AN NCS INTERVIEW: CONAN

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Mar 262025
 

(Lured by the impending release of a new Conan album on Heavy Psych Sounds, our Comrade Aleks got in touch with band leader Jon Davis, and below you’ll find their discussion — and the three singles released so far  from Violence Dimension.)

The UK’s heaviest band strikes back with all the power of the gargantuan barbarian sword. The name itself fit well for the music that Jon Davis and his companions played from the start – dirty, ugly, and damn heavy sludge-doom with a hypnotizing stoner vibe. Conan honed their skills with each new album and made a huge leap onward from the point where they started to their current firm position in the global extreme metal scene.

Conan built the legend on their own, but moreover they somehow managed to develop their sound further with the new album Violence Dimension, a masterpiece of heaviness and brutality. Somehow we caught Jon for a while during the band’s current tour and here’s what we were able to learn from him:

Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: HOROH

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Mar 212025
 

(In February the French death metal band Horoh released their second album on Crypt of Dr. Gore — reviewed here by our contributor Zoltar — and today we have Comrade Aleks‘ interview with this horror-loving band’s two veteran members.)

French death-metal duo Horoh consists of Sébastien (vocals) and J. (all instruments). Both men live in different parts of France, so I doubt that Horoh will outgrow its status of a studio project. And yet the fresh Horde of Horror is their new album released only two years after the debut Aberration. Crypt of Dr. Gore released this 39-minute-long knot of gore, death, and unspeakable horrors in a form of quite old fashioned death metal.

Sébastien and J. spent many years performing different kinds of metal, so… an old horse doesn’t spoil a furrow… or how do you pronounce that? However, here we have a quite lively and fun conversation with both men. Hi there! Continue reading »

PREVIEWING FIRE IN THE MOUNTAINS 2025: AN EXCLUSIVE NCS INTERVIEW

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Mar 202025
 

(This coming July the Fire in the Mountains festival will take place at the Red Eagle Campground in the Blackfeet Nation in northwest Montana, with a spectacular lineup of performers and many other attractions. In the following exclusive interview, our man Gonzo talked with festival organizers Jeremy Walker and Shane McCarthy about how FITM got connected with its new location, what inspires the event, and a lot more.)

It was a clear, calm day in Denver. A cloudless sky left plenty of room for the Colorado sun to focus its fiery wrath directly onto my bare head. Sometimes putting on a hat is all but necessary when living up here. Today, I was woefully unprepared.

While walking down Broadway, one couldn’t be blamed for questioning whether spring had come a week or two early. At this elevation, Mother Nature tends to be especially fickle, and any Denverite knows you should probably dress like you’re going skiing at the beach before going outside during this time of year. It’s a decidedly weird aesthetic, but I don’t make the rules.

I was on my way to the dark depths of Trve Brewing, my usual haunt for getting a midday beer and hiding from the sun’s persistent wrath, especially in summer. I am no stranger to this place, and it’s one of my favorite dark corridors in which to lurk and drink.

Today’s visit would be different, though. I’d be meeting up with Jeremy Walker and Shane McCarthy, two of the gentlemen behind the curtain of the Fire in the Mountains festival, to talk about the event’s long-anticipated comeback, where that journey has taken them since its last appearance in 2022, and how in the hell they managed to get Old Man’s Child to play their first-ever US show as a headliner.

I was fortunate enough to have experienced this festival in ’22, when Enslaved and Wolves in the Throne Room were featured, and I can say without exaggeration that it was a life-changing weekend. It became very clear to me back then that this was more than just a music festival. This was something special.

With all that in mind, I’d been looking forward to today’s conversation with Jeremy and Shane for weeks. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: IMPURITY

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Mar 112025
 

(Late last week Hammerheart Records released the debut album from the Swedish death metal band Impurity, and today we follow that with Zoltar‘s interview of all four bandmembers.)

We’ve seemingly been buried under an endless stream of classic Swedish death metal sounding bands lately, old and new, as if one could never get enough of THAT instantly recognizable buzzsaw guitar sound and part-old-school-death-metal-part-crust dynamic, more than thirty years after Left Hand Path originally dropped, turning the scene upside down. Not that it is a bad thing, mind you but the downside of this endless outpour is that fans tend to stick a rather tunnel-visioned view of what Swedish death metal was/is.

Granted, Entombed, Grave, and Dismember all wrote the rules most of their followers to this day strictly follow. But once you started going beyond the mandatory Into The Grave or Clandestine, less-talked-about or cursed by the ‘wrong label’ plague acts like Necrophobic or Hetsheads had their own say about what Swedish death metal could also be about, with a meaner, darker, and even satanic at times edge to it.

