Islander

AN NCS PREMIERE: ASPEN SANCTUM — “PILLARS”

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Jul 102026
 

(written by Islander)

We’re all about to roll into the weekend, and we hope it will be a good one for everybody. To help pave the way into it, and to make the weekend a better one for you, we’re premiering a song from Aspen Sanctum’s forthcoming debut album To Withhold the Need to Conquer.

Because this is a fairly new band, an introduction is in order. They are based in Kalamazoo, a town in southwestern Michigan that shares the Algonquian name for the river that runs by it. The band’s four members are Jared Koons, Jeremy Cronk, Tim Wicklund, and Bryan Neterer. Here’s their explanation for the band’s name, and for the title of their album:

Aspen forests are common to the upper Midwest. Known for their colorful autumn leaves and pale bark, the word “Aspen” serves as a reference to the region’s distinct seasons. “Sanctum” suggests a sacred, secluded space. Aspen Sanctum is meant to evoke a vision of the natural world prevailing in the face of time.

Embodying the beauty of the Northwoods, coastal Great Lakes, and rolling hills of the Midwest, while simultaneously resisting the innate human urge to dominate and conquer all that lies in view. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: RAVAGED BY THE YETI

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Jul 102026
 

(“Fun” is a recurring word in Zoltar’s interview of Mike Borders, and “fun” is the operative word for what the interview will bring you, too. The focus is on Ravaged by the Yeti (Borders‘ band with Rogga Johansson and Jon Rudin), whose new album is being released today by Testimony Records, but it goes in other directions too. Enjoy!)

Few people do take a thirty-plus years leave of absence in death metal before going back at it in full swing. But Mike Borders ain’t no regular death metal musician either as he was part of one of MASSACRE’s earliest line-ups back in 1985. Yep, he played along Kam Lee, Bill Andrews, and future OBITUARY axeman Allen West before the latter was replaced by Rick Rozz, recording with them their first two proper demos before hanging up his bass to lead a ‘normal’ life.

That is until 2019 when Lee called him back, eventually becoming part of the team that would record and release the Resurgence album and a few subsequent EPs, including Mythos. Said team included Rogga Johansson from PAGANIZER and a zillion other bands with whom Borders would soon have a very special bond, leading to formation of RAVAGED BY THE YETI in 2023, right after his second and final exit from MASSACRE.

After a cool but nowhere-to-be-found debut on a rip-off label (Apex Predator) and a slight reshuffling of the line-up – gone are both WOMBBATH’s Jonny Pettersson and drummer Jon Skäre – RAVAGED BY THE YETI’s brand-new album Snowbound Horror on the far more reliable imprint Testimony Records is as dumb and fun as its title suggests and Borders doesn’t even try to pretend otherwise. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HORNS OF ABOMINATION — “HORNS OF ABOMINATION”

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Jul 092026
 

(written by Islander)

Horns of Abomination is the name of a new Southern California-based one-man audio terror. It is also the name of the band’s debut demo tape to be released by Sentient Ruin, and it’s the name of the demo’s opening song, which we’re now premiering.

As usual, Sentient Ruin has crafted its own vivid prose to describe what happens on the demo:

Treading a liminal outer realm of ear-splitting chaos where bestial war metal and pure noise converge into experimental derailment riding the confines of sanity, Horns of Abomination establishes an audial conquest of unprecedented cruelty and destruction. Obsessive, maniacal, barely coherent rhythmic pulsations plumbing a bloodbath of distortion; assaultive, chainsawing guitars creating berserk repetitions against a foul regurgitation of bestial, disemboweled vomits.

Of course, we have some descriptions of our own to offer. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DEFIANT — “CAESARS MESSIAH”

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Jul 092026
 

(written by Islander)

Not for the first time, an extreme metal band has used excerpts from The Passion of Joan of Arc to illustrate one of their songs. This time it is the Croatian black/death metal band Defiant, who commemorated their 20th year of existence in 2025 with the release of their fifth album, Mammon Mantra. But in the video we’re premiering for their song “Caesars Messiah” from that album, Defiant aren’t celebrating the famous martyr, but using the scenes for a different purpose.

