Premieres Archives - Page 459 of 512

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: SERPENTS LAIR — “CIRCUMAMBULATING THE STILLBORN”

Nov 032015

Last year I reviewed an impressive first demo by a mysterious hooded group from Sjælland, Denmark, named Serpents Lair. Now the band have completed their debut full-length, a seven-track, 43-minute album entitled Circumambulating the Stillborn that becomes available for download and physical pre-order today. In this post you’ll have a chance to stream the entire album for the first time. And if you’d like a preview of what you’re getting yourselves into, read on.

Following an introductory track consisting of beautiful choral voices and the slow, muffled pounding of timpani, Serpents Lair deliver five mostly long songs and an instrumental interlude. The songs are richly textured, dynamic in their pacing, and wholly unsettling. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: INVOCATION SPELLS — “DESCENDENT THE BLACK THRONE”

Premieres 2 Responses »

Nov 032015

Descendent the Black Throne is the name of the second album by the Chilean black metal band Invocation Spells. It’s set for release next month by the mighty Hells Headbangers, and today we’re presenting a stream of the album’s ripping title track.

South American black metal tends to mix savagery with speed, and Invocation Spells deliver that experience in spades. “Descendent the Black Throne” is a galloping romp of speed metal riffs and gut-punching percussion trailing clouds of sulfurous smoke in its wake, capped by venomous vocals nasty enough to wake demons from their slumber. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: COMA CLUSTER VOID — “MIND CEMETERIES”

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Nov 022015

(Austin Weber introduces our premiere of the title track to the new album by the multinational group Coma Cluster Void.)

In a way it’s very fitting that I’m here today writing about the premiere of the first full Coma Cluster Void song. Because it was Islander himself who first tipped me off to this multinational atonal 10-string death metal band in the first place. At the time he alerted me to them over a year ago, the band only had some very short song snippet clips up. But even those were strong enough to make me realize this band was going to be something special. So as I said, being here today to help premiere the title track from their forthcoming debut album Mind Cemeteries definitely feels like things have come full circle.

As for what the song “Mind Cemeteries” offers your ears, it’s a massive rumbling from the abyss right from the start, heaving with a mechanical, uneven gait that easily induces vertigo. There is a suffocating heaviness to “Mind Cemeteries”, which mercilessly strikes and jabs at you in shrill volleys of noise and disturbing dissonance. Continue reading »

KRODA: “Навій Схрон (NAVIJ SKHRON)”

Album Reviews, Premieres 2 Responses »

Oct 312015

We wish all of you a glorious Samhain. It is the most metal of festival nights, the ancient day marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, a day for the remembrance of the dead, a day when the veil between this world and the realm of death is as thin as tissue, and for many the first day of a spiritual new year.

In our den of thieves there was some loose talk about compiling a Halloween play list for the site, but this talk came to naught. It matters not, because we have something better. We have a stream of the new album by HelCarpathian Kroda, just released via Bandcamp on this blessed day — and like nothing you’ve heard from Kroda before.

I’m only human. When I have intensely strong feelings for the past creations of an artist, I tend to be predisposed to admire whatever comes next, to the point of overlooking flaws and focusing on the gifts when necessary. But most of the music on this new Kroda album, Navij Skhron, turned my expectations upside down, as if someone erased almost everything familiar on the chalkboard and began writing a new verse. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: KVLTIST — “THE DEVIL’S CATECHUMEN”

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Oct 302015

As the dark chill of winter looms ahead of us, W.T.C. Productions prepares for the release of Catechesis, the debut album by Germany’s Kvltist — an album that is the final realization of a vision in the making for a decade. Today we spread before you the premiere of the album’s opening track: “The Devil’s Catechumen”.

Through this song, Kvltist throw open obsidian gates revealing sounds that seem to emanate from a different plane of existence. It’s a Luciferian black metal devotional that’s intricate, multifaceted, and constantly changing. With dissonant riffs and arcane melodies that writhe and spiral like phosphorescent lights beneath the surface of a black surging sea, the song spawns imaginings of a great and ominous power rising to the surface in triumph, illuminated with flickering tendrils of unholy fire. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: INVOKER — “AEON”

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Oct 302015

Today is the official release date for Aeon, the second album by Germany’s Invoker, which will be brought to discerning metal lovers by Non Serviam Records. It is adorned by a wonderful album cover created by Misanthropic Art. It’s likely that you have seen this artwork at our site previously, because it has been our pleasure to bring you the premiere of three songs from the album. And now we bring you the premiere of a full album stream.

