AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): STELLAR REMAINS — “WASTELANDS”

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Feb 132024
 

Let’s pretend you can’t listen to Stellar Remains‘ new EP right now, even though you can if you just scroll further down the screen you’re now looking at.

Let’s take our game of make-believe a move further and pretend you have no idea who this band is and have never heard a note of its music. That requires less suspension of disbelief, because Wastelands is in fact the first release of Stellar Remains, and only one song from the EP has been available for streaming before today.

Moreover, all that most of us know or could find out about the band (apart from that one song) is that it’s the solo work of Brisbane-based Dan Elkin, who has no resume on Metal-Archives yet.

So, if you indulge all this pretending, then you have to put some amount of weight on what we now have to say about Wastelands. How nice for us. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CHILD — “CREATIVE INVENTIONS OF KILLING”

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Feb 122024
 

As one dictionary tells us, the German word zeitgeist means “the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time”. It combines two words that mean those very things — time and spirit.

Now, take a guess about how the Swedish band CHILD think about our current age, given that they’ve named their new album Shitegeist. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VERWOED — “THE MADMAN’S DANCE”

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Feb 092024
 

We’ve been following the progress of the Dutch black metal band Verwoed (the solo project of Erik Bleijenberg), and becoming increasingly intrigued and viscerally moved by each successive release. And so it was exciting news to learn that Wolves of Hades and Argento Records will be releasing a new Verwoed album named The Mother on March 29th. Getting the chance to premiere a song from it was another thrill.

The song is called “The Madman’s Dance“, and madness does burn within the music, with such intensity and such wholly enveloping power that it’s easy to feel consumed by it, witnessing not merely derangement but bloody splendor. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: FROZEN WINDS — “THEOSPHOROS”

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Feb 072024
 

Freezing winds howl through the Earth’s atmosphere in the far northern and far southern latitudes, but they can howl through our minds too, regardless of where we dwell. In realms of music, black metal brings the howling cold in ways more biting and dreadful than most genres, with the gales often whipped by the furious wings of fallen angels.

And so it’s not so perplexing to find a black metal band named Frozen Winds that originated on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, no matter the usual sun and warmth of those climes. They delved into occult subjects and found ancient expressions of the Left Hand Path that led them into the gales, and also into the ritualism of mystics.

More than 17 years into their existence, Frozen Winds have moved their music to evolve, building upon their previous releases as well as live performances, sharing stages with the likes of Rotting Christ, Kawir, Septic Flesh and The Dead Creed. Where the movements have now taken them will be revealed in a new album (only their second) named Keys to Eschaton, and is partially revealed today through our lyric-video premiere of the first single from the album, a fabulous song named “Theosphoros“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WOUNDS — “ZOOPHAGIST”

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Feb 052024
 

It’s always a pleasure to come across a song name that sends us running for the dictionary, even when it’s a name whose meaning we might be able to guess after dividing it into its component parts. If you guessed that “Zoophagist” refers to an animal that eats every other animal available to it, you get a gold star.

However, in the case of the song you’re about to experience courtesy of the Chicago band Wounds, that creature isn’t one you can find in any zoo or earthly wilderness. As the song’s chilling lyrics describe, it is instead a collective of lethal things that have captivated the mind of their captor in a lab in outer space and thereby achieved their escape.

In the words of the song, these things eagerly anticipate what will come next after they make their way to our solar system: Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ABYSSUS — “UNDER SIEGE”

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Feb 022024
 

As their name portends, the Greek death metal band Abyssus did not arise to shine light and love on a miserable world, but to submerge it into deeper darkness and more relentless savagery. Since the release of their debut EP a dozen years ago, they have not wavered in their dedication to musical renditions of blade-sharp barbarism, esoteric terrors, and punk-fueled mayhem, nor allowed mercy to mediate their music.

