Islander

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: FUNERAL DANCER — “MANANANGGAL”

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Feb 282025
 

(written by Islander)

The black ‘n’ roll band Funeral Dancer came together at the end of 2019 in Long Island, New York, rising from the ashes of the blackened death metal band Locus Mortis. Since then they’ve released a pair of demos and a 2023 EP (The Nightmare) and played well-known venues in the New York area (including opening for Devil Master and 200 Stab Wounds at Necrofest at Saint Vitus Bar).

Now Funeral Dancer have signed with the revived Dark Empire Records (the Cleveland-based label started back in the ’90s by Integrity‘s Dwid Hellion) for the April 4 release of a new EP called Fiends of the Outer Wave. As a taste of what’s coming, today we’re bringing you the official lyric video for a song from the EP named “Manananggal“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: AN AXIS OF PERDITION — “I AM ODIUM”

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Feb 282025
 

(written by Islander)

We have a rare treat for you today, not just an exceptionally good new song by An Axis of Perdition but also an exceptionally good new video.

Let’s get to the video first. It tells a story, something like a haunting fairy-tale that the Brothers Grimm might have imagined. It was directed by award-winning filmmaker Randal Plunkett. The interior settings and the costumes are beautifully made, the exterior settings well-chosen. It’s also well-acted and meticulously filmed, and the narrative unfolds in a way that’s gripping.

Here’s a comment about the short film by Randal Plunkett himself: Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: ONIROPHAGUS

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Feb 282025
 

(In January of this year Personal Records released a powerhouse new album by the Spanish death/doom band Onirophagus. Our Comrade Aleks gives it a very good quick review below, along with his very enjoyable interview with the band’s vocalist, Paingrinder.)

Catalan death-doom band Onirophagus have been through a lineup rotation since the release of their second album Endarkenment (Illumination through Putrefaction) in 2019, and with two new guitarists and a bassist in the lineup, they have recorded 45 minutes of material under the title Revelations from the Void.

Initially, Onirophagus focused on the legacy of the grimmest death-doom bands of the past, those that avoided melodrama and “gothic sentiments”. And how could it be otherwise, if almost all the members either previously performed or still perform in thrash and death bands? Perhaps that is why the new album is so heterogeneous, although sustained in a single style.

In some places, Onirophagus pulls the veins with classic depressive doom, a model of dissonance; in others they deafen with a death metal attack in the name of Incantation; and in others they invite us into the paranoid nightmare of Esoteric. The mixture of these influences serves the purpose of creating the individuality of the band. Even the violin, appearing in “Black Brew”, plays its part in an unexpected schizophrenic style.

I guess, you can hear the rebellion of the bands from the noughties in Onirophagus, those who found the key to depicting madness with the help of new combinations of familiar formulas. These crushing and murderously dark compositions can be majestic and even melodic, and in this contrast lies their aesthetic value. The band almost never returns to the theme played within the track, preferring to move on from plot to plot. After all, Revelations from the Void is a conceptual album and the musical accompaniment of this story is appropriate. Onirophagus did everything right. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HELVITNIR — “DRAUGR”

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Feb 272025
 

(written by Islander)

The lineup of the Norwegian metal band Helvitnir have resumes that make fans of black metal sit up straight and pay attention. They include three recent former members of Ragnarok, and two of those are also in Myronath. And their drummer is none other than Hellhammer (Jan Axel Blomberg).

In July 2024, following several singles, Helvitnir released their debut EP Helborn on the esteemed Dusktone label, and it proved to be a masterful four-song blend of raw, chilling aggression and majestic, grandiose compositions that both honored the old ways of black metal from the far north and pushed it forward.

That EP did well, and so now Helvitnir and Dusktone have joined forces again for the release of the band’s debut album Wolves of the Underworld on March 14th. What we have for you today is the premiere of a lyric video for the album track “Draugr“, and we want to begin our introduction with Helvitnir‘s own description of what it brings us: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GALLOWER — “BUBONIC BREATH”

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Feb 272025
 

(written by Islander)

About two and a half years ago we gleefully premiered a song named “Claws and Fangs” from a then-forthcoming EP by the Polish black-thrashing maniacs in Gallower. We introduced it with the observation that “Gallower incite a riot of violence that skillfully melds the Teutonic legendry of Destruction, Sodom, Kreator, and Violent Force with the first-wave black magick of Bathory, Hellhammer, Venom, and Japan’s Sabbat.”

And now, with equal devil-horned glee, we’re helping spread the word that Gallower will be returning on March 28th of this year with their second full-length, aptly titled Vengeance & Wrath, in collaboration again with Dying Victims Productions. And again, we’re happily hosting the premiere of one of the Gallower songs off the new record — “Bubonic Breath“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TER ZIELE — “EMBODIMENT OF DEATH”

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Feb 272025
 

(written by Islander)

“When we, as humans, accept subjection to suffering, resignation in life inevitably follows.”

With those words the Dutch band Ter Ziele introduce their debut album Embodiment of Death, which will be released on February 28th by Tartarus Records. The words pack a lot of meaning into a relatively brief sentence. They refer not just to human suffering, but to suffering caused by others or by oneself, hence the word subjection. They suggest that there is a choice among those who suffer about whether to accept the subjection or not. And they point to the consequences of acceptance: the inevitability of resignation in life.

