Album Reviews Archives - Page 4 of 574

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): STYGIAN — “HUNT THE DIVINE”

Sep 042026

(written by Islander)

On this day (a Bandcamp Friday for those who pay attention to such things) the Italian band Stygian are releasing a new two-song EP named Hunt the Divine. It follows their 2025 debut album Dreadlands, which we had the pleasure of premiering and reviewing. As we wrote then, Dreadlands presented “an intersection or fusion of two worlds, a hybrid of crust punk and black metal” that proved to be “as fierce, as wounded, and as defiantly resilient as the album’s thematic insights”.

As for those thematic insights, they reflected “serious thought, scorching insight, and honest rage”. To quote the band:

Dreadlands explores the contrast between two spiritual worlds: the harmony-centered pagan traditions and the legacy of Abrahamic religions, which often channel humanity’s most violent instincts. While pagan rites served to express and contain primal forces, maintaining balance between humankind and nature, monotheistic dogmas have frequently justified war and destruction in the name of faith. This work stands as a tribute to life, to the sacred bond between people and the natural world — a bond shattered by centuries of religious conflict.

Now we return to Stygian with our premiere of the new EP on the day of its release. Here’s the description we received of the EP’s themes: Continue reading »

EXITIUM SUI – UNRAVELLING

Album Reviews No Responses »

Sep 032026

(Andy Synn has some grim delights to share with us today, from an album set for release tomorrow)

The weather here in the UK has recently taken a turn for the worse, shrouding us in a grey cloud of damp and humidity that somehow manages to combine Meditteranean swelter with Scandinavian chill at the same time.

What this signals, of course, is that our glorious (read: parched) days of Summer are now over, and we’re staring right down the barrel of another wet and wild Autumn/Winter.

And what better way to prepare for this than with the latest sepulchral slab of oppressive blackened Doom from the one and only Exitium Sui (AKA Chris Gebauer).

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): WINCE AND FRISSON — “TUMULT”

Album Reviews, Premieres 3 Responses »

Sep 022026

(written by Islander)

In February of this year we helped introduce listeners to Wince and Frisson, a “dissoblack and death metal” duo consisting of Triumvir Kaleido from North Carolina and Steve Wiener from New Jersey. In February we premiered a striking animated video created by Triumvir (who’s responsible for all of the band’s artwork) for the song “Kärrhäxan” from Wince and Frisson’s then-forthcoming debut album Tumult. What we’ve got for you today is a premiere stream of that album in its entirety in advance of its September 4 official release..

Wince and Frisson introduce the album with these words:

Tumult – a virulent cocktail of extreme metal genres. Seven tracks, all blackened and swathed in dissonance. It gets to the point immediately and offers no rest to the listener until its conclusion. All the while, guitarist, bassist, and vocalist Triumvir Kaleido maniacally spews warped interpretations of his experiences with religious and psychological abuse, and struggles with mental health.

But of course we have our introduction to what you’re about to hear. Continue reading »

GOROD: “THE EMBER GONE”

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Sep 022026

(We present a review by Professor D. Grover the XIIIth of a new album the French metal band Gorod which was released last Friday.)

Greetings and salutations, friends. As you may have picked up on in recent years, I’m a big fan of modern technical death metal (not that I mind the classic old-school stylings of Death, Cynic, Pestilence, and Atheist). In recent times over on Bluesky I ranked my top twenty modern tech-death albums (read: post-Necrophagist), one album per artist, and my number one with a number belonged to Gorod’s Process Of A New Decline. It was probably the album that truly made me love tech-death and it’s an incredibly influential album for me even to this day. I’ve loved everything Gorod have released, both before and since, but there’s been a definite evolution in their style over the years, a creeping prog influence that has culminated in The Ember Gone. Continue reading »

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Sep 022026

(Andy Synn caps off another busy month here at NCS with four more albums you may have overlooked)

Like I said last week, for the most part we prefer to focus our attention on bands who we think deserve more exposure or who simply aren’t as big as we think they should be, rather than expending our time and energy on artists who have been thoroughly covered elsewhere.

For example, I’m probably not going to be crafting a full Mastodon review this time (it’s a good album… occasionally a very good album, but occasionally held back by a few dud moments and an excessive length) or writing about the new Sigh (which, so far at least, I’m really not a fan of), as both those bands have already received more than enough coverage, so a few extra words from us – positive or negative – is unlikely to have much of an impact.

The four artists I’ve chosen to feature today, however, have never been written about here at NoCleanSinging before, which should make for some fun discoveries for all of us.

FEN: “ELEMENTAL (PART 1: MOURNING EARTH)”

Album Reviews No Responses »

Aug 312026

(We begin a new week at NCS with Daniel Barkasi’s review of a new album by the UK black metal band Fen, recently released by Prophecy Productions.)

The UK black metal scene is one of vibrance and diversity in approach. Of the long-standing members of that geographical scene, Fen stands alongside Saor and Winterfylleth as the most eclectic of the bunch, with today’s subject being a prolific example of never making the same album twice, choosing to continuously take risks over familiar stylistic comfort.

Since releasing their astounding and ever-relevant debut The Malediction Fields back in 2009 to throw the black metal hordes on their proverbial heads, it’s been a harrowing journey since, with a wide array of sonic shifts and creative swerves. That album will always be a special one for yours truly, and having witnessed it played in full at Fortress Festival remains a core memory.

