AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SVNTH — “NARROW, NARROW”

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Mar 272025
 


SVNTH – Pink Noise Conception

(written by Islander)

In case you’ve forgotten or never knew, the Roman experimental metal band SVNTH pronounce their name “Seventh”, a connection to their former name Seventh Genocide. Their last album, 2020’s Spring in Blue, was an hour-long double-LP and part of a planned trilogy of colors based on emotions in different phases of human life. Almost five years later the plan evolves with a new album named Pink Noise Youth that will be released on April 18th by These Hands Melt.

SVNTH explain about this second part of the trilogy: “If the previous record Spring in Blue was about facing life’s struggles on a childhood perspective, the upcoming Pink Noise Youth will be based on exploring awareness as an adult in late youth, trying to give a voice to a generation emotionally unstable and chaotic as pink noise.” The album’s cover image by Tryfar is in line with that conception.

But not only has the subject matter moved into a different phase of life, the music has moved too. SVNTH have already established themselves as a band interested in bringing together a wide variety of musical colors — as varied as black and post-metal, shoegaze, art pop, and cinematic post-rock. The new album is equally transcendent of genre boundaries, combining elements of hardcore, metal, shoegaze, and post-rock with some new instrumental choices — incorporating an electric Indian sitar, classical and 12-string guitars, and (gasp!) clean singing. It is also the work of a lineup that has changed significantly since the last record.

As a hint of what the album brings, it’s recommended for fans of Deafheaven, Alcest, Brutus, Svalbard, and Agalloch. As a more concrete hint, today we premiere an official video for the third single from the album released so far, a song called “Narrow, Narrow.” Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VISCERAL — “LOATHE”

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Mar 262025
 

(written by Islander)

Time has flown, two years and almost five months since we last premiered music from the Portuguese death metal band Visceral. Back then the occasion was the impending release of Visceral‘s debut album The Tree of Venomous Fruit. Back then, the band’s veteran mastermind Bruno Joel Correia was accompanied by members of such bands as Enthroned, Lucifyre, Grog, Earth Electric, Gaerea, and Oak.

And now, at last, Visceral return with their second album, Eyes, Teeth and Bones, which has been set for release on April 4th by Raging Planet Records. The label accurately describes the music as a “blistering, high-speed death metal onslaught”, but it is also more than that, and we have an eye-opening, jaw-dropping example of how much more it brings through our premiere of a frightening lyric video for the song “Loathe“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: OPUS EST SANARE — “AXIS OF REGENERATION”

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Mar 252025
 

(written by Islander)

Searching through our site’s vast archive, I confirmed what I knew, which is that I’ve been following and writing about the musical activities of the cellist Kakophonix (Christopher Edward Brown) for a long time — since the fall of 2017, to be precise.

Over these last 7+ years, most of the attention has been paid to the Kakophonix solo project Hvile I Kaos (articles collected here), most recently in the context of premiering and reviewing the album Lower Order Manifestations, released last summer by Eisenwald and House of Inkantation. However, I and others here at NCS have also covered songs and records by other bands and performers in which Kakophonix performed as a guest musician (and there have been many of those).

As I explained in that album premiere last summer, Kakophonix has decided to lay Hvile I Kaos to rest; Lower Order Manifestations was the final work of that project, whose music Kakophonix labeled as “Cellistic Black Metal” or “Black Ritual Chamber Musick.” Although closing that book, however, Kakophonix has begun a new chapter under a new name — Opus Est Sanare — and has shared with us this “Mission Statement” for the new endeavor: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VETUS SANGUIS — “TROMBETAS DIABÓLICAS”

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Mar 252025
 

(written by Islander)

Helldprod Records has marked April 16th as the release date for the debut album of the Portuguese black metal band Vetus Sanguis, which is the solo work of the creator known as Perversus. The album’s name is Dimensão Horrenda, and it builds upon the music presented in the band’s 2022 demo, Sangue Velho.

As a sign (or rather a warning) of what lies within the new album, today we’re premiering the fascinating track “Trombetas Diabólicas“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CRAWLING CHAOS — “WYRD”

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Mar 242025
 

(written by Islander)

Wyrd is the third album, by the Italian death metal band Crawling Chaos, and it’s set for imminent release by Time To Kill Records on March 28th. As the label explains, “It is an anthology inspired by the role of feminine figures in European mythology and their connection to the concepts of fate and free will.” Crawling Chaos elaborate further:

Wyrd is our third full-length assault and it is a twisted journey through fate, destiny, and everything that lies beyond free will. Inspired by the ancient Northern European concept of wyrd, this record dives headfirst into the dark side of what it means to become.

Each of the ten tracks is a chapter in a mythological fever dream. You’ll meet some of the most powerful, terrifying female figures from mythology, folklore, and history: the Norse Norns, Macbeth’s witches conjuring chaos for Hecate, the relentless Greco-Roman Furies, and those wicked Thessalian necromancers who bend the dead to their will. It’s a damn coven of destruction. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DEATH WHORE — “INFERNAL TERROR MACHINE”

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Mar 242025
 

(written by Islander)

Death Whore‘s band name is a bit of a fist in the face for people who see it. Their music is a much bigger fist, uninterested in pulling its punches. You’ll get the idea again from the name of their forthcoming debut album, Blood Washes Everything Away, and from the name of the album track we’re premiering with a video today, “Infernal Terror Machine“.