All four members of Impurity weren’t even born when said bands were first active but that didn’t prevent them from fully embracing their elders’ (morbid) vision, yet without trying to play the retro card. As a matter of fact, while being recorded at Studio Sunlight – yep, THE Studio Sunlight where ALL Entombed, Grave, and Dismember early misbehaviors were put to tape and where THAT guitar sound was basically invented – their just-released debut album The Eternal Sleep goes the extra mile by truly tapping into something more sinister and menacing. And as you can read below, they know their shit alright! Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: NOIRSUAIRE

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Mar 032025
 

(Later this month Khaoszophy Productions will release the latest EP from the French black metal band Noirsuaire, a prelude to a debut album that’s currently being recorded. In the following interview, our French contributor Zoltar conversed with Noirsuaire‘s mastermind N. about what inspires the band, how the work is done, and other topics of interest.)

There’s always been a certain, especially perverse flair to French black metal and although the scene hit a wall in the late ’90s and early ’00s once all its precursors like Vlad Tepes or Mutiilation had gone either silent or simply beyond the grave, it’s been more vivid than ever lately, and not just with bands perpetrating a certain local tradition.

Noirsuaire is a good example of a band — or project, depending on how you look at it, as it is basically one man’s doing, the secretive N., helped by a drummer and some external contributors – rooted in the classic European sound of the ’90s yet not solely dedicated to reviving the flickering flame of French black metal as it also is largely in debt to the Finns, mainly Sargeist and Satanic Warmaster.

Yes, from head to toes so to speak, this is pure ’90s black metal alright, down to its extremely coded black and white imagery and staccato riffing, yet with a genuine FOAD attitude that really sets them apart, down to coming up with a short-but-sweet two-track EP of Misfits covers (Death Comes Ripping) simply because they felt like doing it… 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 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 INTERVIEW: PENTAGRAM

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Feb 242025
 

(At the end of January the US doom metal legends Pentagram, in collaboration with Heavy Psych Sounds, returned with their first new studio album in a decade. Not long before it was released, our Comrade Aleks reached out and then conducted the following very good interview with current Pentagram guitarist and sound producer Tony Reed, who also leads Mos Generator and Hot Spring Water. With thanks to Tony Reed, we present that interview today.)

The first incarnation of doom metal legend Pentagram was founded in 1971. Back then Bobby Liebling (vocals) gathered around himself a bunch of like-minded persons who dug heavy bluesy rock and wanted to do their own things. The band had a reputation of “street Black Sabbath”, and a lot of talented musicians went through its ranks.

Almost all of Pentagram‘s rises and falls were the result of Bobby’s actions, and it’s a miracle that after so many years the band is still alive. Nearly 40 musicians went through the band, and nowadays Bobby is accompanied by the guitarist and sound producer Tony Reed of Mos Generator, his colleague bass-player Scooter Haslip, and drummer Henry Vasquez from Saint Vitus, Legions of Doom, and more.

At the time of this interview Heavy Psych Sounds was scheduled to release the new Pentagram album Lightning in a Bottle on January 31st. It’s the tenth album in the band’s extended career (and the first one in this decade), and it’s an absolute killer, something I couldn’t ignore. Tony Reed was kind enough to find some free time in his busy schedule and helped with this interview. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: DEATHRITE

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Feb 212025
 

(Last fall, the German band Deathrite released their fifth album, and our Comrade Aleks got in touch with them to find out more about it. After some delays, we’re finally able to bring it to you today.)

Hell! The fifth album of Deathrite, Flames Licking Fever, was released in October 2024, and we managed to organize this interview with these guys from Dresden exclusively fast. But Ruinous Powers interfered at some point, and this fast interview arrived only in the winter of 2025.

A feverish and lunatic mix of deranged death metal and hardcore punk doesn’t need a long introduction. Dig or die. But read it before you choose any of these options. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: JORDAN WHITEMAN (AND “THE UNLIKELY STORY OF DUNGEON SYNTH”)

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Feb 122025
 


photo by Betsy Whiteman

(In this interview with writer Jordan Whiteman, Comrade Aleks delved deeply into the story behind Whiteman‘s recently published book about the history of dungeon synth, and the passion required to make the book a reality. Like the book, the discussion is essential reading for any fan of the subgenre, and for anyone interested in exploring it for the first time.)

Released in December 2024 by Cult Never Dies, the book The Unlikely Story of Dungeon Synth became a good extension of the publishing house’s black-metal-oriented catalogue. It’s not something you would expect probably, but this subgenre, as a development of majestic synth-driven soundscapes accompanying a lot of black metal albums, has its history, its ethos, and influence too.

This well-written and well-illustrated book brightened up this January, so I decided to take a look behind the curtain and discover more of Dungeon Synth and its origin with the book’s author, Jordan Whiteman. Continue reading »

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