The Passion of Joan of Arc is a 1928 French silent film directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer and starring Renée Jeanne Falconetti. It focuses on the time that Joan of Arc was a captive of England and depicts her trial and execution for heresy by French clergymen loyal to the English. It is rightly regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. Even seeing only the excerpts used by Defiant, you can get a sense of why that is.

But, as suggested above, the lyrics of “Caesars Messiah“, which you will also see in the video, seem to have a different moral than the injustice visited upon Joan and the reasons for her ultimate elevation to sainthood by the church. Continue reading »

INFERNO: “THE ANTHROPIC SOPHISMS (ON THE HEIGHTS OF DESPAIR)”

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Jul 092026
 

(We present Daniel Barkasi’s evocative review of a new album by the Czech band Inferno, which will be released on July 17th by Debemur Morti Productions.)

If you search for a band named Inferno on Encyclopedia Metallum, you’ll unsurprisingly get a lot of results. All of these are not created equal, of course. When we think of a band of that name, there’s only one that comes straight to mind – the gnostic black metal Inferno hailing from Czechia.

Having been in existence for over three decades, their works speak for themselves, though they’ve experienced quite a musical metamorphosis over those years. Earlier releases were much more straightforward second-wave black metal with a certain rawness and regional authenticity that added to their proverbial charm. A hint of a more expansive direction could be sniffed out on Black Devotion in certain aspects, but that change truly came to fruition on the nightmarish Omniabsence Filled by His Greatness in 2013, a record filled with dreary, unpredictable atmospheres resembling a thick fog that gives no chance of seeing anything but nothingness.

From that release, Inferno have been wildly experimental, carving out a truly singular sound and presence, not unlike contemporaries Blut Aus Nord, Cult of Fire, and a select few others. They also don’t tinker for the sake of it – the upper crust quality of each release exemplifies creative zeal to a level that few achieve. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEHUMANIZING ITATRAIN WORSHIP — “2D COMPLEX”

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Jul 082026
 

(written by Islander)

The best anime death metal from China! That sounds like a narrow niche, doesn’t it? It’s also a description that leaves some big unanswered questions about what the music sounds like – questions we will help answer today.

But first, there’s a question about the meaning of this band’s name – Dehumanizing Itatrain Worship. They have answered that question: “The band name ‘Itatrain’ actually comes from a viral 2012 incident in Shanghai: a fan was caught kneeling and worshipping a train decorated with ‘LoveLive!’ characters. We thought that kind of fanaticism was both stupid and hilarious at the time, so we decided to name the band after it.”

The LoveLive! multimedia anime universe has also played a role in the music of Dehumanizing Itatrain Worship. Their vocalist Kiryu Zhang admits that “on our previous efforts, people probably saw us as just that ‘weird anime slam band’ sampling LoveLive! for shock value.” But what began as a “meme” bedroom project has survived for a decade, and the music has considerably evolved as well.

Perhaps one sign of that is the fact that it’s our site that was invited to premiere the band’s new album, 2D Complex (二次元コンプレックス), in advance of its July 10 release by Stillbirth Records and Gore House Productions. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: MOTHS

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Jul 082026
 

(We venture off our usual beaten paths today with the following very engaging interview conducted by Comrade Aleks with a member of the Puerto Rican band Moths, whose progressive metal goes off in very interesting and often unexpected directions.)

Things happen and it’s difficult to support each new release in time, but I believe that it’s better late than never, and today I’m belatedly announcing that Puerto Rican experimental outfit Moths have a second full-length album Septem, with each track of that dedicated to one of the seven sins. The idea isn’t new, but its execution sounds unique. I can’t say the same about the lyrics, however, as they pose the issue directly, without any frills, and yet the Moths’ essence is quite unusual.

