AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): STARER — “ANCIENT MONUMENTS AND MODERN SADNESS”

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Oct 102025
 

(written by Islander)

The name Starer won’t be new to our regular long-term visitors. We’ve been avidly following and writing about this project (the solo symphonic black metal endeavor of Kentucky-based Josh Hines) off and on for the last five years, almost from the issuance of Starer‘s first singles in 2020.

In that time, Starer has released five albums and a multitude of shorter works. The fifth album, Ancient Monuments and Modern Sadness, was released overnight, and we’re sharing it at NCS today. Because the album has been out for some hours, this feature may technically be more of a “news” item and review than a premiere, but it’s close enough that I’m sticking with the post title. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HERMIT DREAMS — “DIRECTIONLESS GAZE”

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Oct 102025
 

(written by Islander)

And now for something completely different….

The always interesting Mexican label Chaos Records describes the music of Hermit Dreams as “experimental death/doom metal.” All those words are relevant — but especially the “experimental” part, because it’s the nature of the experiments that makes the music so unexpected, so distinctive, and just as fascinating as the cover art of their debut album Desperate Anomies.

A lot of death/doom provides soundtracks to personal or physical catastrophe and their abysmal aftermaths, but the music you’re about to hear goes off the usual beaten paths and into glades that really will make people think of a hermit’s dreams, a hermit from ancient myth who lives on the border of realms where the rules of our world have no sovereignty. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): LUCTUS — “TAMSOŠVIESA”

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Oct 092025
 

(written by Islander)

Now almost a quarter-century into their lifespan, the Lithuanian black metal band Luctus are poised to release their fifth album Tamsošviesa (Chiaroscuro) via Inferna Profundus Records. As the band explain, it “marks a new passage in our journey through the ever-shifting borderlands of light and darkness,” representing “both a continuation and a turning point – a chapter where our path through the twilight sharpens into clear focus.”

The album is indeed a changing progression through realms of shadow and brightness, creating excursions within each song that are at times poignant and haunting, and at other times frighteningly diabolical and utterly ferocious. It’s a meticulously crafted work, viscerally powerful and hard-hitting but also frequently mesmerizing as it ranges from major tropes of black metal into sonic territories beyond those traditional boundaries.

We have a lot more to say about the album below, but the main point of this feature is to let you hear all of it for yourselves. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): RED RIGHT HAND OF PLAGUE — “TRANSGRESS. SCAR. NUMEN”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Oct 082025
 

(written by Islander)

The cover art for the debut album of Red Right Hand of Plague is unusual, and intriguing, especially if you don’t know anything about the music of this Portland (Oregon) project. So is the album’s title: Transgress. Scar. Numen. So is this statement that appears on the album’s Bandcamp page:

IN THE EYE OF YAHWEH
HER ITHYPHALLIC REJOINDER

But really, I’m not sure anything could adequately prepare (or forewarn) people for what happens within the album. Labeling the music an amalgam of raw black metal and grindcore isn’t wrong, but that doesn’t come close to capturing just how wild the music really is.

In the paragraphs that follow, we’ll try to come closer, just for the hell of it, but you’ll have the chance to get really close because we’re premiering a full stream of Transgress. Scar. Numen today in advance of its October 10 release. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: UNCHURCH — “PILGRIMAGE TO ABYSS”

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Oct 072025
 

(written by Islander)

“UNCHURCH is an atrocity that emerges from the depths of the Chilean death metal scene in late 2022, where three entities form the strident disharmonies of this new act of violence manifesting from the abyss. Thus, this project, oriented toward anti-Christianity and harrowing death metal, with varied influences within the genre, is born, creating a tripartite conversation between primitive and technical metal, without losing the dark and bestial essence of death.”

That’s the introduction provided by the respected Mexican label Chaos Records, whose ears were caught by Unchurch via the band’s debut release in 2023, a self-produced EP rightly named Ode to Blasphemy. Having been invigorated by that sonic excursion into hell, the label is now set to release the self-titled debut album of these furious blasphemers on November 14th — and we’ve got the fiendish pleasure of premiering its first single today, a surging brain-exploder named “Pilgrimage To Abyss“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LIGHTLORN — “TO DREAM OF DISTANT STARS”

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Oct 072025
 

(written by Islander)

The Swedish “cosmic black metal band” Lightlorn haven’t faltered since their first steps, but have only become more and more accomplished. From their debut EP These Nameless Worlds in 2022, to their first album At One with the Night Sky in 2023, and on through their 2024 single “Noctalgia,” all of which we’ve written about here, they’ve created atmospheric black metal that (as we once wrote) “reaches beautiful heights (in keeping with the band’s celestial interests) but also harries the heart.”

