delirious onslaught of mangling abrasion; wild yells can be heard in the distance; pile-driving blows and vicious jabs are delivered; sonic earthquakes and landslides ensue, along with miserable melodic fanfares.
Apart from a few quick stops and sudden re-starts, there’s no relief from all the bizarre and brutalizing contortions until about halfway through, when the mayhem is replaced by a slow and thuggish stomp. But that doesn’t last long, and then we’re right back to being fed into a junkyard metal compactor, seared with acetylene torches, and having our bones chewed by some of the most horrific vocals I’ve heard in some time.
There are a few other slow-paced breaks before you make it to the end (if you can), breaks in which the music gruesomely heaves and moans but also madly clatters, or gently bubbles in setting the stage for some weirdly angular but also queasy riffage, which in turn sets the stage for the shrill and freakish ecstasies of a guitar solo.
To repeat, this is bizarre and brutalizing. No doubt, many listeners will find it excessive. Honestly, I wasn’t tempted to stop. Sometimes you’re in the mood for an overdose of weirdness (or perhaps I should just speak for myself), and this was one of those times.
Song: “Flehmen Position”
Release date: May 12th
https://flehmenposition.bandcamp.com/album/flehmen-position
INTERLUDE
Despite what I wrote in today’s introduction, I did leave out some of the music I wanted to recommend, mainly because I thought it was likely that many metalheads would have already learned about the songs through some other channel, given the prominence of the names involved. But even though I’m not making time to express thoughts about these songs, I’ll link to them here:
INSOMNIUM: “Shadowlife”
(the first single from a new album projected for release in October)
MARTYR: Feeding the Abcess
(This is a fully remixed and remastered edition of Martyr’s final album originally released in 2006.)
APHONIC THRENODY (Int’l)
I feel like after Flehmen Position I need to offer a balm for listeners’ wounds, and thankfully this next song and lyric video provide that.
To be sure, it is a heartbreaking experience, a funereal one steeped in sorrow, from the words spawned by a lost love to the impassioned crooning that delivers them.
But this being Aphonic Threnody, the music is also very heavy, and truly abyssal growls and wrenching howls trade off with the broken-hearted singing, which itself splinters apart as it pleads.
The music, and its lyrical themes, also become very sinister, creating tension and feelings of peril as our protagonist contemplates a devil’s bargain. The song has a glorious finale as the music and choral vocals rise.
You can learn more about the album’s inspiration and themes at Bandcamp. Here are the credits:
Déhà – Vocals
Delora Ingrid – Vocals
Gévaudan – Vocals
Riccardo Veronese – Guitars, Bass, Drums, Keys
Song: “Grace My Heart”
Album: Grace My Heart
Release date: August 7
https://aphonicthrenody.bandcamp.com/album/grace-my-heart
https://www.facebook.com/AphonicThrenody/
CABINET (U.S.)
At the risk of giving our visitors who are still with us a severe case of whiplash, I’m following that piece of sublime doom/death with the latest exhilarating rampage from Mammoth Lakes’ Cabinet.
Once again, Sxuperion has gone overboard with the song titles on the new Cabinet album, as well as going overboard on the name of the album. You’ll have fun if you go to Bandcamp and look at all of them. The name of this one is “Valetudinarian Pule / Intimate Insanitation Display (Anhedonia pt. II)“.
Prepare to be ruthlessly mauled by roiling, grime-encrusted riffage and piercing sonic spirals, and to have your blood rushed by brutally thudding bass-lines, ecstatically scampering drums, and truly horrid growls.
But also be prepared to get thrown off-balance by sudden bursts of seductive melodic glamor, and equally sudden bursts of vicious circle-saw violence, tunnel-boring bass heaviness, and maniacal jackhammering hostility.
Song: “Valetudinarian Pule / Intimate Insanitation Display (Anhedonia pt. II)”
Album: Deracinated Into Soiled Reliquaries (Sarcophagus Odyssey)
Label: Bloody Mountain Records
Release date: July 7
https://bloodymountainrecords.bandcamp.com/album/deracinated-into-soiled-reliquaries
http://www.bloodymountainrecords.com
STAIN (Finland)
This next three-song EP seemed like it would fit pretty well in this position on today’s collection. In some respects it seems to straddle a line between the gloom of Aphonic Threnody and the ruination of Cabinet’s more ruinous moments.
The opener “Chasm” is initially abrasive and ominously unsettling. The viscera-choked vocals are tremendously ugly. When the drums come in, slowly leading us forward on a death march, the music gruesomely heaves and morbidly moans. It sounds like someone is strangling the raging vocalist, but he won’t back down. The song also includes slight shifts in pace, abusive screeches of feedback, and generally suffocating oppressiveness.
“In Nothingness” is an ugly, soul-choking trudge as well, accented by drums that sound like they’re hammering coffin nails in a crypt. The riffing oozes decay and agony as it groans, slowly slithers, and miserably clangs.
You’re either in or you’re out at this point. If you’re in, stay in, because the EP’s title song “Permitting Evil” stays firmly planted in the slow and suffocating lane, providing one last dose of choked-throat vocal monstrosity, nail-hammering drums, and the clawing crawl of thick, hopeless riffing — though at the end, the drums go wild, and it sounds like the vocalist is vomiting up every last remaining internal organ.
I would guess this EP will appeal pretty strongly to fans of Primitive Man.
EP: Permitting Evil
Release date: March 27
https://stainsludge.bandcamp.com/album/permitting-evil
https://linktr.ee/stainsludge
https://ropeorguillotine.com/shop/
https://www.facebook.com/stainsludge
MAGEFA (Germany)
My final selection today is a complete album. I’ve been meaning to write something about it for a while, and finally I have, though not as much as I should.
From the cover art and song titles alone, it’s clear that the album includes themes about warfare or other unsettling aspects of modern life. Some of it is based on or inspired by real world events — for example, Magefa released a new version of “Back to the Front” in support of Ukraine this past March, and it was included in the Grind For Ukraine compilation. Some of it seems to have fantastical or science-fiction aspects.
As for the death metal represented on the album, it intertwines multiple facets. It’s capable of inflicting brutally bludgeoning punishment, viciously seething riffage, and monstrously commanding vocals, but the songs also routinely lock into tremendously compulsive grooves and unfurl superheated soloing or exotically twisting atmospheric melodies.
You’ll get a sense of all of that from the album opener and title song “Legion“, which first arrived with a video I’ve included below. The following seven songs also deliver muscle-twitching physical sensations, highly variable drumming, a dynamic flux of riffs and guitar-leads, and a ranging display of imperious vocal hostility from both death and black-metal camps.
The riffing might be darting and angular one moment, and a violent blizzard, a seething menace, or a brute-force pile-driver the next. The lead guitar might vividly sparkle in one episode or fluidly swirl in another. The soloing does often sound exotic, but also haunting. Unexpectedly but gratifyingly, a vividly burbling bass gets some solos too.
The album includes re-recorded and re-mastered versions of six singles released from 2022 through 2025, as well as two new songs — “Legion” and “Death Waltz“. It’s good to have the singles all collected in one place, and the two new songs are also standouts.
Album: Legion
Release date: June 6
https://magefa.bandcamp.com/album/legion
https://linktr.ee/magefa
https://www.facebook.com/Magefametal/