The video we’re about to premiere provides a bit of history, a bit of nostalgia, and plenty of feral energy that hasn’t lost its punch or power despite the passage of 19 years since the release of the song featured in the video.

The band here is Antagony, a Bay Area group active from 1999-2009, that became one of the pioneers of deathcore, integrating elements of death metal, grind, and hardcore in ways that really hadn’t been done before. Their name may have been eclipsed in popularity by other groups that gained greater prominence, and their continuing progress hobbled by extensive line-up changes, but they’re still remembered to this day by a lot of fans. And their former members went on to form or join such bands as Oblivion, All Shall Perish, Hacksaw to the Throat, Suffokate, Oblige, Misericordiam, Connoisseur, and more.

Last year saw the release through Metal Injection of a 32-minute documentary film about Antagony directed by Brandon Hunt and entitled Dawn of Deathcore, much of it consisting of Antagony performance footage in the Bay Area. What we have for you today is a video for the song “End of Circle” that was bonus footage after the end of the closing credits and hasn’t been previously revealed. Continue reading »

(We present DGR’s review of the new album by some Swedish upstarts whose name will eventually be well-known if they keep doing stuff like this. It will be released on May 18th by Century Media.)

You’d be forgiven if, like your dear author here, the shock of At The Gates being an active band still hasn’t worn off yet. It’s been four years since the release of 2014’s At War With Reality, the group play shows and tour regularly, and yet every moment they’re around feels precious.

Recording an album that has transcended into a metal cultural landmark and leaving a near-twenty-year gap until the next one will do that to you, one guesses. Yet, here we are on the cusp of a second release from the group after that long hiatus in the form of their sixth album, To Drink From The Night Itself, and the first to feature new guitarist Jonas Stålhammar (whose own resume is pretty stacked and most recently played alongside vocalist Tomas Lindberg in their more old-school-focused The Lurking Fear).

In the lead-up to At War With Reality we all had a lot of fun pontificating on the many thought exercises of “What will a new At The Gates album sound like after the band has been gone for so long”, as the band had essentially watched and been part of a whole genre-explosion while its various members were involved in a slate of other projects. When the album was released, the answer was a pretty solid “it sounds like At The Gates” — which has to be one of the most frustratingly difficult things to pin down. Continue reading »