SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: FROST, EXCAVATED GRAVES, DWELLNOUGHT, A LIGHT WITHIN, GROS ENFANT MORT, NEON SCAFFOLD

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Jan 032026
 

(written by Islander)

Here we have the first Saturday NCS roundup of new songs and videos in 2026. It’s a temporal and stylistic mix of things. Temporally, some of it is from records released in 2025 and some from releases slated to happen this year. Stylistically, it will jump you around like popcorn kernels getting hot, including one new song and video that’s well outside our usual musical focus and a closing selection that’s beyond categorization.

I don’t expect everyone to enjoy everything I’ve assembled here, even though I do. That would be too much to expect. I do hope you’ll find at least one thing to brighten your day (i.e., to darken it like a storm cloud). Continue reading »

ULVER – NEVERLAND

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Jan 022026
 

(Andy Synn begins another new year here at NCS with a new album by an old favourite)

The turning of the year is all about change, about rebirth and renewal… and if one band’s career has epitomised all of these things it’s that of Black Metal’s very own “lost boys”, Ulver.

That being said, as someone who’s been a fan of the band for a long time (especially since they fell out of the Black Metal pram and landed somewhere much stranger), the group’s last couple of albums (Drone Activity excluded) have – in my opinion, at least – fallen into a bit of a creative rut, with their attempts to follow in the footsteps of 2017’s fantastic, career redefining, The Assassination of Julius Caesar resulting in increasingly diminishing returns.

Thankfully, however, if history has taught us anything about Ulver it’s that they’re never too far from another stylistic shift, and with the start of a new year comes the start of yet another new era for the band.

Or does it?

Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A NEW YEAR’S DAY: KARLOFF, TOMBSEEKER, HEXER, 1986, KATHAREIN, HURSAN

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jan 012026
 


Seattle Space Needle in the fog, Dec. 31, 2025, photo by Akash Pamarthy for The Seattle Times

(written by Islander)

Yesterday a newsletter I subscribe to (“This, Not That“) compiled quotations by many famous writers about New Year’s Day and the ending of the previous year, some of them humorous, some of them depressing, some of them wise. One of the quotes, by Charles Lamb, seemed to sum up all the others: “No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference.”

I’m certainly not indifferent. I’m determined… determined not to let the day go by without posting here about new music, notwithstanding the likelihood that many people are too hungover or sleep-deprived to wreck their heads with our preferred sonics today. It’s a compulsion of long standing, one that has resulted in our making some kind of music post 365 days a year, or close to that, with fewer than a dozen missed days over the 16+ years of our site’s existence.

As it always does, the new year of heavy music won’t waste much time taking off and achieving orbit velocity. We’ve already seen and spotlighted lots of songs from albums slated for release in the new year’s first quarter, and more will begin surfacing at an accelerated rate after this relatively slow week ends. I’ve picked an array of recent surfacings in this New Year’s Day column.

But, for better or worse, we haven’t completely finished reflecting in other ways on the music that 2025 brought us, including a few of today’s picks. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: GATES OF DAWN, HANDFUL OF HATE, THE BLOOD MOUNTAIN BLACK METAL CHOIR, ISLEPTONTHEMOON, WOUNDS OF RECOLLECTION

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Dec 282025
 

(written by Islander)

We’ve arrived at the last SHADES OF BLACK column for 2025.

If you read yesterday’s column (and surely you did, and no I’m not calling you Shirley) then you’ll know I’m flying the coop mid-morning today to watch a football game at the local sports bar (there’s only one), accompanied by my spouse and a good old friend. Despite that plan I did not wake up extra early (it is a Sunday, after all) to finish today’s column, and I wasn’t able to make much of a head start yesterday due to watching a very long movie set on a planet where the indigenous peoples have tails (watching in 3D, no less), followed by dinner at the very same sports bar where we’ll be returning in a couple of hours.

