Islander

AN NCS INTERVIEW: SECOND TO SUN

 Interviews  No Responses »
Nov 202025
 

(Today we present Comrade Aleks’ wide-ranging interview of the very busy Russian musician and producer Vladimir Lehtinen, and we’ll let Aleks introduce it.)

Vladimir Lehtinen is a one-man army, as he has managed not only to rule one of the most prolific and exemplary Russian black metal bands, Second to Sun, but also stay as one of the organizers of an annual festival of extreme music known as T’ma Fest (Darkness Fest) and to keep on working as a sound engineer who has mixed and mastered dozens of metal albums.

Second to Sun remains Vladimir’s main outfit, and together with Theodor Borovski (drums) and the Sysoev brothers from cult bands Grima and Ultar, he manages to keep the balance between quality and the quantity of music he produces. The band’s most up-to-date release is the EP Thunderbolt, which you may have heard as it was out in February 2025; yet you need no special reason to make an interview with such a man, as Vladimir, being deeply involved in the underground, has a lot to tell. Continue reading »

TUMBLEWEED DEALER: “DARK GREEN”

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Nov 202025
 

(Our site has had a long and warm relationship with the Canadian musician Seb Painchaud, whose year-end lists have always provided eclectic cornucopias of music for all of us to investigate. His band Tumbleweed Dealer released a fascinating new album way back in February of this year, an album that really needed the unusual voice of Vizzah Harri to express a review of it — which at last he has managed to do. It was worth the wait.)

Sometimes if we don’t carefully watch our daily intake of the ‘terribles’ online, it can seem a bit too much Everything Everywhere All At Once (warning, flashing images). It is good to keep oneself updated if any online life or profile exists because outside of our daily intake of horror, two pretty big leaks of personal data happened over the space of about 8 months. The Internet Archive (NPR link) was one, and on Saturday June 21st this one got confirmed too. It’s an AP link, not an attempt to hack you.

You won’t exactly need a machete to hack your way into the shadowy thickets of marshy vegetation when imagining the source material; but Tumbleweed Dealer’s album Dark Green pays tribute to one of the greatest pieces of fiction stemming from the 20th century, Swamp Thing.

Now that I’ve primed your frame of reference with the perils of the internet and mentioned horror at least once, well, Alan Moore is known amongst other things as having been the mind behind the resurgence of said comic book back in 1987. It is available to borrow or buy on the internet archives (it is probably safe by now) and Moore’s introduction to The Saga of the Swamp Thing has some passages that are worth sharing here for still being applicable in today’s climate, and also regarding the record being discussed: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SEDNA — “SILA NUNA”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Nov 192025
 

(written by Islander)

Based on photographs, Cesena looks like a pretty place. A small city of roughly 100,000 people, it’s near the Apennine Mountains in Italy and about 15 kilometres (9 miles) from the Adriatic Sea on the east coast of the country toward the north. Of course, like every other place in Italy it has an extensive history, and its old architecture reflects that.

Cesena is home to the genre-bending black metal band Sedna. They have a new album that will be released in two days by the Dusktone label. The name of the album is Sila Nuna, a compound word of ancient origin that means “Sky and Earth”. But the language isn’t one of the many that have been spoken over time in the area of Cesena, or anywhere else in Italy. And you probably can’t guess what that language is, because it is so unexpected. Continue reading »

CENTINEX: “WITH GUTS AND GLORY”

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Nov 192025
 

(We present DGR’s lively review of the 12th album by the Swedish death metal band Centinex, recently released by Black Lion Records.)

If the smoking rubble of the American public school system and, by some extent given how intertwined they are nowadays, Google A.I., are to be believed, then a famous playwright once wrote that “brevity is the soul of wit”. But, a curious idea arises in reading the quote as literally as possible, and a new quest alights as the result:

Is there wit to be found in something that exists solely for being brief? Are the attempted jokes and madcap hilarity of many-a-plug-and-play grind bands secretly the funniest things metal has to offer? Is there something of wit to be found in an album that has shown itself to be surprisingly and unexpectedly short? Is there wit to be found in that unexpectedly short romp in what might feasibly be some of the purposefully dumbest music put to record?

The Swede-death stomp, writ large, has been the proprietor of hundreds of markedly stupid circle pits, a lowbrow artistic effort of high reward in the unleashing of rotational energy, and the revivalism of the last decade of “old school death metal” has seen the dead walk anew; bands returning from long trips to farms upstate or groups who’ve been in the game for a while yet playing a different subgenre of metal’s increasingly fractalized musical tree declaring to the world “we can make that bullshit too!” and succeeding for the most part. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): LOCUSTS AND HONEY — “SHADOW OF MY END”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Nov 182025
 

(written by Islander)

The London band Locusts and Honey released their 28-minute debut record in May 2024. Its title was interesting (and still is): Teach Me to Live That I Dread the Grave as Little as My Bed. It was “inspired by the bog bodies of Ireland and Denmark – people of the Iron Age who were sacrificially hanged and found extremely well-preserved in peat.” They described it as “a meditation on death and living well.”

