Islander

AEONIAN SORROW: “FROM THE SHADOWS”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
May 162025
 

(Sacramento-based DGR has at last caught up with the latest release by the pan-national doom band Aeonian Sorrow and shares his thoughts about it below.)

We’ll pry the mask off of our anonymity somewhat here but a few releases have hit this year that I’m genuinely surprised have flown under the NCS radar. Perhaps it’s just due to the weird flood/non-flood of pacing that releases have seen so far, but some that’ve floated past us feel like releases that have had neon signs hovering over them and calling out to us.

Maybe it’s just due to the fact that release season has been weird. I’m obsessed with finding a groove in things and that includes the flow of the year. Generally speaking, January has been my fall back for checking out Doom releases. It is about as cold as the home town will get (a frigid 29 fahrenheit at worst guys, make sure to hunker down) and also allows for a meditative slowing down of things.

Not this year though, as a certain moron decided to get high on his own supply and proceeded to add an addendum to the year’s most infectious list which took a surprising amount out of them. On top of that, Doom didn’t really hit in the massive wave that it usually does in January. Finland as a whole did, dominating the early part of the year somewhat, but the Doom releases were a little more scattered.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I am legit surprised we missed Aeonian Sorrow‘s new EP From The Shadows when it saw release in late March. We’ve had a pretty good track record of keeping up with the Finnish/Greek superhero team-up, but for some reason From The Shadows flew right past our dazed skulls. Well not anymore, let’s rectify that now. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: GRAVEBORN — “TEMPORAL SANDS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 152025
 

(written by Islander)

Four years ago we had the extreme pleasure of premiering the title track from Transmigrator, the then-forthcoming fourth album from the Boston-based death metal band Graveborn. That album was a significant step in the band’s ongoing evolution in their musical approach, a steadily progressing shift away from their deathcore roots and into a more stylistically multi-faceted and even more thrilling (but still brutalizing) experience.

Four years later, it’s clear that Graveborn haven’t stopped moving. Where their increasingly inventive momentum has led them is reflected in a new single we’re premiering today, presented through a fascinating animated video. Named “Temporal Sands,” this new song is a head-spinner of a high order — and a brutal bone-smasher too. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: EMPEIRIA — “IV”

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May 152025
 

(written by Islander)

The black metal band Empeiria (a word intended to mean “the un-tangible, the negation of limit”) arrive like some flaming meteor suddenly surging through a night sky.

A mysterious German duo who go by the names π and η, their first recording is a debut album that caught the attention of Vendetta Records, which will release it on June 6th. The album’s name is The Ascent: Szenen der Katharsis, and we have this description of its narrative progression:

The Ascent: Szenen der Katharsis is a tripartite concept album tracing the journey of the lyrical protagonist through three emotional stages: tormenting doubts and guilt (I–III), growing confidence (IV–VI), and existential realization (VII). The atmosphere and compositional approach of the seven tracks reflect these evolving themes.

What we have for you today is a premiere stream of the album’s fourth track. And we have this introduction of that specific song to share with you as well: Continue reading »

How the fuck is it already mid-2025 when 2020 was just a few months ago? Yeah I slept on some shit last year, I was going through some stuff, what`s your fucking excuse for listening to the same 5 albums over and over again? YES, it`s all the title including this sentence. Haven`t you picked up on my way naming these articles yet?

 Album Reviews, LISTMANIA 2024  No Responses »
May 152025
 

(“Eclectic.” There’s that word again, the one we almost always use in sharing year-end lists from Tumbleweed Dealer‘s Seb Painchaud. We already did present Seb’s 2024 YE list during our LISTMANIA series for last year, but it turns out he overlooked a few — 16 of them, to be precise.)

How the fuck is it already mid-2025 when 2020 was just a few months ago? Yeah I slept on some shit last year, I was going through some stuff, what`s your fucking excuse for listening to the same 5 albums over and over again? YES, it’s all the title including this sentence. Haven’t you picked up on my way naming these articles yet?

So, are we really doing this again? I swore I was done with these lists as no one seems to read ‘em but god damn it, I kept discovering amazing 2024 albums I wish I had included and I made a playlist of ‘em on spotify and it’s just there, mocking me with its smugness, shoving my face into the failure that is not reporting these albums to you, the people not reading these lists.

On we go… Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: COMATOSE — “CONDEMN TO DARKNESS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 142025
 

(written by Islander)

The last time we hosted the premiere of a song from the Filipino death metal band Comatose (here) we called the music “both diabolically frenzied and lethally vicious, both cold-blooded and wild,” a “combination of feral bloodlust and pre-meditated cruelty.”

That was a long 6 1/2 years ago, and the occasion back then was to help spread the word about their forthcoming second album The Ungodly Lamentations. Now, at last, Comatose are back with a new album and we’re back with them again, hosting another song premiere.

