Galare come our way from Elizabeth, New Jersey. They’ve been hard at work on their first EP, and I now have a single from this debut release to share with you, because I like it. It’s name is “Thy Dying Light“.
This is a song that I suspect you’ll want to hear more than once, just to understand what you’ve heard, because it’s unpredictable, and more than a little unnerving. Continue reading »
After a series of well-received shorter releases, Atlanta’s Death of Kings will be releasing their debut album Kneel Before None later this year on CD, with a vinyl pressing to follow. But before we get to that point, Boris Records will be bringing us a Death of Kings single on March 31, and we’ve got the premiere of its title track for you today: “Hell Comes To Life“.
Truer words were never spoken, because this song is explosively hellish, in all the best ways. It’s the kind of turbocharged, obliterating thrash ferocity that may make you want to destroy things, while it’s destroying you. Continue reading »
(Austin Weber brings us this stream premiere of the new album by Trilateral from Ontario, Canada.)
While there’s plenty of bands on the deathcore and djent side of the spectrum fusing death and groove together, it’s not as big a phenomenon in more technical death metal circles, though that seems to be changing. Granted, you have groups like Soreption already, but overall it’s still fresh territory to explore, as evidenced by last year’s Dischordia release and others.
Though groove is far from all that Trilateral offer, their integration of it within a largely technical death metal (without coming across as tech-death) and prog metal sound is what gives their upcoming album Elliptic Orbits a fresh feeling all its own. Continue reading »
We are very pleased to bring you a full streaming premiere of Atra Lumen, the third album by the satanic French metal band Corpus Diavolis. It will be released by ATMF on April 6 of this year.
Making music that has the feeling of ritual has become one of the traditions of black metal, at least within certain circles of the black arts, and Atra Lumen has that feeling. But not all ritualistic music is alike. Where some black metal might conjure images of cavorting witchery around a woodland bonfire or huddled figures drawing blood in the glimmering candlelight of a crypt, Atra Lumen brings to the mind’s eye the ominous grandeur and majestic might of a great ceremony of praise and summoning beneath the high vault of a gothic cathedral, a ceremony surrounded by the tangible presence of death. Continue reading »
“And now for something completely different….” That’s the phrase that popped into my head as I began pondering how to introduce the track we’re about to premiere, though the music has no comedic overtones (or undertones) that Monty Python’s famous catchphrase might bring to mind. It’s just… completely different… at least by comparison to our usual fare at NCS.
The band’s name is different as well. It has regularly defeated my efforts to type it, and also my efforts to pronounce it. The name is Buioingola (I am using copy/paste techniques now), and the track we have for your unsuspecting ears is “Silenzio“, which appears on the band’s new album — and likely to be their last — Il nuovo mare (“The New Sea”). The album will be released by Sentient Ruin Laboratories (and a consortium of European labels) on March 31. Continue reading »
Paolo Girardi’s cover art for the new album by Chicago-based Drug Honkey stopped me dead in the tracks of my internet scurrying when I first saw it, and when I learned that it was a new album by Drug Honkey, I experienced a combination of drooling and shivering, a blending of desire and incipient loss of mental stability.
Both of those effects were produced by the memory of the band’s last album, 2012’s Ghost In the Fire, and so it’s with a similar combination of dread and tingling anticipation that I’ve approached this new album, Cloak of Skies — which will be released on May 5 by Transcending Obscurity Records.
I had some difficulty trying to capture the experience of Ghost In the Fire when I wrote about it so many years ago. I re-read the review this weekend, and had forgotten how many words I had spilled in an effort to do that. They included these crazed attempts to capture the imagery that the music provoked in my shaken skull: Continue reading »
In a career that now spans more than 20 years, the Czech black metal band Inferno have been on a journey of exploration and self-realization, a journey that has reached its highest plateau with their new album, Gnosis Kardias (Of Transcension and Involution). It not only represents the zenith of the band’s own understanding and creativity, it’s a also a searing, soaring, transcendent experience for the listener and a more than worthy successor to the band’s last album Omniabsence Filled by His Greatness. That’s not a hyperbolic claim, as we think you’ll agree when you hear the song we’re premiering today: “Ω > 1 (Oscillation in Timelessness)“.
As wondrous as the cover image by Peruvian artist Jose Gabriel Alegría Sabogal is, the music is more wondrous. It has already prompted DECIBEL’s Chris D. to proclaim, in his introduction to DECIBEL’s premiere of the album’s opening track, “There will be no more important release in 2017”. Perhaps those words display precognition, but even if they are merely an ultimate expression of enthusiasm, it’s an enthusiasm that I share. Continue reading »
When Les Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil”) was first published in 1857, it led to the prosecution of its author Charles Baudelaire and his publisher for “an insult to public decency”, the imposition of fines, and the removal of poems from the volume’s remarkable collection of verse. The attempted suppression did not work, of course. The volume to this day is recognized as a work of unsettling genius, with Baudelaire praised by no less a figure than TS Eliot as “the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language”.
Les Fleurs du mal is also the name of the new second album by While They Sleep, a one-man black metal band from Crimea in Ukraine, which will be jointly released by Symbol of Domination and More Hate Productions on March 29. And that album is the source of the song we’re premiering today: “The Perfume“. Continue reading »
Now more than a decade into their career, Oklahoma City’s Horde Casket are back with their fourth album, Xenopocalypse, which will be released later this year by Sevared Records. What we’ve got for you today is a piece of all-out obliteration from the album called “Uprising“.
There have been changes in the line-up of Horde Casket since their last album, 2015’s Bloodfiends. This time, founding guitarist (and former vocalist) Steve Giddens is joined by Shane Fallon (drums), Micah Smith (vocals), and Justin Perry (bass). They make a fine pack of monsters. Continue reading »
Mörk is the debut album of the Ukrainian black metal duo Lava Invocator. It will be co-released on March 27 by the Russian labels Satanath Records and More Hate Productions. Two songs from the album have premiered previously, and today we bring you a third — a track called “Black Dawn“.
“Mörk” is the Swedish word for “dark” and shares its origins with the English word “murk”. We’re told that Lava Invocator was conceived in the old Swedish town of Lund near Malmö, under the shadow of dark storm clouds passing above the Øresund strait. And “Black Dawn” is itself cloaked in gloom. Continue reading »