Islander

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: FERNDOM — “STONE-TOOTHED ABYSS”

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Feb 052026
 

(written by Islander)

I’ve previously explained that the forthcoming debut album of Ferndom piqued my interest before I ever heard a note. First, it’s a one-person project from my hometown of Austin, Texas (the person goes by Vileinist, a clever name for reasons you’ll soon learn). Second, the title of the album is Tesuque, named for a place near Santa Fe in New Mexico that I and family members have visited frequently.

And, well, the third reason for getting interested is that Vileinist is a violinist, and uses an electric violin to replace traditional guitar parts throughout the album.

The occasion for first paying attention to Ferndom at our site was its release of the first single from Tesuque, a completely captivating song called “Cacophony of Ice“. We’re paying more attention today because we’re premiering a video for the album’s second single, “Stone-Toothed Abyss“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: FROZEN OCEAN — “BORTKASTADE DÖDSRUNOR”

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Feb 052026
 

(written by Islander)

The music of the band Frozen Ocean (the solo work of Vaarwel) could broadly be characterized as a melding of depressive rock and atmospheric black metal. Its musical output has been prolific: Frozen Ocean has released 11 albums and a variety of shorter works since 2005. Yet there’s been a significant interval between full-lengths since 2015’s Prills of Remembrance. Now a new Frozen Ocean album named Askdrömmar is finally on the way, with a release date of February 13th set by the Apocalyptic Witchcraft label.

In its previous releases Frozen Ocean has thematically explored a wide range of subjects and inspirations. The new album draws inspiration from the writing of John Ajvide Lindqvist and the music of Lifelover, with lyrics written entirely in Swedish. Its themes are described on behalf of the label this way: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HEIR CORPSE ONE — “DESTINATION: DOMINATION”

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Feb 042026
 

(written by Islander)

The Swedish heavy metal luminaries who formed Heir Corpse One in 2020 obviously had their tongues in their cheeks when they picked the name, twisting the call-sign of the U.S. president’s official plane to suit the twisted tale they wished to tell.

That tale, which began to unfold in the band’s 2021 debut album Fly the Fiendish Skies, envisioned a group of wealthy passengers fleeing the pandemic in a private jet (like that ever happened!), only to crash, descend into cannibalism, and trigger a zombie outbreak.

The narrative was so tailor-made for the manifold awfulness of the covid pandemic that it wouldn’t have been surprising if Heir Corpse One had been a “one and done” project. But no, these people obviously had so much fun making that first album that they forged on, not just with the music but with the gruesome concept story.

And so now we’re on the verge of getting the second Heir Corpse One album, Destination: Domination. And by “verge”, we mean the brink of February 6th, which is when Emanzipation Productions will disgorge the record. As you’re about to discover first-hand, it’s a ghastly delight. Continue reading »

STRANGULIATORIUS: “FLIES DON’T LIE”

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Feb 042026
 

(In January Horror Pain Gore Death Productions released a new album from the Lithuanian death metal savages Stranguliatorius, and below we present our Norway-based contributor Chile’s review of this new full-length atrocity.)

It is not surprising that metal, one of the shining lights of postmodern art, that paragon of human creativity, has made a foothold in many different places around the world, and is luckily not limited anymore geographically or in any other way.

Hailing from Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, Stranguliatorius is another one of those worthy entries in our everlasting, world-encompassing quest for all things filthy and deadly. No strangers on these pages, we have been visited by these death dealers before.

One of their previous albums got plenty of love here back in 2018, and deservedly so, with our editor calling the band “damned clever songwriters,” managing to concoct “a toxic brew of old school death metal, grindcore, doom, and d-beat crust”. Sounds good to me.

Now, I’ve been to Vilnius some years back and it really is a nice place, but there’s obviously something in the water, as they say, judging by the savage intensity on display. 

While some death metal bands have that distinctive stench arising from the decaying, rotten flesh with the imagery and riffs that go with it, some acquire a different perspective and put themselves in the role of the cold-blooded, flesh-cutting pathologist himself.

Sister, pass the scalpel, please.

Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: LONE WANDERER

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Feb 042026
 

(Just a handful of days ago High Roller Records released a new album by the German funeral doom band Lone Wanderer, and that provided the occasion for Zoltar to conduct the following interview with the band. Doom on….)

Silent hooded sinister figures in line disappearing into the mist next to a cenotaph as cover artwork, a nearly 25-minute opening track titled “To Rest Eternally”… Even before pressing play, you more or less know that you’re treading here on funeral doom territories, and that’s somehow exactly what Lone Wanderer proudly deliver with Exequiae, their third album.

But what’s interesting with those Germans is that besides their unusual background – three out of four members also played pure classic ’80s heavy-metal with Kerrigan – and the fact this is being released on High Roller Records, a well-established label and mail-order whose well-deserved reputation was built on high-quality classic metal vinyl reissues — they’ve managed to somehow tweak their genre’s otherwise firmly established assets into something quite personal, albeit still pretty much in debt to Mournful Congregation, whose mastermind Damon Good actually mixed their first two records. The band collectively agreed to lift the veil on their funeral obsessions… Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: CEPHEIDAE VARIABLE — “THE CONDUIT”

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Feb 032026
 

(written by Islander)

Fans of astronomy may pass their eyes over the name Cepheidae Variable, pause, take a second look, and come away puzzled. But the band’s solo creator, Ryan Koepke from British Columbia, Canada, has an explanation:

The name “Cepheidae Variable” is a bit of nonsense. I wanted to name the project “Cepheid Variable”; however, I quickly realized every word and combination of words under the sun has been used at this point. So it became a play on words, and now it’s about a family of jellyfish.