Today we happily share the news that Lightlorn are working on their second album, and we gladly extend our site’s attention to the band’s music by premiering a new Lightlorn single named “To Dream of Distant Stars” that’s scheduled for release on October 10th. They introduce it with these words: Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEATHFUCKINGWOUND — “VOID MMXXV”

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Oct 062025
 

(written by Islander)

We’re about to premiere the debut EP of a Finnish duo who call themselves DEATHFUCKINGWOUND. To introduce it, we begin with the band’s own statement of intent:

“While the world is currently being courted by flames ignited by weak men wielding unfathomable power only paralleled by their insatiable greed and corrupt lust for land and wealth that isn’t theirs, art can be used as a bridge between the oppressed and the beaten, to be then deployed as a weapon against the aforementioned flaccid figures hiding in their ivory towers. Those towers burn, too. Everything burns.

“Our objective is to harness our own strengths into a tangible aural form that is equally unyielding and full of rage as the free spirits craving for the flesh of the sovereigns poisoning this world. VOID MMXXV is a documented moment in time that hopefully reaches many minds alike, representing merely the firsts steps taken towards our own caustic annihilation.”

Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HELGE — “ZOONGIDE`E”

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Oct 032025
 

(written by Islander)

The Danish band Helge describe their amalgam of black and death metal as “spiritual metal”. Of course, many other metal bands also invoke spiritual concepts, but more often that not they’re talking about such things as diabolical spirits of vengeance, malign alien gods that venture forth from the void, or getting fueled up by ethanol spirits and running wild. That is not what Helge mean.

Instead, they delve into themes that include the presence of common bonds among people, the need to make a less violent world more nurturing of nature (and each other), and other ideas that point toward spiritual uplift rather than downfall. Their most recent album, Gidinawendimin (released on November 1st of last year) is (as they explained) “an ancient word from the Ojibwe people that means ‘we are all related.'”

Last year we premiered an exhilarating video for the album’s closing song “Keep the Fire Burning,” a song that lyrically exhorts listeners to “stand aside from ego,” to forsake anger and poison, to “return to the core of the spirit,” and thus to become reborn, and to rise.

And now we have another video premiere for yet another emotionally powerful song from that same album. This one is “Zoongide`e“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: MERFOLK — “CASTAWAYS”

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Oct 022025
 

(written by Islander)

More than seven years having passed since the Montréal-based progressive death metal band Augury released their last album Illusive Golden Age, which itself was released a lengthy nine years after the one before it (Fragmentary Evidence). But although we can happily disclose that Augury are recording their fourth album and are half-way there, their leader Patrick Loisel has continued to make music on his own in recent years through his intriguing solo project Merfolk, which divulged the Demersal demo in late 2022 and released the debut full-length Sundaland this past May.

Sundaland is obviously an entirely personal creation, one in which Loisel wrote everything, performed every instrument, engineered and mixed every sound, and directed all the visuals. Those instruments included not only conventional metal accoutrement (though a fretless bass is not entirely conventional) but also classical instruments such as violin, cello, double bass, and piano.

It’s also worth giving you the following statement regarding the album’s inspiration, before we share with you a new video for the album track “Castaways“: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DWELLING BELOW — “SACRAMENTS”

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Oct 022025
 

(written by Islander)

The lineup of Dwelling Below — drummer/vocalist Jared Moran, bassist Anthony Wheeler, and guitarist Nicolas Turner — overlaps significantly with those of the bands Hierarchies and Acausal Intrusion. United in Dwelling Below, they create a variant of doom/death metal. But if you’re at all familiar with their work in those other bands, you can guess (correctly) that their version of doom/death is a twisted one, occupying an ever-changing intersection of the conventional and the unconventional, with results that are as unpredictable as they are abominable.

Dwelling Below made their advent with a self-titled debut album in 2023, and now they’re back with a second head-warper named Wearisome Guardians, which will be released on October 31st by Transcending Obscurity Records. What we’ve got for you today is the third song from the new album to be disgorged so far, a mind-ruiner named “Sacraments“. Continue reading »

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