AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ANTILLES — “HUMANITY IS CANCER”

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Jun 122022
 

 

Who knows when you may read this and listen to the song we’re presenting? Whenever that day may come, we’re first presenting it on a Sunday, a rare day for premieres at this site. But having heard this new song by the German band Antilles, it was an easy decision to make the rare effort.

The song title proclaims that “Humanity Is Cancer“, a bleak and angry sentiment, but one that’s regrettably backed by mountains of deplorable evidence that shows humankind’s persistent use of the Earth as a sewer, befouling and degrading it in a headlong rush toward what we imagine in our hubris as “progress”, and simultaneously turning the climate into an oven.

Much of that evidence is assembled in the video that accompanies Antilles‘ lyric video, interspersed with footage of the band explosively expelling their disgust and fury through the music. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TRUENT — “THROUGH THE VALE OF EARTHLY TORMENT”

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Jun 102022
 

The press materials for Truent‘s debut album Through The Vale of Earthly Torment recommend it for fans of early Revocation, early Gojira, Fit For An Autopsy, and Archspire. Those turn out to be good clues to what this Vancouver-area band have achieved on their first full-length following a pair of EPs.

Across eight tracks, most of them rushing ahead at a turbocharged pace, Truent create an electrifying death metal amalgam that features tour de force technicality, non-stop prog-metal adventurism, eye-popping vocal barbarity, and grooves that hit hard enough to cause visions of ruptured organs. To leap ahead in our review, which precedes a premiere stream of the entire record one week before its release, it’s a true spectacle of sound, an experience that’s both head-spinning and bone-smashing. Continue reading »

AN NCS PLAYTHROUGH VIDEO PREMIERE: THE SECOND FOVEA — “MANTA”

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Jun 102022
 

The Second Fovea is a band with its origins in India but with a current location in the San Francisco Bay Area. They’ve released two singles so far, 2021’s “Headshot” and the song “Manta” that came out just a couple months ago. We’ve written about both of them here, not only because the music grabbed us but also because of the songs’ conceptual themes.

“Headshot” was a condemnation of global hate crimes and racism, and “Manta“, as is obvious from the name, was “dedicated to appreciating the majestic manta rays and spreading awareness about their conservation”. Two very different subjects, but we can get behind both of them.

What we’re bringing you today, in an effort to shine a bigger spotlight on “Manta“, is a playthrough video for that song which features the performance of the band’s drummer, principal spokesman, and co-songwriter Priyam Srivastava. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THE ATROPHIC — “COAGULATING MIRTH”

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Jun 092022
 

What we have for you here is yet another welcome sign that even the darkest of times can’t black out artistic creativity, and can indeed become the inspirational fuel for something new and vibrant.

Today’s case in point is The Atrophic, a North Carolina band formed in 2021 that combines the talents of vocalist Sean Irizarry and guitarist/bassist Kyle Kuffermann. Working our of their home studios, they recorded a four-song EP named Coagulating Mirth, augmented by the performances of session drummer Robin Stone (Ashen Horde, Norse, ex-live for Augury). And then they had it produced, mixed, and mastered by Hannes Grossmann (Alkaloid, Blotted Science, ex-Hate Eternal, ex- Obscura, etc.) at Mordor Sounds Studio in Germany.

And if that alone doesn’t tell you how much they believed in what they had accomplished, they enlisted one of our favorite visual artists, Vladimir ‘Smerdulak’ Chebakov, to create both the cover art for the EP and a separate piece for its first single, and they turned to the talented sci-fi and horror artist Sanskarans for the creation of an artwork piece for the title track — which we’re premiering today in advance of the EP’s release on July 8th.

You can see the work of Sanskarans above, and here’s Smerdulak‘s cover for the EP: Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: INSTIGATE — “INDOCTRINATED REBORN”

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Jun 092022
 

We are fast approaching a day we’ve been hoping would come — the June 24 release of a debut album by the Italian death metal band Instigate. Their first release, a 2020 EP named Echoes of A Dying World, elicited praise at our site from both myself (here) and Andy Synn (here), with comparative references being dropped to the likes of Misery Index, Suffocation, Dyscarnate, Hour of Penance, and Hideous Divinity. And we weren’t alone in our praise — that EP triggered lots of positive reactions across the metalverse.

So we’ve been both eager and curious to find out what Instigate might do on a first full-length. Now we’re getting our answers, and you’re getting them too, thanks to the debut of two singles already (“Witness of the End Times” and “Haruspex“) and a third one we’re bringing you today — “Indoctrinated Reborn” — which is paired with an electrifying video made by Maurizio del Piccolo (Movidel Production). Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): EGGS OF GOMORRH — “WOMBSPREADER”

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Jun 082022
 

The new album by Eggs of Gomorrh is lyrically devoted to a general disgust for humanity (or at least the Christ-worshiping segments of it) and to blasphemous occult visions of sadistic punishment and merciless retribution — scenes of mutilation, degradation, inhuman monstrosity, ruinous violence, and sexual perversion, all of it frothing in oceans of blood and semen. They revel in the foul riot of their words, and the music within Wombspreader is a fucking riot too, carrying the band to new heights of terrorizing excess.

