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”

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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 »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SARCASTIC OBEDIENCE — “FADING FAITH”

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Jan 302024
 

It may have been the English writer Jonathan Swift (he of Gulliver’s Travels) who was the earliest source of the proverb that, as time passes, everything old is new again. Or it might have been Ovid. But whoever first coined the phrase was surely right.

The members of the Greek metal band Sarcastic Obedience aren’t that old, but they are new again. They look very young indeed in photos of them taken when they released their debut EP Internal Disturbance in 2013.

But now they’re more than a decade older, and they have their first record since that EP now on the horizon, a self-titled album that will be released on February 14th by Chaos and Hell Productions. New again, but man, for them that horizon must have seemed like it was receding farther away with every step they took toward it. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MORVIGOR — “MIDDEN IN DE WERELD”

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Jan 292024
 

By sheer coincidence, this marks the second premiere we’re hosting today from a band who are returning with a new recording seven years after their last one. This time the band is the Dutch quartet Morvigor, coming back from their hiatus with a new EP named De Spiegel that will be co-released on February 26th by Onism Productions and Vita Detestabilis.

We also hosted a premiere in the run-up to Morvigor‘s last album, 2017’s Tyrant. At that time, having overlooked the band’s full-length debut (2014’s A Tale of Suffering), we didn’t know what to expect. But when this same writer first heard that song we premiered, I wrote that “it felt like someone had stuck a live power line straight into my brain stem, by which I mean it is an absolutely electrifying surprise — one of the best new discoveries of this rapidly waning year”.

Having been stunned by Tyrant, this time it will be more difficult for me to come away surprised by Morvigor‘s multi-faceted, genre-bending sounds and their adventurous approach to song-writing. But that doesn’t make De Spiegel any less startling, as you’ll discover for yourselves when you listen to “Midden in de wereld“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HACAVITZ — “MUERTE PRIMERA”

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Jan 292024
 

A long seven years after their last album (Nex Nihil), the Mexican black metal band Hacavitz are returning, with a tremendously powerful new album named Muerte that’s now set for release on February 9th by Vomit Records.

Muerte is the sixth full-length overall from Hacavitz in a career that now spans 20 years. Their name is well-known to devotees of dark metal, and their absence has been felt, even with a couple of splits dropping during the album gap.

But this new album abundantly compensates for the band’s absence, and you’ll quickly learn why when you watch and listen to our premiere of a lyric video for the album’s first song, “Muerte Primera“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DOOM BEACH AND CHOP7X

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Jan 262024
 

(We present Christopher Luedtke‘s introduction of our premiere of two songs from a forthcoming 12″ vinyl split set for release in February by Redscroll Records, one each by the bands Doom Beach and Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop.)

It is not just a good day because it is Friday and the weekend is so close some of us can already hear the siren call of free time choice paralysis, but today we also have not one but two song premieres. Today is a double dose of blown-out Connecticut rage from Doom Beach and Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop (or Chop7x if you’re nasty) from their upcoming split to be released early next month on Redscroll Records. Continue reading »

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