And so the sentence is both an observation of bleak realities that beset the human condition and also (possibly) an argument. What does it matter if acceptance leads to resignation unless people have the ability to reject instead of accept? And what might motivate them to resist or to change?

Of course, the words don’t suggest that resistance or change will be easy. It may not even be possible. In some cases we know it will be futile, that some conditions are so terrible and hopes for relief so barren that despair seems inevitable, even when (and maybe especially when) those conditions are self-inflicted. But again, the words imply that acceptance is not the right answer, because that is the surest recipe for a never-ending cycle of misery. They seem to make an argument, though not a “preachy one,” for resistance.

Obviously, there is a connection between the sentence and what inspired the album’s music, and between the inspiration and the results. And you can draw all those connections today as we premiere the record as a whole. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: REJECT THE SICKNESS — “ACTA NON VERBA”

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Feb 262025
 

(written by Islander)

This year the Belgian metal band Reject the Sickness are celebrating their 15th year of music-making with a new album named Signs of the End that will be released worldwide on May 30th, and to help introduce it we’re premiering an official video for a multi-faceted song from the album named “Acta Non Verba.”

Over the course of that 15-year career Reject the Sickness haven’t stood still (and no one who’s heard their music would be able to stand still either). Instead, their music has evolved, along with their lineup, to the point where the new album discharges an amalgam of heavy-grooved death metal, accents of atmospheric black metal, and “a dash of metalcore.” It’s the kind of music that feeds the need for hard-charging, muscle-moving mayhem but also contributes memorable (though often dark) melody, and white-hot vocal intensity.

You’ll see what we mean when you listen to “Acta Non Verba.” Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: CULT OF EXTINCTION — “DIVINE RETALIATION”

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Feb 262025
 

(written by Islander)

Seven long years ago we premiered the title song to the debut demo by Cult of Extinction, the perfectly named Black Nuclear Magick Attack. We summed it up as “music that upholds the standards of annihilating savagery that govern war metal, yet delivers more than the mere mindless and murky bludgeoning often vomited forth by less talented practitioners.”

Since then, this solo project of the German lone wolf Void (who is also behind Imperceptum) has uncaged two albums, Ritual in the Absolute Absence of Light (2019) and Gnosis of the Wicked (2022), both of them also well-named in light of the nature of the music, and now a third album blackens the horizon. Entitled Nightmare Ascension (another title that honors truth in advertising), it will be released on March 3rd by Winter Demons, a sub label of Darkwoods that’s “devoted to near-death experiences only.”

What we have for you today is an official video for an advance single from the new album called “Divine Retaliation.” Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: OLD FOREST

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Feb 252025
 

(James Fogarty is a man of many talents and musical incarnations, but clearly one of his favorites is in the guise of Kobold within the British black metal band Old Forest. That band, and their newest album Graveside (out now on Soulseller Records) is the focus of Comrade Aleks‘ interview with him that we present today, though the discussion turns to come of his many other projects and bands as well.)

Bands practicing any of the old school genres nowadays do not have to be original, they are not required to be. We approach such bands with a very specific request and expect to receive impressions conditioned by a clear code, a set of musical, lyrical and visual attributes common to the genre.

British black metal band Old Forest does not hide its intentions to express itself with the traditional features of the “second wave of black”. The name and logo itself, and the cover of the new album based on the 18th century painting ‘Moonlit Stoke Poges Cemetery’, exude a unique old-fashioned charm. Song titles such as “The Curse of the Vampire”, “Forgotten Graves”, “Spawn of the Witch” and so on categorically indicate the subject of their lyrics.

Although the label describes Old Forest’s approach to recording as “primitive and regressive”, this does not mean that Graveside will irritate your eardrums with its sound like the scraping of dead man’s claws on your window pane. Old Forest‘s eighth album is an honest and artful piece taken to the extreme level of verisimilitude. Their moderately angry, sincere, coffin-grim black metal comes straight from the ’90s, which is not surprising if you remember that the band has been active since 1998. With a deliberately simplified approach to writing music and a general tendency towards traditionally repetitive themes that build up the atmosphere, Old Forest catches you with memorable, sharp solos, rhythm changes, and even vocal melodies or the utterly vampiric harpsichord’s tunes.

Here’s the interview Kobold conducted with us soon after the Graveside release on Soulseller Records. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CRYPTS OF DESPAIR — “TERMINAL DAIS”

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Feb 242025
 

(written by Islander)

We’ve had lots of good things to say about the previous music of the Lithuanian band Crypts of Despair, most recently within Andy Synn’s review of their 2021 album of blended death and black metal All Light Swallowed, which he described as “a perfect example of the level of annihilation that can be achieved by the crossbreeding of these two savage styles” — “the sort of highly-evolved, apex predator that doesn’t really need to do anything particularly new or revolutionary to achieve its goals – it simply kills and kills and kills again, without remorse or restraint.”

At an earlier time, in the context of their preceding album The Stench of the Earth, I also referred to their music as both “an irresistible headbang trigger” and a simulacrum of “what it feels like to suffer a cranial fracture and concussive trauma.”

Now these killers are returning with a third full-length (their second one for Transcending Obscurity Records), and a title as bleak as those of the first two: We Belong In The Grave. What we have for you today is the third single from the album, “Terminal Dais.“ Continue reading »

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