But this should come as no surprise. Over the course of their 2016 debut album (Rot Prophet), a 2019 EP (Outpregnate), and a 2019 split with the Turkish blasphemers Sarinvomit (Encomium of Depraved Instincts), these Swiss fiends have already established a reputation for delivering astonishingly savage forms of jet-speed sonic annihilation with impressive technical skill — and slipping in some grooves and eerie melody in the midst of their slaughtering tirades.

As you’ll discover from our premiere of their forthcoming second album on the Godz Ov War label, all these qualities are again explosively displayed Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ABOVE & BELOW — “SUFFER DECAY ALONE”

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Jun 072022
 

Some dreams take a long time gestating before they come screaming into the world. Many others die in the womb. Suffer Decay Alone is a dream realized, but it did take a long time for that to happen.

We’ve written often over the years about the Ohio band Plaguewielder, whose fantastic latest album Covenant Death we had the privilege of premiering here last year. What we didn’t know until more recently was that Plaguewielder‘s primary member Bryce Seditz has harbored a desire to make industrial music ever since the first time he listened to NIN‘s 1994 album The Downward Spiral. It took the covid quarantine to begin making that dream a reality.

Above & Below is the name Seditz chose for this plague-spawned project, and Suffer Decay Alone is the title he gave to its first fruits, an album that will be released on June 10th by Jeff Wilson‘s Disorder Recordings. The title has meaning, a sign of the times in which the music was made. It reflects some of the overarching moods of the music as well, but anyone familiar with Seditz‘s work in Plaguewielder could have already guessed that despite a change in genre-style this would be confrontational music with a raw and intense core — and so it is.

By the same token, anyone familiar with Covenant Death might also guess (correctly) that although Suffer Decay Alone is frequently dark as midnight, it isn’t a monotone, either emotionally or in its sonic textures. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THE WORLD WITHOUT US — “WEEDS”

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Jun 062022
 

It’s fair to say that in recent years Pennsylvania has proven itself to be a hotbed of progressive death metal, with bands such as Rivers of Nihil, Black Crown Initiate, Alustrium, and Burial In The Sky all seizing international attention. In that environment, it would take something special for another similarly ambitious group to see their own star rise, but The World Without Us definitely bring something special to the firmament.

Building on their 2019 EP Incarnate, the band are now approaching the July 8 release date of their second EP, Body Forth, and the four songs it includes merit the eye-popping cover art by Magic the Gathering artist Poison Project that you see above. One of those songs, “Eden“, is already out in the world, and today we have the pleasure of presenting a second one — “Weeds“. Lest you misconceive the title as a message about dope, here’s how the band’s vocalist Mario Paulo Canavarro describes its meaning: Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: LACABRA — “FRACTURED”

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Jun 062022
 

The metal band Lacabra from the Pacific Northwest brings together the talents of Lance Neatherlin (Lead Vocals), Eric Snyder (Guitar), Eric Weber (Bass/Vocals), Michael Anthony (Guitar), and Ryan Yancey (Drums/Vocals). All of them have been tried and tested in other bands, but it’s fair to say that in Lacabra they’ve caught lightning in a bottle. We’ve got electrifying proof of that in the single “Fractured” that we’re premiering today through a powerful video.

Lyrically, the song foretells a nightmarish future in which humankind’s own technological innovations become the agent of its downfall. That grim conception is captured in the animated segments of the video (created by Maria Nicheva-Wicklund of Bulgaria), which were inspired by Netherlin‘s “disdain for technology and how it makes us desensitized and numb to events that should cripple the human heart”, and by his attraction to the work of Lotte Reiniger, a German film director and the foremost pioneer of silhouette animation.

The video also captures the intensity of Lacabra‘s own live performances, and pairs extremely well with the turbocharged power and captivating dynamism of the song. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VIDRES A LA SANG — “SALVEU-ME ELS ULLS”

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Jun 062022
 

 

Heads will spin, nerves will twitch, and jaws will drop. Those are among our predictions for listener reactions to Fragments de l’esdevenir, the new album by the Catalonian band Vidres A La Sang, their fifth full-length since 2004 and their first one in four years. It’s an unusual and thoroughly fascinating piece of musical alchemy, one that’s intricate and technically impressive, experimental and progressive, both bewildering and mesmerizing, and yet also fiery and ferocious in ways that will appeal to fans of death and black metal. Anyone who attempts to fashion a genre label for it will do so at their peril.

Much more could be said (and undoubtedly will be said) about Fragments de l’esdevenir, because it’s so multi-faceted and adventurous in its songwriting and so dazzling in its execution, one of those albums whose music demands close attention because it’s elaborate and ever-changing, but somehow also hits at a reflexive level, compulsively provoking movement and changing moods at the same time as it’s challenging your higher mental faculties to keep up with what’s happening.

The song we’re premiering today is a great example of what we’re struggling to say about the album experience — not that our struggles will cease, because we will forge ahead with some further linguistic exercises by way of introducing you to the marvels of “Salveu-me els ulls“. Continue reading »

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