That debut release was the work of a duo — composer and instrumentalist Tomás Robertson and vocalist/lyricist Stephen Murray. Since then the lineup has expanded to five members, and the quintet now have a new EP scheduled for release on November 21st by Toronto-based Hypaethral Records. The title of this one is Shadow of My End. Its inspiration, as described by Stephen Murray, is also interesting: Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: SLAUGHTERDAY

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Nov 182025
 

(The German death metal band Slaughterday signed with a new label, Testimony Records, and their first release for Testimony (which will be out on November 21st) turns out to be something different from what you might expect. We’ll let Zoltar explain, just before he dives into a discussion with Slaughterday bassist/guitarist Jens Finger.)

When former Obscenity guitar player Jens Finger caught up with his old friend Bernd Reiners to go see Autopsy play at the Party San Festival on August 13th 2010, the pair quickly realized that the song title “Slaughterday“ off the classic Mental Funeral album performed that night would make a great band name.

Since then, besides setting a live line-up to play shows around their native Germany, the two have laid out four great albums of doomish old school death metal in between 2013 and 2022. After over a decade on FDA Records, Slaughterday have just signed a brand-new contract with Testimony Records (Deserted Fear, Carnal Tomb, Leper Colony). Yet, as suggested by its cover artwork (a spoof of the mighty Horrified album), the very first result of this new alliance ain’t exactly what you would have expected from those guys.

Instead of their usual downtuned catchy style, Terrified turns out to be a four-tracks, nine minutes, in-your-face grindcore EP, but the kind of grindcore only metalheads raised in the ’80s on a severe diet of thrash metal and hardcore/crust could really muster. We caught up with Jens, who handles guitar and bass in the studio, to see if this was just a spur of the moment thing or an indication of a sudden change of heart… Continue reading »

AN NCS “PREMIERE”: DEATH OBVIOUS — “THE GREAT GATE THEORY”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Nov 172025
 

(written by Islander)

The sharp-eyed among you will notice that the word “PREMIERE” in the post title is cuddled by quotation marks. That is because the song we’re presenting today was out in the world for some number of months beginning last January, when the debut album that includes it was digitally self-released by the band who made it. I heard the song and the rest of the album back then and spontaneously reviewed it because the record blew my mind.

At some point the digital stream vanished, the reason being that the astute Transcending Obscurity Records decided that the album needed a pjhysical release and a bigger audience, and the band agreed. As T.O. has written: “This release is not a rebirth but a necessary resuscitation.” And so now the once-public songs are being slowly revealed again in the run-up to T.O.’s release of the album on December 5th, including the song we’re re-revealing today.

What are we talking about? We’re talking about Death Obvious! Continue reading »

GALUNDO TENVULANCE: “INSOMNIS SOMNIA”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Nov 172025
 

(The Japanese melodic death metal band Galundo Tenvulance released a new album on the Spiritual Beast label in September of this year. What you’ll find below is our DGR’s enthusiastic review.)

The universe has its constants – such as the existence of a universal constant concept; in the grand cosmic chaos that many a metal band have drawn from for inspiration, there have been a few things we’ve been able to use as sign posts along the way. Whether it be the classic ‘death and taxes’ or the equally reliable refrain that ‘things can always get worse’, the reliability of them is undeniable.

We would actually propose another, which we’ve covered before here, and that is the idea that you just never, ever, ever forget a band name like Galundo Tenvulance after it goes sailing across your desk even one time. Continue reading »

THE MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS OF 2025: OUR ANNUAL APPEAL TO READERS FOR HELP!

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2025  24 Responses »
Nov 172025
 

(written by Islander)

You might not have noticed, but our annual LISTMANIA extravaganza at NCS has begun, as evidenced by this post from last week. But we didn’t really give this project a proper introduction (though I did make an effort in our new-music roundup this past Saturday), so we’re doing that now. For those of you new to the orgy, our LISTMANIA blockbuster comes in four parts:

First, like that post linked above, we re-print assorted lists of the year’s best albums, leeched from other big web sites and magazines. Second, we will provide a post in which our readers can share their lists of the 2025 albums and shorter releases they enjoyed the most (we’ll be asking for those on December 1st, so get ready). Third, we will post the year-end lists of our own staff and assorted guest writers, and that will begin whenever Andy Synn gets his week-long series of lists ready, since that’s how we always begin.

And fourth, I’ll again roll out my list of the year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. That list is the subject of this request for help. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: THE STONE, ENTHRONED, BURIAL GIFT, WIJRA, MORBONOCT, REMAINING WARMTH

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Nov 162025
 

(written by Islander)

If you missed yesterday’s roundup of new music you missed some very good and very diverse tunes. You also missed my alert about a request for help I’ll be making to our readers tomorrow. Catch up on all of that if you can.

For today’s assembly of black and blackish metal I picked four songs from albums that will be released later this month or in December, plus two EPs that I caught up with in the last couple of days. Continue reading »

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