AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: FLOSCULE — “A TREE OF LIFE”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 152024
 

The metal band Floscule, which features members from Silvern, White Ward, and Obrij, is based in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, a city with a shipbuilding history near the Black Sea in the southern part of the country, and an important transportation hub. As this source reports:

“In February and March 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian military forces attacked Mykolaiv and placed it under siege. Ukrainian forces barred Russian forces from the city, though Russian artillery continued to shell it. By July, half of the pre-war population had left the city…. On 25 March 2022 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded Mykolaiv the title of Hero City of Ukraine due to the Battle of Mykolaiv.”

On September 27th, Vendetta Records will release Floscule‘s debut album, entitled Ї. Tomorrow, the band will release one of the album’s songs as a digital single, and we’re premiering it today with a lyric video. It has a history that connects with what Mykolaiv experienced in early 2022, and what the entire country has been experiencing as a result of Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion, with no end in sight. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HEINOUS EXSANGUINATION — “VILE ROTTING MASS”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Aug 142024
 

Take a moment to reflect upon all you’ve done wrong in your life, or at least all you did wrong yesterday: The careless, stupid decisions. The petty jealousies. The pointless cruelties. The opportunities not seized, and the forgiveness not given. Think about all that, and maybe you’ll understand, as you bleed out, how well you deserve the merciless beating you’re about to suffer at the hands of Heinous Exsanguination.

This Los Angeles band clearly picked their name in an attempt to sum up the intent behind the music they decided to make — not just bloodletting, but odious and abominable bloodletting, both blistering and brutalizing.

And even if you don’t carefully ponder the meaning of their name, take a look at the artwork up there, which adorns their debut EP The Stench of Decaying Flesh, and you’ll get the message, a message not just reinforced by the EP’s title but also by the name of the EP track we’re premiering today: “Vile Rotting Mess“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FÖHN — “A DAY AFTER”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 132024
 

(written by Islander)

A few weeks ago the Greek band Föhn released a video for “Bereft,” the first advance track from their debut album Condescending, which will be released on August 23rd by Hypaethral Records in North America and These Hands Melt in Europe. I paid attention to it after seeing the album described as “avant-garde funeral doom” and realizing that the song included performances by two saxophonists. I then urgently wrote 330 words about it, just the one song.

Granted, “Bereft” is more than 13 minutes long, but even 330 words probably still didn’t do it justice.

When I spilled all those words I didn’t know we would be asked to host the premiere of a second song from Condescending, but that happened, and so I’m afraid you’re in for a lot more words. But mainly what you’re in for is yet another profoundly powerful piece of music, this one named “A Day After“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PNEUMA HAGION — “AEON”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 122024
 

Not long ago we published our Comrade Aleks‘ interview of Ryan Wilson, who is the musical equivalent of a perpetual motion machine and one of the two men behind the Texas-based death metal band Pneuma Hagion. The entire interview is well worth reading, but I found his comments about the Lovecraftian influence in Pneuma Hagion the most illuminating, especially in the context of the band’s new album From Beyond:

“I’ve been a huge fan of Lovecraft’s stories for most of my life. The key thing about Lovecraft is the sublime horror that he evokes; it’s a horror that can’t be seen, can’t be touched, and really can’t even be easily imagined. I love this; something that is beyond comprehension, but just graspable enough to be terrifying….

“Our minds have the power to create much more sinister and frightening ideas and images than anything the physical world can actually produce. The idea of extradimensional entities invading people’s minds is a huge theme in the stories of Lovecraft, and I enjoy trying to evoke similar feelings via the medium of music…. [M]usic is a great platform for the sublime, where the art lies in sound and not in visual cues so that your mind gets to handle all of the relevant imagery.”

Those thoughts resonate powerfully when listening to From Beyond, an album that truly does conjure terrible images of the listener’s own making, no two of them alike just as no two of us are completely alike. Everlasting Spew Records, which will release the new album on August 30th, fleshes out its thematic sources: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MNAJDRA — “IN THE NAME OF THE GODDESS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Aug 092024
 

(Writtenby Islander)

Last year the mysterious U.S. band Mnajdra made a splash with its self-titled debut album. Granted, it was a splash in a far corner of the small tributary of metal that spikes away from the vast ocean of music on a broader scale, but it still sent ripples, especially through devotees of terrorizing yet surprising musical extremity.

