AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SPLENDIDULA — “ECHOES OF QUIET REMAIN”

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Dec 042025
 

(written by Islander)

Loss and remembrance… these are the overarching themes of a new album by the Belgian atmospheric black/doom band Splendidula. Fittingly, the album’s title is Absentia, an apt name because the music’s emotional core lies in the tragic absence of loved ones.

No one can avoid the death of friends and family members. It’s only a matter of time. It’s rarely foreseeable, and often it seems unjust because it’s so random. Splendidula went through such a period beset by loss, and in the making of this new album they dedicated themselves to remembering, and to mourning.

As a new sign of what they achieved in their music, today we’re premiering a video for a song called “Echoes of Quiet Remain“. It includes a guest vocal appearance by Aaron Stainthorpe, known of course for his iconic role in My Dying Bride (and High Parasite). We’ll begin with Splendidula’s own statement about the song: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: PONTE DEL DIAVOLO, NEL BUIO, BIND TORTURE KILL, NÍLIM, EQUILIBRIUM, MARISSA NADLER

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 292025
 

(written by Islander)

As on most Saturdays, today I’ll be looking back at the recent past, recommending some selections of underground metal that caught my ears and eyes during the last week or two, but first I want to look ahead — specifically, to something I’ll be asking you to do on Monday.

On Monday I’ll post the annual NCS appeal to our visitors to share their lists of the year’s best metal. Every year this post proves to be a highlight because so many people fill up the Comments with their favorite releases, which makes those Comments a great gathering place for things other people might have otherwise missed. We keep that post linked in the upper right corner of every page on our site for the 12 months that follow (just look there now to see the 2024 lists).

Bear in mind that you don’t have to have your lists completed and ready to go on Monday. Hell, you could add a 2024 list even today. But it’s time to at least begin thinking about it. And now, on to this week’s roundup of new songs and videos…. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: ENSHINE, UNIVERSE217, CARRION VAEL, GHOULHOUSE, CH’AHOM, XAOC

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Nov 222025
 

(written by Islander)

I guess the word of the week is “piggy”, and not because Northwest Terror Fest announced yesterday that Piggy D will be one of the headliners at the May 2026 edition of the fest. In other news from the Department of Coincidence, we will post a review next week of an album by a band called Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs.

I guess I’ve been piggy myself this morning, ravenously rooting through the trough of extreme metal that got filled up with new releases over the past week. Now engorged, here’s what I decided to vomit up for your delectation this weekend: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: IRREVERSIBLE MECHANISM, NEMOROUS, SATOR, WEFT, PITTS TWYFORD & SINGH, MORAL IMPLANT

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Nov 152025
 

(written by Islander)

Before I get to the music I’ve picked for this Saturday’s roundup I’d like to alert our followers to something that will happen on Monday, which will involve an appeal for your help.

It’s the time of year when our traditional year-end LISTMANIA series will slowly start lurching forward, building toward a frantic rush. Broadly speaking, it includes three segments: 1) our sharing of YE lists published at certain print mags and “big platform” websites, not because we’re endorsing them but because sometimes they’re useful and sometimes they’re laughable and they provide a gaze into how the broader surface-world of metal reacted to the year’s releases, and in all those way can be entertaining; 2) our posting of year-end lists assembled by our own writers and some special guests; and 3) the one thing I contribute to the exercise — my list of the year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs.

That infectious song list is the last part of NCS LISTMANIA. I don’t usually begin rolling it out, bit by bit, until after the first of the New Year. But I start thinking about it much earlier. I keep a growing list of candidates all the way through the year based on what I’ve heard, but I don’t hear everything (who could?), and so part of what I always do to get ready for that list is to ask our visitors for their input, for their picks for the most infectious songs they heard that were released this year. Continue reading »

THE HALO EFFECT: “WE ARE SHADOWS”

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Nov 142025
 

(On November 21st Nuclear Blast will release a new EP from the Swedish metal band The Halo Effect, an EP named We Are Shadows that includes five cover songs, featuring one track picked by each band member. Our writer DGR has been a fan of the band, spent some time with this new EP, and wrote the following review.)

The year in heavy metal is going to have peaks and valleys. Previously, we could’ve viewed years in heavy metal as one seemingly unending torrential flood or the polar opposite in a semi-peaceful consistency, a steady flow of new albums, discoveries, and distractions in equal measure. The past handful of years, however, have been so brain-fried and birdshot when it comes to any form of a consistent release schedule that you could never tell what was going to arrive and – part of this due to getting older and being blissfully unaware of the world surrounding us – more often than not now it feels like we’re constantly getting blindsided by something just off in the distance arriving at the front door with all the aplomb and grandeur one might afford to a distant cousin deciding to bike across the country and wanting to crash at your house for the day. Not to say that there’s any personal experience in the matter, but come the fuck on dude, we’ve spoken one time in nearly forty years?

