AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: KVSKET — “ALL THIS TALKING”

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Jul 232025
 

(written by Islander)

The Minnesota band kvsket (pronounced “casket”) describe themselves as “Minneapolis Goth Rock”. That’s the definition of a short-hand description. The “for fans of” references to Deftones, Gojira, My Chemical Romance, Turnstile, and The Cure is more descriptively complete but still doesn’t complete cover the waterfront of kvsket‘s head-spinning music on their album Patiently Awaiting Your Arrival, which was released last February. We tried to unpack it in May when we premiered a video for one of the album tracks (“Hot Grip”):

The 11 mostly short songs on Patiently Awaiting Your Arrival encompass a lot of musical variety…. You’ll find big burly bounding grooves, guitars that abrade like a belt-sander and glitter like needles or quiver like warped sirens, high-flying singing with a raw edge, dark gothic crooning, furious wailing yells, and nasty snarls. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CULT BURIAL — “BESEECH”

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Jul 232025
 

(written by Islander)

We ran out of fingers. It took all 10 of them and one toe to count the number of articles we’ve published here about the London band Cult Burial, all of them in just the last five years. The attention began with the release of their 2020 debut EP Sorrow and has continued through their release of numerous singles, another EP, and two albums. Now this duo of Simon Langford and César Moreira will release a third album in September named Collapse of Pattern, Reverence of Dust.

The new album is described in these haunting and harrowing words:

Collapse of Pattern, Reverence of Dust is a record about erosion — of structures, of certainty, of meaning. Across eight tracks, Cult Burial tears through the frameworks we cling to, carving out something that sits between aggression and despair, weight and absence. The music is dense and layered, yet unafraid of space; at times claustrophobic, at others stripped to bare wire and exposed edge.

Each song peels back the layers between memory and oblivion, order and chaos. Built on jagged riffs and drenched in haunting textures, this album traces the gradual decay of mind, identity, and ritual. From the first shudder of collapse to that final, ash-choked breath, it offers no solace. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BLUTSAUGER — “BLACK SHROUD RITUAL”

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Jul 222025
 

(written by Islander)

Though Italian in location, the black metal band Blutsauger chose a name for themselves that means “bloodsuckers”, drawing inspiration from Transylvanian and Austro-Hungarian folklore and evoking the undead monstrosity of Nosferatu. They named their 2021 demo Path of the Bleeding Dead, and their forthcoming debut album is emblazoned with the title Nocturnal Blood Tyrants.

All of that, and their signing with the label De Tenebrarum Principio (a division of ATMF), signals music of “nocturnal terror and eternal darkness”, of “sanguine delirium” and “feverish ultraviolence”, and of a “trance-like state” that might be induced by their blood-lusting and blood-letting assaults against victimized listeners.

Those are among the preview words offered on behalf of the label. We have some of our own, impelled by the Blutsauger album track we’re premiering today: “Blood Shroud Ritual“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SULPHURIA — “LA DANZA DEL SATIRO”

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Jul 212025
 

(written by Islander)

Imagine you’re staring at the face of a clock instead of this page, a clock with a sweep hand that steadily ticks away the seconds. Then imagine the clock goes haywire, the second hand and the other hands spinning instead of ticking or crawling, and then all of them suddenly spinning in the opposite direction.

That’s one way to prepare you for the Sulphuria song “La Danza Del Satiro” we’re about to present. It spins in very different directions from the kind of music we usually feature here, strange directions that become strangely seductive, a twist on black metal that exotically warps it, an alchemy that justifies a “for fans of” reference which includes Goblin and Mercyful Fate as well as Beherit and Gorgoroth (among others). Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: UNALIGNED — “DREAMING IN DECAY”

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Jul 182025
 

(written by Islander)

“Blackened Tech Death” is the shorthand description offered by Transcending Obscurity Records for A Form Beyond, the debut album of the U.S. band Unaligned, though the label also rightly draws attention to the band’s penchant for creating a more atmospheric and epic take on the technical death metal style.