The new full-length is The Unhallowed Congregation, and it will be co-released on May 21st by Satanath Records (Georgia) and WP And RO Productions (Netherlands). The song we have for you today is “Condemn To Darkness.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PIECE — “DEMIGOD”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
May 142025
 

(written by Islander)

The Berlin-base sludge band Piece made their recording advent with a self-titled EP in 2017 and then followed that with a 2018 split, a 2021 single, and their 2023 debut album Ancient Greed. Another split (with Arsen) came forward the following year, and now Piece are ready with their second full-length.

The new album is Rambler’s Axe, and it’s set for release by This Charming Man Records on September 5th. To help spread the word, today we’re premiering a very cool video for the album’s neck-wrecking first single, “Demigod“. Continue reading »

THE HAUNTED: “SONGS OF LAST RESORT”

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May 142025
 

(After a very long wait The Haunted are returning with a new album now set for release by Century Media on May 30th, and below you’ll find DGR‘s musings about it.)

We’re not doctors around here. We have crew on the staff of this site that have higher education degrees and have made something of themselves – not yours truly, though – but at last check we don’t maintain anyone with the ability to diagnose anything or write a prescription. That said, if you’ll allow for some folksy wisdom, we can definitely see patterns and recognize solutions that seem to work.

Given that The Haunted experienced a second extended hiatus where it seemed for a while that the future of the band was up in there air, only for them to return with a ferocious new single that makes them seem scrappy again and with some vitality in their step, perhaps an argument is to be made that The Haunted are a band best served with a nice break between albums. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEWICHOR — “BARBED WIRE”

 Premieres  1 Response »
May 132025
 

(written by Islander)

Two years after the release of their debut EP Ritual, the Siberian band Dewichor are returning with their first full-length album, No Tomorrow, which is set for release in August by Satanath Records. The “elevator pitch” for the album describes it as “the quintessence of black, death and post-metal, seasoned with the atmosphere of the end of the world.”

The label’s further pitch is to recommend it for fans of such bands as: Behemoth, Kriegsmaschine, Mgła, Batushka, Ultar, Grima, Gaerea, Schammasch, Belphegor, and Panzerfaust.

As quick pitches go, those are obviously very enticing, especially since these days it’s fairly easy to imagine living in a post-apocalyptic world before we expire (but hopefully not before this album’s release in August). It’s thus agreeable to have a soundtrack that (as the label promises) will “plunge us into a world of chaos and the absence of any hope for survival.” And of course those comparative band references create agreeable (and lofty) expectations too.

But let’s see how well the music of No Tomorrow lives up to these quick pitches. As a sign of that, we present the album’s fifth track, a stunner named “Barbed Wire“. Continue reading »

AN NCS DEMO PREMIERE: VEIA — “TUCHULCHA / IL RITORNO DI TUCHULCHA”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
May 132025
 

(written by Islander)

Frequent visitors to our site (and other people equally intelligent and tasteful) will know the names Thecodontion and Clactonian. If you don’t know those names, you can find out why I think you should know them by plowing through the volumes of words we’ve spilled about their music (collected here and here, respectively). Both bands are the brainchildren of Italian musician G.E.F., joined with other very talented friends in each group.

Now we have another name you need to know, another brainchild of G.E.F. This one is Veia. Under the banner of Veia G.E.F. is the vocalist and lyricist, joined here by bassist extraordinaire G.D. (also from Thecodontion) and exceptionally talented people from Svart Vinter and Veil of Conspiracy on drums and guitars.

Unlike Thecodontion and Clactonian, Veia is predominantly a vehicle for black metal. The band’s members have been at work on a debut album to be entitled Vacal, and they expect the recording sessions to be completed later this year. But to help introduce Veia to listeners, G.E.F. decided to release two “raw excerpts” from the album this month through his new-ish label Prehistoric Sounds, and we have premiere streams of both songs for you today. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: SIJJIN

 Interviews  No Responses »
May 132025
 

(Here we present Zoltar‘s interview of Malte Gericke, bassist and vocalist of the pan-national death/thrashing band Sijjin, whose new album Helljjin Combat is out now on Sepulchral Voice Records.)

“I couldn’t be happier man.” Malte Gericke, aka Mors Dalos Ra, is relieved for probably the first time since the band’s split in 2021 not to be asked about Necros Christos, the cult and highly-mystical death/doom beast he led out and back to the abyss for over two decades. And he deserved the right to, as Sijjin, the to-the-point and proudly stuck in the ’80s thrash/death new band he had put together even before NC took their final bow, has proven not to be the expectative derivative but an entity on its own, far less entrenched in occult and cryptic atmospheres and doom-laden circumvolutions, way more straight-forward and unapologetically METAL, as in denim-and-leather-patches-furious-headbanging metal.

If their 2019 demo, later reissued on LP, and their debut album Sumerian Promises were treading on early Morbid Angel territories, as he once again puts it himself, their long-awaited sophomore and very riff-oriented album Helljinn Combat goes even more “back in time”. Old-school to the bone! Continue reading »

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