AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: NIGHTWRAITH — “BEGUILER”

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Jun 172022
 

 

Almost three months ago Reaping Scythe Records released a new album by the Denver-based metal collective NightWraith. Entitled Offering, it was one of those albums that threw down the gauntlet to people interested in simple genre descriptors. With changes reflected not only from song to song but within each song, the band made use of ingredients from melodic death metal, black metal, and doom, but pulled from an even more eclectic array of time-traveling influences than even those.

As the band’s extravagantly bearded founder Benjamin Pitts put it: “It’s like we took all the heavy parts from bands like Carcass and Enslaved and combined it with the warmth of classic bands like Thin Lizzy and Blue Oyster Cult. It has been really fun inserting rock guitar and organ tones into a genre that typically avoids these types of sounds.”

And really, even those contrasting references just hint at how many facets Offering displays as it turns. As a reminder of that, today we’re bringing you the premiere of a live video of the band performing one of the thoroughly captivating tracks from Offering, a song appropriately named “Beguiler“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VOID WITCH — “BOUDOIR BLOODFEAST”

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Jun 172022
 

Last October the Central Texas band Void Witch released their first demo, a two-track offering at the altar of death and doom. For 13 minutes and change they led listeners through dank crypts and ghastly mansions, lurching and rumbling, dragging like a wounded beast and convulsing in electrifying fevers, and lacing their strikingly dynamic maneuvers with a rich tapestry of captivating guitar melodies and wide-ranging, spine-shivering vocals.

That demo, especially as a debut recording only two tracks long, really is tremendously multi-faceted and extremely impressive in both its songwriting and its execution. Even without a lot of fanfare it attracted a devoted following, but no doubt still flew under many people’s radars. However, the people at Everlasting Spew Records didn’t miss it. They’ve signed on to give the demo a physical and a new digital release, both of which include a third track exclusively recorded by Void Witch for the occasion.

This new third track is what we’re delighted to bring you today, to coincide with Everlasting Spew‘s street date for the self-titled Void Witch EP. The song’s gruesome name is “Boudoir Bloodfeast“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MORBID EVILS — “FEARLESS”

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Jun 162022
 

 

Having previously become preoccupied by Morbid Evils‘ apocalyptically heavy and thoroughly unnerving last album Deceases in 2017, we confess to shuddering at the news that these Finns were coming back with another one. The prospect was even more frightening, given that they had so many years to use, calculating how they might spread ruin in even more obliterating and frightening ways.

Of course, fear can be addictive, especially when it’s delivered through the crushing and mind-warping combination of sludge, doom, and death metal that Morbid Evils so formidably bring to the table. And so it really wasn’t likely we’d actually stay away from their new album Supernaturals. Yes it’s morbid, and yes it’s evil, and it delivers both earthquaking punishment and psychotic mayhem, but for all those same reasons (and more) its twisted twists and turns are thoroughly riveting.

The album consists of four monolithic tracks, and we have one of those for you today that proves the points we’ve stammered above. Its name is “Fearless“, which might be what you need to be to go into it. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WINTERHORDE — “THE GREATEST PLAGUE ON EARTH”

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Jun 162022
 

 

Although the word “epic” is unquestionably overused in describing certain variants of extreme metal, sometimes there’s no better word, and that word springs to mind over and over again in listening to the new WinterHorde single we’re premiering today. Other words also come to mind — words like “savage” and “sinister”, “dramatic” and “soul-stirring”, “fist-pumping” and “infectious”.

“The Greatest Plague On Earth” is the name of this new song, and it’s the first recorded output from this Israeli band after a six-year-long break following their 2016 full-length Maestro (reviewed in detail  here). It’s also a sign of what lies ahead on the band’s next album Neptunian, their fourth full-length in a career that began more than 20 years ago. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: XENOGLYPH — “ICONOCIDE”

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Jun 152022
 

 

The Translation Loss label has repeatedly demonstrated eclectic but dependable tastes, and we have a further vivid reminder of that in the album Spiritfraud that they’ve set for release on July 15th.

This album is the second full-length by a classically trained, avant-garde black metal duo who call themselves Xenoglyph. Conceptually, as the band explain, Spiritfraud is written in call-and-response format “as a dystopian cosmic journey between humans left on earth after technology and robotic overlords have taken reign”. It presents “an inverse relationship between technological advancement and the relevance of humanity, illustrated in a narrative where digital beings want to expedite their own evolution by means of stealing human dreams”.

Yet this tale is clearly presented as a metaphor that confronts us with a choice in the modern age: “Unbeknownst to man, humanity’s spirit has been drained from our collective consciousness by the very technology that we invented (an inevitable consequence of even existing in the 21st century) and replaced with a shadow of our former greatness. The only way out is to channel and meditate on the strength of the cosmos – the only constant in our world”.