The song we’re premiering today, “Dreaming in Decay“, which arrives with a vividly illustrated lyric video, bears out those descriptions. It manages to be eerily supernatural, a manifestation of ancient gods and demons, but also a blood-rushing display of instrumental exuberance, hard-hitting groove, and spine-tingling vocal savagery. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BA’AL — “THE FINE LINE BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HERE”

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Jul 172025
 

(written by Islander)

The British metal band Ba’al picked a name for their new album that will make most people’s scanning eyes stop in their tracks when they see it: The Fine Line Between Heaven and Here. Your hurrying brain might quickly interpret it one way (the wrong way) and then pause (if it’s not rushing too fast) to realize it says “Here“, not “Hell“.

The title is clever, but it’s also meaningful. The band explain:

“The Fine Line Between Heaven And Here reflects on growing up in a city like our home of Sheffield; the contrast between bleak, grey industrial sprawl and the beauty of nature that surrounds and often overlaps with it. It touches on mental health, substance abuse, suicide, grief and existential dread.”

“Here“, where we are, can be hellish. Human beings have always imagined the torments of Hell based on what they know and have seen of ourselves and our fellow travelers on our spinning orb. It may be that we have also imagined the glories of Heaven based on the glories of Here too.

How Ba’al have used their music to render the grey and the green, the scars and the sublime, will be revealed in full today through our premiere of their new album. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEPHOSPHORUS — “PLANETOKTONOS”

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Jul 162025
 

(written by Islander)

The title of the new fifth album by the Greek “cosmic grind” band Dephosphorus is Planetoktonos. That is a Greek word coined by the band, which roughly translates to “Planetkiller.” The album will be released on set on July 18th by a trio of labels in a variety of formats.

The new album’s name is an inspired choice, in part because it is reflective of the science-fiction and cosmology themes that lyrically run through the songs, and in part because the album often sounds like a planetkiller — as you’ll discover today through our premiere stream of the record in its entirety. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HARVESTED — “SYNAPTIC CONFUSION”

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Jul 152025
 

(written by Islander)

Your muscles are about to reflexively twitch, your head is about to hammer, your pulse is about to accelerate. Audio worms will slither into your ear canals and take up residence there. Some of your cranial neurons may start spinning, creating visions of fast devils and hulking monsters.

Those are our predictions of what will happen when you see and hear the playthrough video we’re premiering for the song “Synaptic Confusion” by the Ottawa-based death metal band Harvested. It’s an excellent way to rev up your own motor as Harvested rev up theirs. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): STOMACH — “LOW DEMON”

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Jul 142025
 

(written by Islander)

Miserable and merciless, doomed and depraved, an exorcism of inner demons. Those are among the descriptions you may have seen if you’ve come across the news about a new album from Chicago-based Stomach. You may have also seen the album’s name: Low Demon. And man, is it ever that.

The album will be released this coming Friday by Hibernation Release. It will likely turn the end of the week into a smoking crater, from which horrid smoking things will crawl. But hell, why wait to see what happens? Let’s see what happens today. There’s no good reason to let this week pretend to have a positive start (we know better than to be fooled that way), and so we’ll drop Low Demon on your heads right now. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VISITANT — “STARLESS”

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Jul 112025
 

(written by Islander)

Visitant is an excellent name. Unlike the more mundane “visitor”, it suggests the appearance of something uncommon, something supernatural and possibly dangerous, like an apparitional visitation from the spirit world. That idea is reinforced by the striking red-hued cover image on this U.S. band’s debut album Rubidium.

True to the name they chose, Visitant‘s music turns out to be uncommon as well, a changing braid of varying genre ingredients that creates altered and interwoven sensations — sensations haunting and harrowing, disconsolate and vengeful, diaphanous and pulverizing, and altogether head-spinning.

You’ll get an idea of just how variable those ingredients are when you see the “for fans of” references provided by Visitant‘s label Exitus Stratagem Records: Gojira, Opeth, Naglfar, Between the Buried And Me, Enslaved, Dimmu Borgir, Mgła, Leaves Eyes, and Chelsea Wolfe.

Of course, not all those allusions become relevant within each song on Rubidium. The weave tends to change from song to song. The one from the album we’re focused on today is “Starless“, presented through a gripping lyric video made by Motus Insaniam. Continue reading »

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