Death Whore‘s earlier releases, their 2020 self-titled EP and the Total Teutonic Torso EP two years later, were mauling and murderous hybrids of death metal, hardcore, and crust punk. Wielding punishing percussive hammers prone to jackhammer grooves and stringed instruments tuned to mangling levels of abrasion, and fronted by scraped-raw and savagely rabid vocals and gang howls, they leaned into furious metallic hardcore beatdowns fueled by adrenaline and coated in grit and filth, leavened by monstrously brutalizing stomps as bleak as a sucking chest wound.

Those EPs are well worth catching up to even now, especially if you’re interested in getting big doses of raging and ruinous catharsis that are as viscerally compulsive as they are bone-smashing and corrosive. They build very high expectations for this debut album that we’re about to preview. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: RAHVIRA — “I AM ARYAN”

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Mar 212025
 

(written by Islander)

Let’s address the elephant in the room right quick: Rahvira are NOT a Nazi band, despite the conclusion you might leap to based upon the title of the song we’re premiering. The word aryan has a history and meaning far more ancient than the grotesque appropriation of it that the Nazis made.

The Holocaust was also not the first genocide of the 20th century. That horrid distinction goes to the Ottoman Empire’s near-complete liquidation of the Armenian people during World War I, an event that’s the subject of Rahvira‘s new album and that even the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. devotes attention to. Here is part of what you can find in that Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia:

Sometimes called the first genocide of the twentieth century, the Armenian genocide refers to the physical annihilation of Armenian Christian people living in the Ottoman Empire from spring 1915 through autumn 1916. There were approximately 1.5 million Armenians living in the multiethnic Ottoman Empire in 1915. At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million died during the genocide, either in massacres and individual killings, or from systematic ill treatment, exposure, and starvation. Indeed, the origin of the term genocide and its codification in international law have their roots in the mass murder of Armenians in 1915–16.

Additional horrific details are available in this article at Wikipedia. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GALVORNHATHOL — “III”

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Mar 202025
 

(written by Islander)

Today, on the eve of its release, we present a full stream of a new album by the one-person German band Galvornhathol, whose name (we are told) “is derived from Tolkien’s Sindarin script and can probably translated to ‘(dark) metal axe'”. That is intended to draw a contrast between the man-made world of iron and axe and the band’s lyrical themes, which connect to spiritualism (non-religious) and nature.

With respect to those themes, we’ll begin by sharing Galvornhathol‘s description of the new album:

“III” concludes the trilogy that started with the conveniently titled “I“. A journey from the earth, to below the clouds and now to the stellar realm of stars and galaxies. Tinged with metaphors for the facets of human life, encased in an interstellar poem of the matter, dark and light, all round us, that we call “nature”. Providing an uneducated guess of what our future might hold; providing we keep living our present, the listener might come to the conclusion that, while we are able to observe objects that are millions of lightyears away, we refrain from looking ahead into our own time to come. Whatever the future might hold; onwards. Ad Astra. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: “FOUR SORROWS” — A SPLIT BY STARER, MYVANDRER, AMBERGAZE, AND MISTRAL

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Mar 192025
 

(written by Islander)

On March 21st Fiadh Productions and Snow Wolf Records will co-release Four Sorrows, a four-way split among bands around the world who deserve your close attention. Those bands, who are carving their own path through the realms of black metal, are Starer (USA), Myrvandrer (Norway), Ambergaze (Mexico), and Mistral (Poland). As an explanation of how the split came to be, we’ve seen this statement by the person behind Starer (and Snow Wolf):

I have been a huge fan of Mistral since both our debut albums released together on Folkvangr Records back in January 2021. Janek has become a good friend and I’m thrilled to be working together. All credit to him for introducing me to two amazing bands Ambergaze and Myrvandrer and convincing them to share their incredible music with us.

What we have for you today is a premiere stream of this new split, which includes one new song from each band, preceded by a bit of background about the artists and some thoughts about what you will hear. (Here’s a hint: the music is quite diverse and mostly beyond the bounds of traditional/conventional black metal.) Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MORBIFIC — “CRUSADING NECROTIZATION”

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Mar 192025
 

(written by Islander)

We have some previous experience with the Finnish death metal band Morbific. In considering music (which we premiered) from their second album Squirm Beyond the Mortal Realm, we described it as “undeniably raw and foul, well-calculated to channel sensations of disease, putrefaction, and madness while giving your bones a brutal beating — and creating an atmosphere of supernatural horror while they do all that.” We added that Morbific were also “ridiculously good at making their creations head-moving and ‘catchy’ as well as hideous.”

More recently our contributor Chile caught their performance at the 2024 edition of Oslo Deathfest and wrote this vivid description of what ensued:

…the crowd goes wild in a fantastic display of great chemistry between the band and audience, turning the bar area into a warfield of bodies strewn on filthy riffs stretching as far as the eye can see…. Bursting through the abdomen of the stage like some kind of extraterrestrial, Morbific are all teeth and snarl in a seemingly simple, yet very effective display of putrid brutality.

And now this rotten-to-the-core death metal band are upon us again, with a third album entitled Bloom of Abnormal Flesh set for co-release on April 21st by Memento Mori and Me Saco un Ojo (who also co-released the band’s last album), again adorned with blood-congealing cover art by Chase Slaker. And again, we have a song premiere off the album. The name says it all: “Crusading Necrotization“. Continue reading »

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