With themes as expansive and visionary as those, one would hope for music of a similar scale and imaginative power. As you’ll discover through our premiere of the song “Iconocide“, that hope has been fulfilled. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): APTERA — “YOU CAN’T BURY WHAT STILL BURNS”

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Jun 152022
 

The lyrical themes of Aptera‘s debut album You Can’t Bury What Still Burns (which is set for imminent release by Ripple Music) leap across millennia, from legends of ancient Greek mythology to modern-day race-based murder at the hands of police and personal resistance against daily experiences of repression. What ties these time-spanning topics together is a through-line of anger and defiance, of rebellion and revenge, of refusal to be silenced and at times a call for violent resistance. It’s no wonder, then, that the album’s cover art, like its title, embodies a burning refusal to be buried and silenced.

This Berlin-based quartet’s interest in Greek mythology as a vehicle for some of their lyrical themes is also reflected in the name they chose for themselves, which was the site of a battle between the Sirens and the Muses, where the Sirens lost their wings and were cast into the sea. “Joining the sirens and muses at the table,” as the press materials recount in a further summation of the narratives, “are a coven of reanimated witch spirits and a gang of man-eating mermaids with a healthy appetite for destruction”.

We don’t know what came first, the lyrical themes or the music. But even if the band cooked up the riffs and rhythms before crafting the words, it seems obvious that the same spirit behind the lyrics fueled the music. The fires of rebellion unmistakably burn through both of them again and again, but the band’s music also doses the listener’s mind with hallucinatory vapors and ferries us into perilous supernatural realms. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MAUL — “REPULSIVE INTRUDER”

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Jun 142022
 

When you begin to hear the music on Maul‘s forthcoming debut album Seraphic Punishment, you’ll realize just how perfect Jason Barnett‘s cover painting really is. The imagery is a macabre bestiary, horrifically detailed and hideous in its manifold visions, and yet crafted with pastel rather than hellish colors to portray its paranormal panorama.

Like that artwork, Maul‘s album is also ghastly, a Pandora’s box of death metal horrors that take various blood-congealing shapes. But it’s also a bone-smasher, and fiendishly infectious, and the songwriting is so dynamically good that it causes the album to stand out, just like the artwork’s color scheme.

Like the name of the song we’re premiering today — “Repulsive Intruder” — Maul present themselves as repulsive intruders, but you can’t help but invite them to stay. They might ruin your home, but you’ll have a fucking great time watching them do it. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: TOMB OF FINLAND — “SHADOWS OF THE NORTH”

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Jun 142022
 

This makes our second video premiere for a song off the forthcoming third album by Tomb of Finland, a record whose title — Across The Barren Fields — foreshadows some of its grave and grim moods and its occasionally expansive sweep. But the title doesn’t tell all, as you’ll learn from today’s new song, “Shadows of the North“.

In this newest track, delivered with a well-made video of the band’s performance, a fever burns in the darting riffage despite the song’s dark and ominous name. The music takes flight as the guitars soar like flames in the wind, though the mood even then is no less tormented. The delirium subsides and the music becomes both more forlorn and more mesmerizing — an unfolding of melancholy that quickly takes root in the mind. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: GOLGATA — “VAGABOND”

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Jun 132022
 

We welcome the Swedish black metal band Golgata back to our pages roughly 18 months after they first caught our attention and admiration with their last album, 2020’s Tempel, which spawned comparative references to the likes of Skogen, Grift, and Fellwarden. The occasion of their return is a forthcoming third full-length named Ur Eld Och Aska, which will be co-released on July 7th by Satanath Records and Ketzer Records.

As the title implies, the album is a journey through fire and ash but it’s also a journey through time, inspired by the history and natural surroundings of the dark, forested region that gave birth to this duo. It has the capacity to scathe the senses in raw and unbridled fashion, but it’s equally powerful in its capacity to mesmerize and to transport listeners away from modernity and into a much older age, creating grim and haunting visions of yearning and sorrow.

And thus we’re proud to present today the album’s fourth track in the running order, a song named “Vagabond“, revealed through a lyric video in the band’s native tongue. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DEVENIAL VERDICT — “ASH BLIND”

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Jun 132022
 

From from 2009 through 2016 the Finnish band Devenial Verdict released a pair of demos and a pair of EPs, and now, six years later, their debut album is on the horizon. Entitled Ash Blind and adorned with cover art by the great Mariusz Lewandowski, it will be released later this year by Transcending Obscurity Records.

Time brings change, and thus Ash Blind represents alterations in Devenial Verdict‘s sound, revealing more prominent dissonant and atmospheric elements in the music. The band show themselves capable of creating vast sonic vistas that are as entrancing as they are unnerving. But while Devenial Verdict have clearly spread their creative wings in expansive fashion from where they began, the songs also make for potent adrenaline fuel through bursts of obliterating hostility and grooves that hit hard enough to give your spine and skull a terrific jolting.

All these facets of their music (and more) come through in the album’s riveting title track that we’re bringing you today through an official video Continue reading »

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