The band’s latest descent is an EP named Under Siege. It was released without much fanfare near the end of last year, and so the title of this feature plays fast and loose with the “premiere” word, which is something we almost never do. But the chance to help spread the word about Under Siege was just too tempting, especially now that it’s being offered by Chaos and Hell Productions on CD. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DÖDSRIT — “CELESTIAL WILL”

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Feb 012024
 

For their forthcoming fourth album Nocturnal Will, the Swedish band Dödsrit have created a remarkable musical symbiosis. Their hallmarks of black metal and crust punk are still there, but the music is also elaborate and frequently elegant, the melodies intensely moving and immediately memorable.

And there’s a reason why the new album’s cover art depicts a stricken knight, on his knees in a wintry plain and head bowed beneath glowering skies, because the music seems to cast its gaze back to an ancient age of valor and bloodshed, of triumph and death, of devotion and suffering, so much so that we’d venture the guess that devotees of medieval black metal will relish this as much as metalpunks will.

As evidence of what we’re trying to convey, we present today the premiere of the album’s second single, “Celestial Will“, in advance of the record’s March 22nd release by the Wolves of Hades label. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): NECROWRETCH — “SWORDS OF DAJJAL”

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Feb 012024
 

With 15 years of recordings and performances behind them, the French extreme metal band Necrowretch likely need no introduction to the horned denizens of this site, nor any added fuel of anticipation for their forthcoming fifth album Swords of Dajjal, which we’re presenting today on the eve of its release by Season of Mist.

But it’s worth knowing that the new album was one of those unexpected fruits of the covid pandemic, which ruined the band’s touring plans in support of their just-released fourth album but provided a pause they used for the creation of this new fifth full-length. And thus Necrowretch spent more time writing and fine-tuning Swords of Dajjal than they’d ever spent on previous releases.

Not only that, the band changed their gear, their sound, their tuning, and even initially wrote the songs on acoustic 12-string guitar. The result, as described by the band’s vocalist and rhythm guitarist Vlad, is the group’s “most black metal record, with splashes of death metal here and there”.

He adds: “Whereas on the previous album all tempos were pushed to the extreme, there’s far more variety here to be found. It also gave us free reins to reach a more mystical, Biblical if you will vibe”, fed by Vlad‘s experience living in Turkey in the late 2010’s. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HASTURIAN VIGIL — “UNVEILING THE BRAC’THAL”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Jan 312024
 

Possibly drawing upon a reference in the Ambrose Bierce short story “Haïta the Shepherd”, and/or stories in Robert Chambers‘ collection The Yellow Sign, H.P. Lovecraft added Hastur the Unspeakable to his pantheon of the Great Old Ones in his tale “The Whisperer in Darkness”.

Spawn of Yog-Sothoth, the half-brother of Cthulhu, and possibly the Magnum Innominandum, Hastur was a vast monstrosity of hideous power drawn from nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions. And that terrible thing seems to have been an inspiration for the Irish musical duo who chose for themselves the name Hasturian Vigil.

However, these two — multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Cxaathesz and drummer Shygthoth — were not content to set their music solely within Lovecraftian spheres. For their debut album Unveiling the Brac’thal they created a mythos of their own, Yith-Melle, inspired not only by Lovecraft but also by Machen, Lord Dunsany, and Yeats, all the better to “embrace their fascination for cosmic dread, deranged pantheons, and unspeakable curses”.

So says the materials accompanying the album which we have received from the publicist for Invictus Productions, which will release Unveiling the Brac’thal on February 2nd. We also have these prefatory words from Hasturian Vigil: Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: REPLICANT — “ORGASM OF BEREAVEMENT”

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Jan 302024
 

Insanity reigns supreme in the Replicant song you’re about to hear, like a mad god gone berserk. It has the impact of a live power line thrashing unsuspecting pedestrians in a deluge, while teleporting their brains into a whipping centrifuge. Minds will be boggled, bones will be broken, blood spray will paint the walls.

Now that we have your attention, let’s fill in a bit of the back-story. Continue reading »

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