The casual and flirtatious folk prelude “Sloth” could be anything but a prelude to a metal album. However, with “Envy,” electric guitar takes over, and the listener is treated to avant-garde and progressive witchy heavy rock. Moths’ new vocalist, Mariel Viruet, previously fronted a local tribute band and performed in a jazz band. Here, she showcases both trained jazz and extreme vocals, effortlessly channeling the track’s hard rock intensity.

“Greed” bursts in unexpectedly hard, predatory, and fast: Mariel growls out the lyrics and switches to her usual delivery. “Pride” follows the pattern of “Greed,” but this extreme, doomy metal piece is imbued with the prowess of progressive rock, with a loud, jazzy vocal and a wealth of instrumental nuances. The difference lies in the details, and Moths sounds disorienting in any case, and the extremity of “Wrath” is unique. Liquid prog parts mutate into fat riffs, growls alternate with jazzy and pop vocals, and all together it sounds bold, unusual, even provocative.

So, today, almost one year after Septem’s release, we managed to organize an interview with the band’s spokesman and bass-player Weslie Negrón. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VILE FORM — “ORB”

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Jul 072026
 

(written by Islander)

The bare bones: The Philadelphia death metal band Vile Form features members of the grindcore trio Die Choking and the death/doom outfit Burden. Since forming up in 2024 they have released two EPs — Unending in 2024 and Death in early 2025 — and in the spring of last year they released a compilation of the two EPs titled Death Unending.

Now, to put some meat on the bones: The opener of the Death EP, which then became track 6 on Death Unending, is a song called “Orb“. Lyrically it pictures gleaming orbs in the sky, but they turn out to be the dreadful demon orbs of Vile Form’s eldritch entity Subulonagus, orbs that absorb life and disgorge what they consume to create a grotesque fortress.

What we have for you today is the premiere of Vile Form’s video for that song, a video that guitarist Jeffrey Daniels has described for us in detail: Continue reading »

AN NCE PREMIERE: SUFFERING QUOTA — “OVERPOWERING WEIGHT”

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Jul 072026
 

(written by Islander)

Three years ago we introduced the premiere of a Suffering Quota song with these words:

“Adjectives like ‘terrorizing’ and ‘explosive’ have tended to surround the music of the Dutch grindcore band Suffering Quota like swarms of angry hornets. Of course, sensations of fury and violence are endemic to a lot of grindcore, but adjectives like those don’t always come to mind as frequently as they do with this band.

“Yet those aspects of their music, while integral and vital to what they do, really aren’t all that sets them apart from a lot of their peers. What really sets them apart is the feeling that they’d get bored just blowing off the doors in listeners’ heads and wrecking the hell out of whatever’s inside. It’s got to be more interesting than that.”

We’ve repeated those words because they still hold true for the band’s new album Sisyphean Life, which will be released on September 25th by Tartarus Records in collaboration with 7 Degrees Records. We’re again in the fortunate position of proving the point with a premiere, this time a song from the new record named “Overpowering Weight” (and we have some thoughts about the album as a whole too). Continue reading »

OBSCURITIES – VOLUME XXIX: SUMMER SOLSTICE

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Jul 062026
 

(We welcome back Daniel Barkasi with another collection of reviews and recommendations of albums released in the month just ended, this time June 2026.)

The summer solstice came on June 21, and it’s been a wild ride so far in 2026. New house in a new state, new baby horse (Ezri is doing awesome). What’s also new – for me, anyway – is not being cooked alive by the temperature at this point in the year. It has been a comforting 70 – 75°F (around 21– 24°C) for a lot of the time here in the WV mountains. Then there’s Florida, where the real feel temperature has been as high as a sweat-farming 110°F (a hair over 43°C).

I used a past tense in describing the amazing weather we were having, but alas, a taste of Florida has arrived, with those same boiling conditions. Talk about perspiration soup. I miss some things about the home of the infamous Florida man, but not that.  With that, it’s been a regular refreshing of cold water for all of the outdoor animals, as well as shearing the sheep – which was quite the ordeal, but absolutely necessary to prepare.

At the beginning of June, we also got to attend an event a little different from music, but with a connection for many who enjoy this sort of music – a horror convention. Continue reading »

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