AN NCS PREMIERE: VERILUOLA — “REGAL BARBARISM”

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Apr 052023
 

Having taken their first steps with a four-song, 21-minute demo nearly three years ago, the part-Finnish, part-U.S. band Veriluola are taking a very big next step with the May release of their debut album Cascades Of Crimson Cruor via Nameless Grave Records.

This duo — guitarist/bassist Santeri and guitarist/vocalist Malus — obviously used the intervening time very productively. It was already evident from their debut demo that the band desired to root their creative expressions in a by-gone time when stout fences hadn’t yet been erected between now-well-defined extreme metal genres. But the new album makes this even more obvious.

The new Veriluola songs effortlessly intertwine strains of black metal, death metal, thrash, and what we now label “classic heavy metal” as if they were all born together as brood from the same monstrously regal mother and feel their kinship instead of warring against each other for attention.

In addition to the kind of songwriting that makes that possible, the album also shows significant attention to detail. None of the songs feel hastily thrown together, but instead sound carefully plotted and fully realized, even though at the time you hear them they’re reflexively captivating… and feral… and sometimes forlorn… and sometimes downright heroic. You’ll get a strong sense of what we’re trying to describe in the song we’re premiering today — the aptly named “Regal Barbarism“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LUCIFUGE — “PHYSIOGNOMY OF FAILURE”

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Apr 052023
 

We were a bit late in leaping aboard the Lucifuge hell-train, but quickly realized what a high-adrenaline rush that is. In 2021 we premiered their fourth full-length Infernal Power and spilled a lot of words on it, ending with these: “This really is a hell of a good album, with a lot more going on in the songs than discharges of blast-furnace heat and berserker mayhem. It definitely WILL get your motor running fast and hot, but the songs’ addictive appeal goes beyond that.”

The band followed up that album by releasing a split with Italy’s Bunker 666 last fall (Of Night and Lust), and we had the fiendish pleasure of premiering that one too, accompanied by another torrent of words, which included the erudite exclamation that the music of Lucifuge was “fucking glorious”.

And now we’re once again in the fortunate position of sharing new Lucifuge music with the world, this time through the premiere of a song off their forthcoming fifth album, Monoliths of Wrath. This one, like the two records identified above, will be discharged by Dying Victims Productions.

In hindsight, the new record proves that we picked a good time to get on board with this German band two years ago, because especially starting then and continuing through the new album, they’ve been increasingly spreading their creative wings (bat-shaped to be sure), resulting now in their most accomplished and varied work to date. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): LARVAE — “ENTITLED TO DEATH”

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Apr 042023
 

“Oakland, California has summoned the rituals of many metal legions over the decades. Its stench is filled with dark art, morbid riffs, death and doom. There’s a scorched place in the corner of the crumbling landscape evoking evil and witchy magic where Larvae feast on the remains of those who perished.”

In the press materials, those evocative words precede the release of Larvae‘s long-awaited second album Entitled to Death, which (to quote again from the same materials) “pursues a human experience, traversing the middle realm seen thru the eyes of a defected warrior,” who is bound to a grim and hostile reality “until the final collapse in a land filled with ruin and loss… crossing over into a cosmic abyss.”

In the musical telling of this uncomfortable tale Larvae draw inspiration from such divergent  ’90s legends as Runemagick, Paradise Lost, Immolation, Bolt Thrower, Neurosis, and Dismember. How they interweave those influences might be difficult to guess, but today no guessing game is needed because we have the complete album stream for you. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BONJOUR TRISTESSE — “ODE TO EMPTINESS”

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Apr 032023
 

On April 7th Supreme Chaos Records will release Against Leviathan, the third album by the Bavarian black metal band Bonjour Tristesse. It’s the first part of a two- part cycle, which has a conceptual thread running through it. As the band and label describe: It “paints an extremely bleak picture of the dystopian reality of our time from an unusual perspective. It can be seen as an angry and passionate critique of the industrialized world we are living in. At the centre is the conflict between modern humanity and nature”.

The album consists of four long songs, and today we present the one that closes the record — “Ode to Emptiness“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: CREPITATION — “METHANATED PROPULSION OF GASEOUS LEVITATION”

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Apr 012023
 

April Fool’s Day! Yes it is, and the joke’s on you!

Well, we’re not suggesting that we don’t really have a Crepitation premiere for you today, because we really really do. But look, the song was inspired by the kind of wet farts that provide a queasy recurring lift to your stride.

Hold that thought… along with whatever gaseous emissions may be trying to escape your bunghole at the moment … and let’s consider “Methanated Propulsion of Gaseous Levitation” (the nasty song from a new Crepitation album we’re premiering along with an insane “lyric video”), not the nasty bodily phenomenon for which it was named). Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VALGRIND — “MILLENNIUM OF NIGHT BLISS”

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Mar 312023
 

We’ve been following the music of the Italian death metal band Valgrind for many years, and for good reason. But if you happen to be discovering them for the first time, despite how often we’ve written about them, they released four demos and an EP between 1995 and 2002 — and then seemed to go into hibernation until the appearance ten years later of their debut album, Morning Will Come No More. Another four years passed, and then Valgrind’s second album, Speech of the Flame, was released by Lord of the Flies Records. The wonderful 2017 EP Seal of Phobos tided over Valgrind fans until the 2018 appearance of the next album, Blackest Horizon, via Everlasting Spew Records.