2024 could have been kindly described as a year of fits and starts at best, were it not for the feeling of burning the candle at both ends – as well as just immolating the whole fucking thing after dousing it in kerosene with the amount we wrote – but 2025 has been the first time in some time that things have felt… consistent. Sort of. We still seem to be drunkenly stumbling to a semblance of previous reality at times but this is more like the occasional stumble one might make when they’re just on the legal line and walking home after having cut themselves off hours ago. Continue reading »

I DON’T DO DRUGS, I AM DRUGS: “I DON’T DO DRUGS, I AM DRUGS”

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Nov 052025
 

(Vizzah Harri is both back home and back at NCS after a hiatus and has brought with him a group of reviews, with the following typically fascinating one focused on the 2025 album by I don’t do drugs, I am drugs from the UK.)

Delaying things can cause them to grow in size from a molehill into an impassable reach. That sheer face presenting its final summit you can’t even process for the valleys, outright tears and fissures in the earth leading up to it, woods less penetrable than a despot’s drive toward self-preservation, and stacked with ghoulish specters of the darkest deepest reaches of self-nebulized phantasmagoria of your brain that need more than a score of filthy twenties to roll to beat. Internalizing these beasties and challenges as this big thing you’ve got to surpass to attain a summit that does not exist in anyone else’s mind. And that is the scariest part.

Time is only the enemy if one so chooses to enter in melee against it. Harrowers of darkened benthic silts. Grubbing and raking, digging deep with numb appendages in them already murky waters of untruth, to meet that sweetest slice and gash, that prick and tear, that hack and rip, of the bloodletting surety of the acidulous blades and pincers of veritas. Fleeting elation as that sinking in and setting of sedimental disdain for the passage of sands still nascently swishing in the alluvial flow of streams and seas of air. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: MUERTO, LEPRETHERE, ROTTEN SOUND, HEXJAKT, PËRL, MASSA NERA

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 012025
 


artwork by the legend Frank Frazetta

(written by Islander)

I hope those of you who celebrated Halloween got through it with all your fingers intact. Oh wait, that’s a different holiday. But the wish still holds, even if the risks of losing digits might not have been as great. It all depends on where you put them and what you hold and whether some masked goon is firing rubber bullets at your raised fists.

I got through Halloween with all my digits intact, and the three I use for typing have been busily pecking away at this Saturday collection. It comes later than usual because I got a late start and was really confounded in deciding what to pick.

I was pretty thorough in saving links and files this week, which meant there were a fuckload of them staring at me this morning, and I had only sampled a small number of them during the week. I would say that more than half of them were of the black metal persuasion, so I shoved off a lot of those candidates (but not all of them) for tomorrow, which is also therefore guaranteed to be confounding. And there’s a bit of a curveball at the end, of course.

On we go…. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: NAEVUS

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Oct 232025
 

(No secret, our Comrade Aleks favors doom above all other metal, and he shows special warmth for the the long-lived German band Naevus in the interview we now present with their vocalist Uwe Groebel, occasioned by the band’s new album Back Home.)

Thanks to Naevus‘ album Sun Meditation (1998), the band is remembered and revered among the more zealous fans of the European and especially German doom scene, alongside bands like Dawn of Winter and Mirror of Deception. Cathedral frontman Lee Dorian once praised the traditional and surprisingly human Sun Meditation, so the album was released on his own label, Rise Above.

This didn’t prevent Naevus from breaking up, and they only returned to the fold in 2012. Their fresh release Back Home is only the band’s third album, but the foursome has lost neither their dexterity nor their inspiration, so even the nine-year hiatus between this release and its predecessor Heavy Burden hasn’t affected the quality of the material.

Naevus continue to impress with their traditional and melodic heavy doom, which most of all invites comparisons to Trouble as a whole and their vocalist Eric Wagner (may he rest in peace) separately as part of his solo project Blackfinger. But while the voice of Naevus vocalist Uwe Groebel’s truly evokes Wagner’s vulnerability, his humanity, the instrumental side of Back Home is their strong part as well. The album boasts plenty of catchy riffs, haunting vocal melodies, and elegant guitar passages, evenly spaced throughout each song.

Naevus managed to get through all obstacles and recorded the new songs with the same lineup which worked on Sun Meditation a quarter of a century ago: Sven Heimerdinger (bass, vocals), Mathias Strauf (drums), Oliver Grosshans (guitars), and Uwe Groebel (vocals, guitars). And you know what? We done an interview with Uwe recently. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: MALKASIAN — “OCCULT 5”

 Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 172025
 

(written by Islander)

As we sometimes do, we’re going off most of our well-beaten paths with the song and video we’re about to premiere. No shrieking or guttural growling this time, but only singing. No blast-beats or brutality, but only the blues. But lest you think we’ve completely lost our way, these blues are very heavy — just as promised by the title of the album that includes the song — and very devilish too.

The name of the song is “Occult 5“, and it’s the latest single to be disclosed by the Denver band Malkasian from their new album Heavy Blues, which will be out on October 22nd. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A BANDCAMP FRIDAY: GALUNDO TENVULANCE, MIND PRISONER, BEASTWARS, MAUDITS, QRIXKUOR, CATHEDRAL

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Oct 032025
 


(written by Islander)

It is another Bandcamp Friday. You will already have many suggestions and discoveries that point you toward how you might spend your music-oriented money today. Poor you, here are some more. (And I’ll have more tomorrow, so you can start complicating your life in advance of the final Bandcamp Friday of 2025 on December 5th.) Continue reading »

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