Album Reviews Archives - Page 3 of 545

WRETCHED: “DECAY”

Dec 022025

(Below we present DGR’s review of the long-awaited fifth full-length by North Carolina’s Wretched, released on October 17th by Metal Blade Records.)

I’ve thought a lot about legacy and what I admire in a band when they decide to return after an extended period of silence. It may just be that this year has been a prime fruiting ground for such bands to find their way back into the eternal heavy metal fray, but the thought has danced on the edges of the intellectual periphery for a while now.

When the subject of what a band has left behind and what they are returning to comes back again – which has proven to be the worst mental dam in the history of man, as I’ve been waiting for thoughts to congeal into something resembling cogent writing – it is mostly couched in the ideals of expectation and what their fans may want from them. This is where the intellectual breeding ground has run wild.

The one overriding thought I’ve come back to is I admire many of the approaches available to a band returning to music after an extended hiatus, though part of that may just be that I’m a barely evolved chimp who is just happy to have his favorite band logos appearing on tour posters again, and among those are exceedingly difficult choices that lie in either the chase of where the group left off last – picking up a baton long covered in dust and left roadside – or the return, but as something different and unexpected, which is where I have found myself standing with North Carolina’s newly resurrected as a four-piece Wretched and their new album Decay. Continue reading »

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

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Dec 022025

(Andy Synn is hoping to cover as many in as possible before “List Week”… so here’s four you may not have checked out)

As the last edition of “Things You May Have Missed” before my epic, week-long round-up of “the year in Metal”, this particular article has a fair bit of pressure on its shoulders, and deciding who to feature wasn’t easy.

Suffice it to say, however, that I’ve done my best to once again cover the spread as well as I can, which this time means a late-in-the-year highlight from the Hardcore scene, an absoutely killer Death Metal debut, some gloriously riff-happy Blackened Stoner Metal from Canada, and a slab of deathly Slovakian Tech/Prog extremity from a band who have, from my perspective at least, flown under the radar for far too long!

So, withour further ado, let’s get to it. After all, time is running out…

SHADES OF BLACK: UMBRÍO, MOON WISDOM, ULTIMA NECAT

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Nov 302025

Valerius de Saedeleer (Belgian, 1867–1941) – “A Winter Landscape”, 1931

(written by Islander)

That painting up there popped into one of my news feeds today. I saw it on my phone this morning as I was sitting outside having a cup of joe and a few smokes before daybreak, with the outside temperature at 37°F. With about 17 hours to go at this point before December begins, that all seemed like fitting synchronicity.

Where I live in the Pacific Northwest we’re well into what everyone here calls The Big Dark. No snow (that rarely happens), but the days are short and usually beset by wet gloom even when the sun is (allegedly) above the horizon. Perfect days for chilly and gloomy music, but also good days for music that lights fires. What I’ve picked for this column today manifests in both those ways.

Of course, December brings more than The Big Dark in the earth’s northern latitudes. It will also bring a rising tide of year-end lists. Tomorrow we’ll be re-posting one from another site much larger than ours, and also asking our visitors to share their own. And then one week from tomorrow we’ll begin rolling out the lists of our own writers, beginning with Andy Synn’s usual weeklong takeover. (Actually, it will probably begin this coming Friday, if Andy does what he usually does and shares his list of the year’s best EPs in advance of his main list week.) Continue reading »

DISTASTE: “AGONIEPOSITUR”

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Nov 282025

(We present DGR’s review of Agoniepositur, the latest album by the Austrian deathgrind band Distaste, released on October 24 by F.D.A. Records.)

It comes as a surprise to see something from Austrian grind band Distaste so soon after the release of their 2023 album Der Ertraeger Und Das Fleisch, but it seems to be the band’s modus operandi to quickly burst into and out of existence like someone lobbing flash grenades from the window of a passing race car.

Sliding in just under the wire for 2025 is an impressive act too, given that the crew comprising Distaste do keep busy with a small handful of other projects, but perhaps the summoning call to the blastbeat has proven too strong, bringing them home from the wilds to once again unleash a sub-thirty-minute hammering of music that exists entirely in the redline and rarely moves from it. Dynamics, to put it politely, can get fucked. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MIND PRISONER — “LESS FAITH”

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Nov 272025

(written by Islander)

Mind Prisoner came together in Portland, Oregon, but their members are now continentally separated between Oregon and South Carolina. Following a handful of demos and an EP, the band released their debut album The Color of Ruin almost exactly one year ago. Our Andy Synn wrote here that it “made one hell of an impression” on him after finally hearing it, using “an array of Black Metal, Post-Black Metal, and Blackened Doom influences” to create experiences that were “dark and desolate,” “bleak yet beautiful,” “bitter” and “biting,” “terrifying” and “tormented.” He closed by suggesting “that Mind Prisoner haven’t even reached the peak of their powers yet, and we should all make sure to watch them very closely in the future!”