The music on the album encompasses a variety of moods, but it’s consistently intense, powerful, and dark. Produced in a way that provides both clarity and massive force, and featuring individual performances that really shine, Aeon’s greatest strength is nevertheless revealed in the songwriting. The song’s have individual character, each one marked by distinctive melodies that get their hooks in your head right away, and there is renewed pleasure when you come back to them. It’s the kind of album that can stay in your playlist a long time, without losing its interest. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: INTEGRITY — “HUMANITY IS THE DEVIL” (20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)

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Oct 272015

I heard about Cleveland’s Integrity long before I heard them. Other bands across a wide range of genres have dropped their name as an influence like I drop cigarette butts on the sidewalk. To this day, I get press releases pushing new bands because they sound (something) like Integrity. Integrity broke ground, and they broke minds.

Almost twenty years on from the release of the band’s landmark Humanity Is the Devil, Magic Bullet Records is releasing an anniversary edition of the EP. This edition features a new treatment of Pushead’s original album cover by artist Josh Bayer and comes with Dwid Hellion’s complete lyrics, along with an updated narration by him on the album’s last track.

And it has been remixed by Joel Grind (Toxic Holocaust) with guidance from Hellion and Integrity guitarist Aaron Melnick and remastered by Brad Boatright at Audiosiege — and that has brought an added power and immediacy to the recorded music that probably wasn’t even possible in 1995. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: XUL — “MALIGNANCE”

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Oct 272015

In preparing to write a few words about our premiere of this hair-raising album from XUL, I went back and read what I wrote about a XUL song we premiered earlier this year from their lethal 2015 EP Extinction Necromance, and I couldn’t help but laugh. I think my mind was so exploded by the music that I forgot where I put it. I’m warning you now that the same thing may have happened when I started writing this post after listening to XUL’s Malignance.

That’s the name of this British Columbia band’s 2012 debut album, which was originally self-released and is now getting a gilded reissue by Redefining Darkness Records, with remastering executed by Ken Sorceron (Abigail Williams), eye-catching new artwork by Remy Cuveillier (Headsplit Design), and a previously unreleased bonus track. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LUNAR MANTRA — “GENESIS”

Album Reviews, Premieres 3 Responses »

Oct 262015

So close and yet so far away, mysterious and unknowable for most of our existence, the Moon has exerted as strong a pull on human imagination as it has on the tides. With its reflected light waxing and waning, it alternately casts the night into deepest darkness and illuminates it with a ghostly pallor, spawning tales of night terrors and visions of things beyond the material plane. And for millennia, it has been associated with madness (there is a reason why the words “lunatic” and “lunacy” are derived from the moon’s Latin name, luna).

The debut album, Genesis, by the Scottish black metal band Lunar Mantra brought all these thoughts to mind, and not just because of the band’s name. In many ways, the album captures the mystery and the powerful influence of our closest celestial neighbor on our imaginations — as well as its link with madness. Genesis is indeed “a nightside odyssey through the formless void”, as one press description has it — a disorienting and arcane experience that proves to be spellbinding. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: LOST SOUL — “ATLANTIS: THE NEW BEGINNING”

Premieres 9 Responses »

Oct 232015

(KevinP provides the following introduction to our premiere of the new album by Poland’s Lost Soul.)

Poland’s death metal masters, Lost Soul, return with their fifth full-length album, Atlantis: The New Beginning, via Apostasy Records on October 30, 2015. Today we proudly present to you the exclusive North American stream of this new opus.

Mainman/founding member Jacek Grecki (vocals/guitar) and Damian Czajkowski (bass) return with the band’s first new material since 2009’s Immerse in Infinity. Making their recording debut with Lost Soul are Asmodeus Draco Dux (drums) and Marek Golas (guitars), who both joined in 2012.

If you like what you hear (and who are we kidding, YOU WILL), stay tuned — as on Monday, October 26, we will GET TO THE POINT in an interview with Jacek Grecki. See the links below to grab digital and physical copies of the album (vinyl will be released in February 2016). Continue reading »

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