The people behind Obscureviolence, two of whom are also members of the death metal band Horror God, lit upon a very good name for their new entity, given the obscure and violent nature of the music they’ve made for their debut album Refuting the Flesh, which will be released by Transcending Obscurity Records on February 7th.
Two songs from the album have previously surfaced, and today we’re presenting a third one, which is the record’s macabre title track. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
Just in time to fiendishly defile Christmas, today we’re premiering the second advance track from the debut album of Necromaniac, which bears the title Sciomancy, Malediction & Rites Abominable. Invictus Productions will handle the album’s release for Europe while The Ajna Offensive will offer it in North America.
Some of you have previously encountered Necromaniac through their 2015 debut demo (Morbid Metal), their 2018 EP (Subterranean Death Rising), and/or their second demo last year. For newcomers, the band is London-based but formed by Swedish, Spanish, Greek, and Polish musicians.
On the new album, they’re also joined by some notable guest performers: A.A. Nemtheanga of Primordial, Negative Plane’s Nameless Void, and one A Corpse Without a Soul, “whose signature throat should not be unknown to astute underground dwellers.” Continue reading »
(As our year-end LISTMANIA series proceeds, what we have for you today is the Top 20 list of NCS writer Didrik Mešiček.)
I’m pretty sure I said about how the world is horrible at the moment in this intro last year, and this year I feel a bit more optimistic, as the world is still horrible but at least we have consistency. That’s… good, right?
Anyway, what about the metals? I reckon it’s been a really solid year, perhaps the best since like 2021? Ironically, the pandemic years are some of my favourite in regards to new musical releases and there’s something to be said there about artists and suffering.
Most of all, I think 2024 has been phenomenal for black metal. I’ve included quite a few albums who are more or less a part of the aforementioned genre and there’s at least three or four more that have been considered but just missed, partly also because I did try to keep it a bit varied in regards to the subgenres. After all, I could easily switch the 19th and the 17th (for example) best album in these lists just based on my mood, the position of the moon, the number of cats currently trying to be in my lap. and whether I’ve eaten a croissant today.
But without further ado, here are the albums! Continue reading »
I have an explanation and a request.
The explanation concerns why I haven’t written a Shades of Black column today for one of a very few times since I started this Sunday thing many years ago. After finishing the Saturday roundup I checked out of listening to music or writing about it the rest of yesterday and last night, and spent all that time with my spouse and cats instead.
And then this morning I left the house very early with her and another friend to go to a reputedly great breakfast place about a half hour away that you reportedly couldn’t get into without a long wait if you didn’t arrive when it opened (turned out to be true). By the time I got back home, having satisfied my total recommended caloric intake for the whole week, the morning was gone.
Now for the request I’d like to make of you. Continue reading »
Obscure Sphinx
(written by Islander)
It seems like the end of the year is coming up in a big rush. It’s now four days before Christmas and the start of Hanukkah and 10 days before New Year’s Eve, a block of time when many people do something different from what they normally do (like taking time off from work), and other people feel grumpier about what they normally do because they’re still having to do it (like working).
We’re still here of course, and not even feeling grumpy about it. For a bunch of reasons I won’t bore you with, it’s the fanatically commercialized “holiday season” that makes me feel grumpy, and it’s continuing to pound away on this blog that helps get me through it.
Part of what we’re pounding on, of course, is year-end LISTMANIA. Even on a Saturday I nailed another list to the door. Next week we’ll have lists from at least four more of our writers, plus a bag of odds and ends from Neill Jameson.
But for now, just more new music — quite a lot of it actually. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
We’re again including Rolling Stone‘s list of the year’s best metal albums because it has become a tradition, a largely comical tradition at this point which dates back to the halcyon days of 2013 when a commenter somehow just skipped past all our introductory text, looked at Rolling Stone‘s list, and chastised us for not naming Gorguts as AOTY instead of Deafheaven.
Of course, Rolling Stone hands-down qualifies as the kind of “big platform” site or zine that we pull from as part of our LISTMANIA orgy, as a way of getting a glimpse into what the top-side world perceives as great metal.
This year, Rolling Stone compiled a Top 20 list (the number seems to vary from year to year). As it often has in the past, it displays a lot of scatter, for want of a better term. There’s albums on the list (quite a few of them) you wouldn’t be surprised to see on one of the lists assembled by our own writers, and there’s others that will make you cringe, just like the ranking will. Continue reading »
photo by Alyssa Lorenzon
(Below is the third installment of Neill Jameson‘s year-end list for NCS, and we thank him again for sharing it with us and you.)
I could have spread this out a little more this year by posting a whole bunch of ambient I’ve been enjoying from various Youtube channels or maybe going into some of the great reissues that 2024 included, like the first three Blood records so nicely done through Nuclear War Now!. I could have even written about the “Schizophrenia” rerecording the Cavalera brothers released (which I did enjoy quite a bit). But, as I get older, I’m striving to figure out how to say more with less, to be more impactful.
That made my head hurt just typing it. I’ve been having to lead a lot of corporate training and that kind of phrasing just sticks with you like some obscure STD you probably got sitting on a toilet at work, ironically enough. Everything connects, it’s fucking spiritual.
So, what have I been up to recently? Glad you asked. I’ve undertaken a new project, Fuck Music, which is initially just going to be a Substack where I write about, you guessed it, music. What a fucking shocking reveal. I’ve considered podcasting but it’s a lot easier on the ears to just read my inane shit without listening to me trail off, searching for ghosts. Plus I’m shit with followthrough, so let’s just see if I stick with this one, ok?
So, this is the end. [Editor’s note: It actually isn’t… tune in again next Monday.] These are the truly special releases in a year that was shockingly packed full of them. I said before I had a really difficult time figuring out a top ten elsewhere and, especially from my second list, any of the releases I wrote about could have ended up here. For a year that felt like an unenthusiastic handjob, given with no love, it was a truly stellar year for music. Here’s my favorites: Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
For the first time we introduce our visitors to the soul-slaughtering Mexican death metal band Manifestum Darkness. Founded in 2016 in the city of León, Guanajuato, they released a first demo named Initiation at the end of 2018, which was later re-released on cassette tape by the Dark Recollections label. And now they’re primed for the release of their debut album Desecration Rotten Corpse in February of the New Year via the Death in Pieces Records label.
Manifestum Darkness have dedicated their album “to blasphemy, dark and rotten sound towards the abysses.” As a sign of what this means, today we’re premiering a foul and ferocious song from the album named “Hossana In the Abyss.” Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
“Broken Smile“, the name of the Danish band Nonrestraint‘s new single, has a dual meaning, at least as I interpret it. Lyrically, it refers to its narrator emotionally and mentally falling apart — “dead inside,” hating “everything inside,” dwelling in “thoughts of malice.” He says, “All I’m left with is a broken smile.”
But then there’s the other meaning: The song itself will knock your teeth out, leaving you with a different kind of broken smile. Continue reading »
(We’ve arrived at the final installment of DGR‘s Top 50 list for 2024, which has been unfolding day by day since Monday of this week. Now it’s time for the Top 10.)
Well this is it folks: the big kahuna, the final ten, the end of all ends, the great sandwich in the sky, the pothole to end all potholes, the grandest exercise in feet dragging you have ever seen, the golden egg, the sponsored award, the singularity of all fifty albums that we’ve been talking about over the course of the week, the grand conjuration, the comically oversized rabbit, the final ten…again.
I wish I had prepard a slightly bigger fanfare than this but it is really hard to explain to your local high school that you would like to borrow their marching band for an hour so you can film them playing as they walk by a camera for each album announcement. What I’m getting at here is this is it. After a week long rollout of the fifty albums I’ve enjoyed jamming the hell out of over the course of the year, we’ve accomplished reaching the end.
It’s been a hell of a thrill ride getting up to this point after all the mountains we’ve climbed, epic journeys we have undertaken, the critic-proofing we’ve had to participate in, the general explanations and explorations of gore, the occasional horror show, yet it never occurs to you just how much these things take out of you until you watch Part One of your list run on the website while you’re in the midst of writing up your final few albums for the last part. Needless to say, this fucker is probably coming in hot, so if these final summations (proclamations, conflagrations) of the albums that made my year-end list read like I was in the midst of being eaten alive, it’s probably because they’re a little more panicked than usual. Continue reading »