And then came their Condemnation album released in 2020 through the Spanish label Memento Mori, followed by their From the Viscera of Darkness EP in 2021. Now, the same Memento Mori is poised to release Valgrind‘s mind-blowing fifth album, Millennium of Night Bliss, on April 24th, and we’re able to share the title track with you today. BUT… before we get to that song, we want you to lend your ears to the new album’s previously released opening track “Teshub“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: PRONOSTIC — “BARE AND WRETCHED”

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Mar 302023
 

The darkest clouds of the covid pandemic didn’t have many silver linings, but one of them is that the lockdowns gave musicians a chance to bring to fruition ideas that had been long-gestating. The Montreal-based technical/progressive melodic death metal band Pronostic is a prime example of that. The dead times allowed them to complete their second album, Chaotic Upheaval, which is set for release on May 12th. It follows their formidable full-length debut (An Atomic Decision) by a long eight years.

It’s fair to say that with this new album Pronostic pulled out all the stops. New participants have come on board, including Fleshgod Apocalypse‘s piano and orchestration maestro Francesco Ferrini; world-renowned drummer Samuel Santiago, known for his time in First Fragment, Gorod, Black Crown Initiate, and more; and fretless bassist extraordinaire Xavier Sperdouklis, whose resume includes work with Killitorous and Ignominy. Moreover, the new album includes a host of impressive guest appearances (which we’ll identify later in this feature). And they got Cryptopsy‘s Christian Donaldson to produce and record it along with the band’s Charles “Butcher” Pilotte.

And none of that is intended to take away from the songwriting and performance skills of continuing members Pilotte (Low Vocals / Guitar) and Alex Lauzon (High Vocals / Guitar).

What all these talents have accomplished on the new album has already been previewed by the release of a single called “L’impureté Globale” (accompanied by an ambitious post-apocalyptic music video), and today we’ve got a further preview in our premiere via a lyric video of the album track “Bare and Wretched“. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): NECRONOMICON EX MORTIS (SELF-TITLED)

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Mar 302023
 

What you’re about to experience is likely to be the most electrifying 18 minutes of your day, unless you lose control of your car, the brakes fail, and you’re surging toward a concrete pylon at Formula One speed.

Those 18 minutes of full-throttle, mind-boggling music are wrapped within the self-titled debut EP by the Chicago quintet Necronomicon Ex Mortis, which will be released tomorrow (March 31st). Their brand of death metal is so fast, so technically head-spinning, and so devilishly inventive that it allows no room for any calm contemplation. All you can do is hang on for dear life and enjoy the flame-throwing madhouse thrills while they last — and then yield to the impulse to throw yourself back in right away. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PUSTILENCE — “ASPIRANTS OF INTEMPERANCE”

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Mar 292023
 

We’re going to leap right into the music we’re now presenting, and then backfill with some details about who’s responsible for it and the album that includes it.

The song is “Aspirants of Intemperance“, and it is indeed a belligerently intemperate death metal outburst. With little more than a noxious grunt to announce it, the song quickly begins bludgeoning listeners and broiling their brains with squealing, siren-like strings and viciously roiling riffage. The raw madness in the seething and swarming fretwork channels rabid savagery as the rhythm section rapidly jackhammer syour spine and horrific gutturals vent their vitriol.

And there’s more violent lunacy to come, including a freaked-out guitar solo, gut-plundering bass-lines, crazed screams, bursts of jittery and jolting fretwork, weird channel-shifting yowling tones, constant shifts in rhythmic patterns and tempos, and even more macabre vocal howling and roaring. It’s all bizarre and bamboozling, not just gruesome and barbaric but also intricate and elaborate. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SOLNEGRE — “VESSEL PART I: THE NIGHT WITHIN”

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Mar 292023
 

We are premiering a powerful song in this feature, but we’re also doing much more than that. We’re introducing you to a new band (this is the first of their recorded music to be revealed); we’re presenting the new single’s cover art for the first time; and we’re sharing insights into what inspired the music, and news about what will be coming next.

The band is SOLNEGRE, from the Balearic Islands near the eastern coast of Spain. The band is new, but the members are not newcomers to heavy music. Indeed, the two founders have been bandmates since 1995 and members of the Doom Metal sextet Helevorn. They chose to part ways with that band but quickly re-united in this new project, later joined by two other performers, who also has extensive experience in underground metal.

They have taken their musical inspiration from the old school greats of Doom/Death metal from the ’90s, referring to such bands as My Dying Bride and and early Anathema and Opeth, and more recent comparative references might include the likes of Shape of Despair, Ahab, and Doom Vs.

SOLNEGRE have inked a deal with the Armenian label Funere for the release of their debut album this fall (which includes guest appearances), but in the meantime they will be releasing their first single on April 7th, a song named “Vessel Part I: The Night Within”, and that’s what we’re premiering today through a visualizer video. Continue reading »

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