We’ve followed that advice, and what the future has now brought us is a new Mind Prisoner album named Less Faith that’s due for release tomorrow — November 28th. It displays a stylistic shift from their first full-length, accurately summarized by their label as “post-black metal with elements of doom, post-punk, and gothic rock,” but as you’ll discover for yourselves through our full streaming premiere of the new record, many of the adjectives that Andy used in describing the first album still apply. Continue reading »

ROTTEN SOUND: “MASS EXTINCTION”

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Nov 272025

(Rotten Sound’s new EP Mass Extinction comes out December 12th on Season of Mist, and in a rare attempt to get ahead of the game, DGR sent in the following review.)

Rotten Sound’s cycle of album and then EP continues unabated for the third time running with the upcoming release of their eight-song auditory assault known as Mass Extinction.

In classic Rotten Sound fashion, they waste absolutely no time in getting going and also have little care for making a song that even bothers clearing the two-minute mark. Sub-ten minutes of fiery grind are on offer here, split off from the grander chaos of the group’s 2023 Apocalypse sessions and made whole as part of a package that songwriting-wise is a little more scattershot, but manages to hit just as hard as the album that preceded it.

It goes without saying that Rotten Sound have continued to be one of the more straight-shooting pillars of the grind scene over the years and any excuse to sit down with one of their bona-fide blastbeat batterings is a good one. Apocalypse stuck pretty close to the tried-and-true for the Rotten Sound crew and it will come as no surprise, then, that Mass Extinction continues that march into oblivion, just with a slight bit more taste for the two-step now that it is a little more free to stretch its wings than Apocalypse’s unrelenting assault would’ve allowed. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): OMEGAVORTEX — “DIABOLIC MESSIAH OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER”

Album Reviews, Premieres 1 Response »

Nov 262025

(written by Islander)

We might think of the varying genres of extreme metal as a branching warren of subterranean caverns, all of them connected but some very far away from others. Some are oppressive in their pressures, others cold enough to freeze breath, some occupied by near-mindless creatures frenzied in their hunger, some haunted by wailing ghosts or giants that woozily lumber about. In some of them, strains of ecstatic and/or mesmerizing melody thread their way through stalactites rhythmically crashing down.

But in some of those underground spaces sheer chaos reigns. That is where you’ll find Omegavortex, in a spiked cavity where skin-searing white phosphorus burns and hurricanes of grit and blades ruthlessly storm, where demons scream in throes of violence and nightmares come to life.

Since 2017 Omegavortex have carved their underground abyss with a few short releases and their 2020 debut album, the aptly named Black Abomination Spawn, but they will soon expand the reach of their terrible domain with a second album, Diabolic Messiah of the New World Order, now set for release on December 5th by Third Eye Temple. We have a full stream of the album for you today — and some thoughts about the gloriously ravishing and ruinous assaults it encompasses. Continue reading »

HVRT – CANCERBLOOM

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Nov 262025

(The new album from Hvrt comes out Dec 05… and Andy Synn says you won’t have to wait, or weep, much longer)

I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this, but I’ve often thought about starting a more Black Metal (or, at least, “blackened”) project of my own, something that sits somewhere between Black Anvil, Black Breath, and Mantar, on the sludgier, punkier side of things… all nasty riffs, gnarly grooves, and stripped-down, hook-heavy songs designed to take no prisoners and take no shit.

There’s only two problems with this, so far:

Finding the right collaborators has proven difficult, as I just don’t seem to know the right people or have the right contacts (and we’d obviously have to be compatible, both musically and personally);
Hvrt kind of already got there first.

PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS: “DEATH HILARIOUS”

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Nov 262025

‘Now we hunt Hippopotamus’ by Aaron Johnson. done in a style they call “reverse painted acrylic polymer peel painting.”

(Vizzah Harri dives deep into and around the latest album by the UK band Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, which was released this past April by Rocket Recordings.)

Bands with PR in three settings across the globe can hardly be considered underground, though postern gates with stairways leading down to caverns advertising treasures would at least induce a probing glance or load-bearing check of the first step.

If opener Blockage was your introduction to this band or their approach, as it was the case for me, you’re in for a trip that results in an antonymic flush. You are forgiven, however, for still being fixated on Aaron Johnson’s stirring phantasmagoric artwork.

Lifted from the Jeremyriad blog is this quote from the artist about the origins of the piece:

“Now We Hunt Hippopotamus is a convergen ce of disparate influences, specifically including The Hippopotamus Hunt by Rubens (one of my favorite paintings by one of my favorite painters), Indian firecracker graphics (which I discovered traveling in India in 2005, a trip that completely exploded my color palette), and the David Lynch film Wild at Heart (the title of this piece comes from torrid moment when Isabella Rossellini stares down the barrel of her pistol pointed at the camera shouting ‘Now We Hunt Buffalo!’).”

BLUT AUS NORD – ETHEREAL HORIZONS

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Nov 252025

(Andy Synn ventures towards new horizons with Blut Aus Nord, whose new album is out on Friday)

Although it often seems like we spend most of our time here at NCS playing catch-up… and that’s because we do… on rare occasions, such as this one, we do manage to get something published in advance of an album’s release.

Not necessarily by much, it’s true, but we’ll take what we can get when it comes to getting ahead of the curve for once.

Of course, few bands out there have as much of a claim to being “ahead of the curve” – not just once, but multiple times throughout the myriad variations of their sound – as Blut Aus Nord, whose long career has been characterised by a near-constant sense of musical motion and creative evolution.

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