We attempted to review the album here, from which this is an excerpt:

The music isn’t easy to sum up, because it draws from scattered wellsprings of black metal, death metal, sludge/doom, post-metal, and psychedelia — whatever works to create wide-ranging sensations of catastrophe…. [B]e prepared to have your head spun and your dreams disturbed.

It is a relief that the secretive people behind Mnajdra, who clearly had done other things before that album, decided not to make the record a one-and-done effort. Instead, they’ve recorded a second album, and we’re thrilled to premiere it today — on the day of its release by Fiadh Productions and Snow Wolf Records. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MEKIGAH — “TO HOLD ONTO A HEARTLESS HEART”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 092024
 

(Writtenby Islander)

Metal-Archives currently brands the Australian band Mekigah “Gothic/Doom Metal” based on the band’s first four albums. Based on Mekigah‘s forthcoming fifth album they may have to put an “(early)” parenthetical next to that genre description. But what will they put in front of “(later)”? What kind of genre label does the fifth album suggest? That turns out to be a very tough question.

Mekigah itself describes the new album as “a purposely designed ugly, drawn out, raw, awkward journey,” with “no attempt or desire to either embrace the slow slow doom, to aggressively technically impress or to build upon previous motifs”:

“Everything is caught between worlds, as Mekigah itself is caught between worlds. Nothing is where it belongs as things are uncomfortably forced together through the sheer necessity of only gaining satisfaction via sonic self sabotage and harm, creating audial-mazes which then have to delicately be navigated through.”

What does this mean? We’ll find out together, through our premiere stream of this new album, To Hold Onto A Heartless Heart, now due for release on August 15th via the Aesthetic Death label. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: CRAWLING THROUGH TARTARUS — “THE FALL OF ATLAS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 082024
 

As their name portends, the southern California band Crawling Through Tartarus, whose music straddles a line between contemporary death metal and deathcore, have drawn inspiration from ancient Greek mythology, with a particular relish for the most brutal and hellish aspects of those old tales, as proclaimed in their name itself.

But while the band wish to lead us into the deepest region of the infernal underworld where the gods internally imprisoned their enemies and ruthlessly punished the wicked, they don’t… crawl. Their music does succeed in creating hellish experiences, but their forte is bludgeoning listeners within an inch of their lives.

One example of what we mean is a song off their self-titled debut album, released earlier this year, that’s the subject of the lyric video we’re premiering today. In a nutshell, it’s a bone-smashing groove monster, albeit one that becomes haunting before the end. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEVENIAL VERDICT — “GARDEN OF EYES”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 082024
 

The appearance of another painting by Mariusz Lewandowski on the cover of a metal album is always welcome, and the album on which the one above appears is also welcome, especially because the music is as hauntingly chilling and as frighteningly colorful as the image.

That album, Blessing of Despair, is the Finnish death metal band Devenial Verdict‘s second full-length, following up their daunting Ash Blind from 2022. What we have for you today is a premiere of the third song from the record released so far, evocatively named “Garden of Eyes“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ANOXIDE — “MORALS AND DOGMA”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Aug 072024
 

Twelve years have passed since the birth of Anoxide somewhere in London. In that time they have released a pair of EPs, a demo, and a couple of singles, but nothing in the last six years. And so it comes as something of a surprise that two days from now they will release an album via Ghastly Music, their full-length debut at last.

They’ve titled it Morals & Dogma, and packed it with 9 songs (one of them an instrumental) that explore such subjects as the influence of misinformation in a media-saturated world, inescapable cycles of systemic corruption within society, the exacerbation of socio-economic disparity and the devastating effects of austerity policies on the working class and marginalized communities, the resurgence of far right ideologies, and visions of dystopian futures produced by suffering and inequality.

Weighty subjects to be sure, and there’s powerful heft in the music too, but also head-spinning adventures, as you’ll discover through our full album premiere today. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: CLOSET WITCH — “TO THE CAULDRON”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 062024
 

The dictionary defines “catharsis” as “the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions”. It’s one of the first words that comes to mind in listening to the fusion of grindcore and powerviolence made by Iowa-based Closet Witch, and especially so in listening to the song that’s the subject of the Closet Witch video we’re premiering today.

This song, “To the Cauldron“, is explained by lead vocalist Mollie Piatetsky: “The song is about needing, wanting, yearning for comfort/advice/the presence of someone who is no longer on the earthly plain and the torment caused by this.”

The subject is familiar to many of us who have lost a parent, or both of them, or others who never had the kind of parent they wished for, or maybe never really knew them at all. Here are the song’s lyrics: Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries