(written by Islander)
We all know that expectations can be disappointed even when the expected person is dependable. You probably expected a roundup of new songs and videos here yesterday, especially because it was Halloween, maybe even a grab-bag of horror videos. What you got instead was the premiere of an album whose themes had nothing remotely to do with Halloween.
What you’ll get today is the roundup you were probably expecting yesterday instead of the usual SHADES OF BLACK column, which I suppose is another dashed expectation. Rest assured that this collection does include some black metal, but overall it will be more cross-genre in its scope.
As usual, the choices were difficult because there was so much to choose from. With Friday being devil’s night and Saturday being Halloween, metal bands and labels really loaded up the week with new stuff. Hope you enjoy the picks I struggled to make.
P.S. If you live in the U.S., did you remember to set your clocks back an hour? I didn’t. But my forgetfulness meant I had an extra hour to use in making this collection bigger than it would have been. Hail the unexpected!
P.P.S. This is a rare Sunday on which we have two features to share with you instead of one. Earlier today my friend Andy posted his glorious 200th Synn Report, devoted to the band Iapetus, and you should dive into that if you haven’t already.
BAEST (Denmark)
“Clap for fucking Satan!” That exhortation seemed like it would be an excellent way to start this post-Samhain collection, and it’s those words that Baest vocalist Simon Olsen yells at a packed crowd to begin the following video. The video, which was filmed at SPOT Festival 2026 in Aarhus, Denmark, spans Baest’s performance of two songs — “Misfortunate Son” from their 2025 Colossal album (reviewed at our site here) and “Necro Sapiens“, the title track of their 2021 album (reviewed here).
The video provides superior evidence of Baest’s ability to command a stage and compel an audience. It features lots of changing camera angles and really good sound quality for a live performance, and it leaves no doubt that the crowd got super fired up, with circle pits galore (one of which had Simon Olsen right in the middle of it).
Both songs, including the darker, more deathly, more demonic, and more ruthlessly punishing “Necro Sapiens“, will likely rev your own engine and get your own heart pumping.
Baest’s Colossal tour of the UK and EU is still in progress, with dates in Denmark still to come. Find details here.
https://baestband.bandcamp.com/album/colossal-24-bit-hd-audio
https://linktr.ee/baestband
https://www.facebook.com/baestband
SERPENT (Sweden)
The next song and video seem like they were tailor-made for the Samhain night that’s now behind us. Visually, “Season of the Witch” is populated with an array of diabolically ornamented bandmembers but also tells a wrenching but also defiant story drawn from the witch-burnings of many centuries ago.
The song is also lavishly diabolical. It features dancing harpsichord-like keys and soaring choral voices, as well as swarming and scathing riffage, hard-punching rhythmic thrusts, and vocals that range from monstrous roars to slaughtering howls and spine-tingling soprano singing. The riffs also viciously slash, and the song also features a spider-fingered guitar solo of gleaming tone.
There’s a lot to like about the song, but what’s likely to stand out most strongly for most people are those high-flying falsetto vocals from soprano Frida Cewrien-Sollerhag.
“Season of the Witch” appears on Serpent’s upcoming album The Pit and the Pendulum, which will be released by Hammerheart Records on November 13th.
https://serpentcult.lnk.to/thepitandthependulum
https://hammerheart.bandcamp.com/album/the-pit-and-the-pendulum
https://www.facebook.com/SerpentCult666/
GORMA (Sweden)
The Swedish band Breach are long gone but not close to being forgotten, and the fact that two former Breach members are the people behind Gorma will draw attention to this new band. The music they’ve made deserves attention wholly apart from that lineage.
Press materials we’ve received tell us that “Gorma” is an old Swedish dialect word meaning “to scream.” The two former Breach members are drummer/producer Per Nordmark and vocalist Tomas Liljedahl. Back in March I wrote about Gorma’s first single, “They Wait“, and in April they released a second one, “Down By“.
At the end of this past week Trust No One Recordings announced they will be releasing Gorma’s debut album, Eat the Sky, and they revealed a third single; the first two will also be on the album. Here is how the label introduced this newest song:
In support of the album, the band has unleashed the track “The Thicket“, which explores faith, doubt, and mortality through the story of two companions walking towards the same unknown end. One believes in God; the other seeks truth in pain. Rooted in GORMA’s dark world, its lyrics evoke folk horror and a bleak landscape where belief offers no protection from the thorns.
It’s an unusual song and an unpredictable one, disturbing in some respects but also exhilarating. It pounds and heaves like a great lurching beast but also includes ringing guitars that quirkily dart and slither, electrifying drum fills, and a bass whose burbles are noticeable despite everything else that seizes attention around it.
The vocals explode in crazed yells and larynx-stripping screams, and the music sears as well as strangely frolics and mysteriously pings. Those big throbbing and heaving grooves keep the song on track in the midst of so much instrumental exuberance and hair-raising vocal mayhem. In the song’s closing phase, the drumming will drop jaws, and you may find that the glitter of the peculiar riffing has taken up residence in your head.
Eat The Sky will be released on vinyl and streaming via Trust No One Recordings on January 29th.
https://gorma.bandcamp.com/album/eat-the-sky
FORTRIU (UK)
Fortriu is a solo project from the Scottish musician George Henry, who has previously played in the grind band Gendo Ikari and the tech-death band The Colour Pink is Gay, as well as working with local brutal death metal bands Iniquitous Savagery and Party Cannon as a recording engineer. His opening gambit under the mantle of Fortriu is a five-song demo released on October 29th that I took a chance on. That proved to be a good gamble.
These five songs are quite a heady and sometimes head-scrambling mashup of genre ingredients, with a healthy helping of rage in the mix. In the opener “beyond the wall”, for example, you’ll hear furious yells and woozily meandering guitars, viciously shivering and manically darting notes, abyssal death metal gutturals and nimble but bone-deep bass lines, a freakishly squirming guitar solo and non-stop percussive dynamism, and a trippy but dismal melody at the end.
The following three songs are equally adventurous and elaborate, providing a wild hybrid of noise rock, death metal, psychedelia, and other psychoactive musical spices, further flavored by a consistently lights-out and relentlessly dynamic drum performance and lots of shape-shifting melodies and cool bass patterns.
I can’t put my finger on all of the genre ingredients, because there are so many, and so many of the spy features are things I don’t often taste in my listening. What I can tell you with a great deal of enthusiasm is that despite (or because of) the music’s quirkiness it all somehow works and is tremendous dark fun to hear — even the completely bizarre closer “supplementary“, which is sort of like a long and fantastic drum solo accompanied by stylings of vocal gibberish you won’t have heard before and by bursts of heavily drilling bass tones.
https://fortriu.bandcamp.com/album/demo
DAWN OF SOLACE (Finland)
Now for an enormous change of pace, sound, and mood, in case you need a palate cleanser after that last Fortriu song.
On Friday Dawn of Solace released a video for the title song to their new album Skeletons. I’ll precede my own thoughts about it with these thoughts from one of the band’s two members, Tuomas Saukkonen:
“Skeletons is definitely the darkest Dawn Of Solace album and strongly highlights the contrast between the demonic voice of Mikko Heikkilä in addition to his angelic melodic cleans capturing both darkness and light. The profoundly somber melodies are still there but on this album the counterforce is far more tenebrous and heavy than before. Scandinavian darkness in its finest form.”
It is indeed a very fine song, and indeed more tenebrous and heavy than I was expecting. I’ve said more than once that despite my low tolerance for clean singing, Mikko Heikkilä’s singing voice always wins me over, and it does again here. And so it’s more than a little startling to also hear his screams, which are utterly vicious and scalding.
As for the rest of what’s in the song, it undergoes quite a few changes. It begins in almost dreamlike fashion, gradually becomes less haunting and more feverish, and then begins to stomp and surge, after which Heikkilä sends his voice beautifully soaring in the midst of celestial sonic swaths. The song pivots back through its changes again, and thus digs all those motifs deeper into the head.
https://www.m-theoryaudio.com/store
https://www.facebook.com/dawnofsolace
https://www.instagram.com/dawnofsolace_official/
HOLY DEATH (U.S.)
Man, Long Beach CA can’t catch a break. Yesterday 15 beaches, including all of the city’s open coastal swimming sites, had to be closed after a pipe burst and dumped nearly 30,000 gallons of sewage, with almost half of it spilling into the ocean. That’s on top of relentless waves from Post-Tropical Storm Rachel slamming into homes on the beachfront earlier in October, with some houses coming close to collapsing into the surf.
But hey, the Long Beach band Holy Death are still standing! Last week they discharged an EP named Beach City Doom Vol. 1, as if they knew the sewage was coming and decided to welcome it with open arms.