Masterworks such as the seminal Dustwalker and the bitingly dynamic The Dead Light are also foundational works in the history of atmospheric black metal, pushing boundaries while bludgeoning with an endless cavalcade of riffs.

Others didn’t land quite as close to those established heights, though all have their place in Fen‘s story. With the benefit of hindsight, each at minimum contain massive standout moments; Carrion Skies took the impossible task of quickly following Dustwalker and is altogether a great record, but not quite reaching the legendary status of its predecessor, where the experimental, proggy Winter has over time been a release that we’ve grown to appreciate more and more. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: KOSTNICA, LAUGH TRACK, OAKENTHRONE, I HELVETE, THERMIDOR, HALO OF TEETH

Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET 4 Responses »

Aug 302026

(written by Islander)

As I did yesterday morning, I began today by again bleakly staring at my enormous list of links for new music. I could hear the list chortling at me. “You fool,” it muttered in between cackles, “you won’t even scratch the surface.” The truth of that mockery made it no less degrading. (Let’s put aside any concerns about hearing voices from a typed list.)

On days like this I often resort to time-savers, one of which is to prioritize recommendations from people I trust, a kind of life-line to a beleaguered soul.

(The Associated Press reports that on this day in 1916 explorer Ernest Shackelton successfully returned to Elephant Island in Antarctica to rescue 22 of his stranded crew members, who had survived on the barren island for four and a half months after the sinking of their ship, the Endurance. I feel this is not a coincidence.)

The recommendations proved to be worthy. Beyond those I resorted to impulse, and fortune smiled upon my scattershot urges. Here are the resulting choices I made for today; if you think of yourself as a trve cvlt listener, be forewarned that many of them challenge black metal orthodoxy in varying (and very interesting) ways: Continue reading »

PRIVATE PRISONS – THEO LACY

Album Reviews No Responses »

Aug 262026

(Andy Synn condemns you all to suffer with the new album from Private Prisons)

You know us here at NCS (and if you don’t, why not?)… when it comes to writing about new music we’ll almost always favour writing about lesser-known bands over bigger and more notorious names.

It’s become almost a perverse sort of compulsion at this point, letting other sites (for the most part, anyway) handle the “big hitters” while we focus on the weirdos, freaks, and underdogs (not always in that order).

And today’s review is a prime example of this, because nothing says “underground” than the visceral, venom-spewing blackened sludgery of Private Prisons.

CLEARING THE SLATE ISSUE THREE

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Aug 262026

(Our writer DGR has been playing catch-up on records released earlier this year when other distractions interfered with writing about them. In mid-July he delivered Issue One (which you can find here), earlier this month he presented Issue Two (here), and now we have Issue Three encompassing reviews of four records released in March, April, May, and August.)

Over the years I’ve noticed a sort of lethargy develops when I reach the end of some sort of media consumption or project completion. The ‘Done-ness’ of it all seems to take it out of me and I wind up strangely tired for the rest of the day. I notice this more often with my videogame hobby than most, as I’ll often reach the end of some game I’ve been playing my way through – often side by side with the many albums I take a swing at writing about – and wind up tired by the end of it.

I once saw someone positing that it’s a sort of decompression, because your brain has been interacting so long with that specific ‘world’ that it is a sort of loss now that it’s over. I’ve found I do the same thing with albums and books too; albums in an equally odd circumstance because I often wind up writing about them afterward, like putting a neat little bow on a story arc and tying it off. I then walk away from the writing part of it just as tired, such that every review after a while feels like an exorcism.

The difficult part, then, is that what I should be doing is getting started on the next thing, because your writing skill is an engine that if you let rust from disuse becomes harder and harder to start up each time. Yet, keeping the machine rolling runs against my long-simmering philosophy of not just completely severing ties with any particular piece of art, because the practice of continual writing and reviewing so easily becomes more of a high score board of ‘look how much I listened to!’ It all feels surface-level at that point. Did you really listen to it if you’ve got 150 other releases on your docket for this month? Or does it count at about the same level as the music playing in your local supermarket for all of the effect it had on you? Continue reading »

DREAMWELL – HYMNS FOR THE DENIAL OF GOD

Album Reviews No Responses »

Aug 252026

(Andy Synn has a few thoughts about the new Dreamwell, out on Friday, to share today)

Change is one of the few, reliable constants in life.

All of us change – sometimes drastically, sometimes subtly – whether we want to or not, and the same goes for bands… especially when they undergo any sort of line-up shift.

Case in point, after releasing two extremely well-received albums – 2021’s Modern Grotesque and 2023’s In My Saddest Dreams… (which landed on my “Critical Top Ten” for that year) – Providence-based “Post-Screamo-core” crew Dreamwell parted ways with long-time guitarist Aki McCullough (A Constant Knowledge of Death), transforming them from a quintet to a quartet for the first time since their formation.

Understandably then, I was intrigued as to how this might effect the group’s sound… after all, McCullough‘s absence inevitably leaves a gap, and just as nature always seeks to fill a vacuum so too will the rest of the group’s members have instinctively moved to establish a new equilibrium to fill this gap.

And now, with the imminent release of their third album (out this Friday), we finally get to hear just how much has changed for the band.

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