Nonsense it may be, but the story brings a smile — and so does Cepheidae Variable’s music, though it’s far away from nonsense. As captured on the project’s debut album Primordial Reverie (released last November), it’s a head-spinning but carefully plotted amalgamation of varied inspirations and stylistic ingredients. Ryan’s identification of bands whose music has heavily influenced him gives some sense of that: Dream Theater, Haken, Intervals, Wintersun, and Caligula’s Horse.

The album is itself carefully plotted and tells a story, even though it doesn’t include vocals. As he has explained: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DISGUSTINGEST — “DIGITAL CYST”

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Feb 032026
 

(written by Islander)

Look around and you can find forms of entertainment (as well as real-world events) that are disgusting. Keep looking and you can find things that are more disgusting. And then there is Disgustingest.

Dictionaries and grammarians would frown on that word, but as metal band-names go, it works a lot better than MOST DISGUSTING.

But what were these Coloradans thinking when they picked that name? After all, the history of death metal is filled with big rotting piles of maggot-ridden, stomach-churning musical foulness. It’s a high bar to surmount (or if you prefer, a really low one to crawl under) to hold yourself out as Disgustingest. But these people do their damnedest to live up to the challenge, as you’re about to find out.

Today we’re helping announce that on February 20th Paper Wings Records will release Disgustingest’s second EP, aptly named Coagulating Putrescence, and we’re also premiering its first single, “Digital Cyst“. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2025’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: THE COMPLETE LIST

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2025  3 Responses »
Feb 032026
 

(written by Islander)

Last Friday I posted the final installment in our list of 2025’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs, the one part of our year-end LISTMANIA series that I alone am responsible for. In compiling that list I wound up with 64 songs before forcing myself to stop. That compares to 69 songs on the 2024 list.

As always, putting together the list was both fun and stressful — fun to re-listen to lots of good music and get reminded of what a good year it was for metal, stressful because list-making of any kind is so difficult for me. Also as usual, my list didn’t cover the entire waterfront of metal genres, given the limitations of my own (still very expansive) tastes,

And of course, as is true every year, I really wasn’t finished when I stopped. A lot of candidates just as worthy as the 64 I chose were left by the wayside when I hit the February wall. Maybe some others will be honored by other writers (last year, for example, both DGR and Andy Synn added addenda to the list), but I don’t know if or when that might happen this year, so I’m doing this wrap-up post now. Continue reading »

WORM: “NECROPALACE”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Feb 022026
 

(Here’s Wil Cifer’s first NCS review of the new year, and he has chosen to focus on the new album by the Floridian necromantic black doom band Worm, which is set for release on February 13th by Century Media.)

Be the change you want to see in the world. I want to hear more of doom’s despair injected into black metal, so I am going to write about blackened doom. In particular, the band Worm.

Two songs into the new album Necropalace and it’s clear that they have grown as songwriters. Refining what they do with a larger-than-life dynamic range to the dramatic swells of guitars, it pretty much sounds the way the album cover looks, music for vampires ruling a cosmic portal in Dungeons and Dragons. Continue reading »

CARRION VAEL: “SLAY UTTERLY”

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Feb 022026
 

(Today we present DGR’s first review of 2026, a full-throttle rush through the full-throttle rush that is Carrion Vael’s new album, which was released two weeks ago by Unique Leader Records.)

The first few reviews of every year lately have felt like an exercise in madness, an attempt to conjure spirits out of thin air while dressed in the most ritualistic way possible. Me, seated with my skirt of bone and three-times-too-big mask in front of a fire and various runes and sigils that may or may not just be permutations on the Pepsi logo – we can’t all be as creative as The Infernal Sea with their logo or draw inversions of an Asmodeus sigil ala Gaerea – and you wait for the year to speak to you. Last year’s end-list was an exercise in scrying to see what the future holds and now we are waiting for the first spirit to reach across the void and grab us by the throat to compel us into 2026.

So far, in spite of all the varied exhortations and exultations, that has no happened yet to this writer. 2026 remains frustratingly silent and has instead gifted us chances to catch up with late-2025 releases that were absorbed into year-end festivities alongside the initial wave of those brave enough to be the vanguard of a new year. It is the amorphous and fungible time that has us attempting to neatly can one horror only to open up the next can of worms to be unleashed.

It’s similar to how decades never end culturally right when a year turns over; it’s more like there is a two-to-three year hangover period before one finally shuffles out the door and the next dumbass thing the kids repeat ad-nauseum can rule the roost. Eventually life becomes a series of checkpoints where you’re counting decades by being thankful one particular bit of bullshit is done with and you don’t have to hear about it anymore. Continue reading »

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