I say that because there’s a damn lot of tar-thick sonic sewage in the bottom of these songs, enough HM-2-toned heaviness to choke you out and enough foulness in the vox that you can be sure showering won’t get this off you. I’d damn sure close the beaches if I heard this was hitting the water.
On a somewhat more serious note, these three songs are catastrophically corrosive, bludgeoning, and eviscerating. The opener “Dark Ritual” lacerates listeners with abusive feedback, then dismally heaves and ruthlessly clobbers, then gets spooky.
“Supreme Violence” is a heavily heaving and gruesomely distorted menace too. It also includes vitriolic screams, demonic pronouncements, lead guitars that freakishly quiver and miserably shiver, a humongous (and humongously ugly) bass that sounds like it’s chewing through bedrock, and a finale of cacophonous voices.
The final song, “Only God Forgives“, features a guest appearance by Tzompantli. It’s monstrously heavy and choked in filth but this time it includes full-riot drum outbursts and galloping hardcore rhythms, as well as a bridge-collapsing breakdown, grit-spraying guitar spasms, and an array of hateful vocals.
If you’re furious beyond words at something, this EP is likely to provide therapeutic catharsis.
https://holydeathdoom.bandcamp.com/album/beach-city-doom-vol-1
https://www.facebook.com/holydeathdoom/
GEISTERFAUST (Germany)
I did promise this collection would include some black metal, and my last two picks today are shades and phases of that. The first one is a new single from the “blackened sludge” outfit Geisterfaust, which follows their 2024 self-titled debut album on the Crawling Chaos label (I shared some preliminary thoughts about that here). The same label previewed the new single this way:
“With LOOKING GLASS SELF Geisterfaust venture into new musical territory while remaining true to themselves: variations on a theme build layer upon layer into a wall of sound, ultimately culminating in a finale that brings epic melodies to the fore. In doing so, the trio’s musical pendulum swings further than ever toward black metal – without sacrificing any of the raw, brutal intensity that defined their previous releases.”
I found this new single fascinating. In retrospect, the song made me think of the looking glass in its title as the one Alice fell through in Lewis Carroll’s novel, entering a fantastical world where things no longer make sense.
I don’t mean to suggest that the song doesn’t make sense, because it has all the earmarks of an actual song, and one with hooks in it, but the ringing and slithering dual-guitar melody that opens it is strange, as well as sinister. The thumping and snapping beats are steady, but the very harsh vocals are macabre as they rise from ugly growls to ruined screams.
Gradually, the music intensifies. Without letting go of that strange and seductive melody, Geisterfaust render it in feverishly shivering terms, and they get the drums hammering. They expand the music’s scale, but also pull it back for a weirdly squirming guitar solo. They march and then belligerently jolt. They send the music forward and soaring in brazen surges which sound both jubilant and imperious.
It is for sure a diabolical work of art, but you may find it very hard to escape after only one listen.
https://thecrawlingchaosrecords.bandcamp.com/track/looking-glass-self
https://www.facebook.com/geisterfaustband/
BELTEZ (Germany)
To close this large Sunday roundup I chose a new song by the German black metal collective Beltez, which was released last week in conjunction with Vendetta Records’ announcement of a new Beltez album — self-titled — that will be released on December 4th.
This new song, “Gebahren der Unvernunft“, which is accompanied by a German-language lyric video, is the kind of experience that prompts me to advise listeners to hyperventilate before listening to it — because you’ll need the oxygen. But simply listening to it may cause hyperventilation.
The song begins with such overpowering intensity that you may not believe it will eventually reach even more breathtaking zeniths of intensity — but ultimately it does. The music blisters and batters, then blisters and batters with even more accelerated fury, and the ensuing screams are just as red-hot as the gouts of molten lava in the video.
The band do shift gears, bringing in rapidly bounding beats and savage growls, as well as vividly swirling leads that take a variety of tones, but for the most part the song is a fireball of different flashing colors. Eventually, heroic singing joins the unhinged screams, and the music also eventually escalates (after a haunting interlude), rising like an immense black tower toward heights of magnificent darkness.
From that ominous tower lead guitars convulse, flash, and swirl like the unfolding of a grand spell, and blast-beats explode near the end to help create a breathtaking finale.
https://beltez.bandcamp.com/track/gebaren-der-unvernunft-3
https://www.beltez.com
https://www.instagram.com/beltez_official
https://www.facebook.com/Beltez