Given my limited time, I had to make some hard choices, but also some extremely impulsive ones. How impulsive? Well, despite the fact that I had my own very long list of candidates from which to select, I chose one thing I didn’t know about until this morning. However, the first thing below has been on my radar for a while. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: JUODVARNIS, ANGERSEED, MAGNACULT, SKULLD, GAMO GRIND, GRAVETAKER

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Dec 272025
 

(written by Islander)

We all made it through Christmas week more or less intact, not just those of us who toil here at NCS but you too, or you wouldn’t be reading this. Taking some deep breaths, we now look ahead to the final five days of 2025. We have a few more year-end lists to share from friends of our site, although I think one or two of those won’t appear until on or after New Year’s Day. And somewhere around the first day of 2026 I’ll start rolling out the last part of our year-end LISTMANIA celebration, the only one I’m responsible for — our list of 2025’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs.

In the meantime, here’s one last 2025 edition of SEEN AND HEARD, and tomorrow I hope to bring you the year’s last edition of SHADES OF BLACK (it’s more hope than promise because there’s a mid-morning start on Sunday to an NFL football game that will rivet my attention; one does not live by metal alone).

As usually happens, the flood of new music diminished during Christmas week, although there was plenty of actual flooding out here on the U.S. West Coast. However, the diminished music stream still included some very good offerings, on top of what had breached the levees in the weeks before that. As you try to recover from the week just ended and begin peering ahead toward 2026 with some combination of fear, loathing, and maybe glimmers of hope, I hope you’ll enjoy what follows. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BLACK MOLD — “ANTINOMY”

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Dec 242025
 

(written by Islander)

On this Christmas Eve don’t worry that your stocking (mental or physical) will be filled with lumps of coal come the dawn. Worry instead that it will be filled with Black Mold. Although, depending on your tastes, that might be one of the best gifts you could hope for.

To be clear, we’re not talking about Stachybotrys chartarum, the fungus whose musty spores can cause mycosis or trigger illness or even death among those allergic to its spores. Instead, our subject today is a new outgrowth of punk-infused black metal by the Portuguese band Black Mold — seven poisonous new songs collected on an EP named Antinomy that’s set for tape release by Helldprod Records on Christmas Day, December 25th. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: LYCHGATE / MONOLITH / QRIXKUOR

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Dec 232025
 

(Andy Synn returns with another collection of reviews for recommended releases by UK bands)

Hola everyone!

As you may have noticed (or maybe you didn’t, maybe my absence went entirely unremaked) I didn’t post anything here at all last week, as I needed a bit of a break and a rest after all the time and effort involved in putting together my mammoth, week-long round-up of the year (which, if you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to do so via the following links):

Now, of course, it’s worth re-stating that, collectively, those lists are still in no way comprehensive… nor was I able to write about every single album featured to the extent I wanted to.

But now that I’m back in action – albeit, still at a somewhat reduced schedule – I’m going to take the opportunity to catch you up on a few albums that didn’t get a proper review, which in this edition of “The Best of British” features two records which made my “Great” list, and one one which (for reasons I’m about to illuminate) just didn’t quite make the cut for the top tier list but which still thoroughly deserves your time and attention.

Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: LUNAR AMULET, MISERERE LUMINIS, FYRNASK, BLACK EDIFICE, KASM

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Dec 212025
 

(written by Islander)

Today is the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere. I suppose everyone knows its astronomical significance — that it is a day of transition between the year’s shortest and darkest day into a period of increasing daylight. That is the source of its symbolic and spiritual significance, an annual representation of rebirth that human beings in far-flung cultures have commemorated and celebrated since prehistory.

But obviously, the overnight change doesn’t happen dramatically. Where I live in the Seattle area, on this shortest day of the year the sun will rise at 7:55 a.m. and set at 4:20 p.m., bringing eight hours, 25 minutes, and 25 seconds of daylight — though the term “daylight” is misleading because the skies will be deep gray and sodden. Daylight hours will begin to grow longer, but at first very slowly, only a matter of seconds per day. By the spring equinox in March the change will peak at around three and a half minutes per day.

Apart from how gradually the change occurs, the days will actually seem darker because we will experience less and less twilight as we move through January and February, twilight being the time of day when the sun is just below the horizon, before sunrise and after sunset. Here at this northern latitude, we will actually lose about 10 minutes total of twilight (five minutes on each end) between New Year’s and the vernal equinox. On top of that, January is historically the coldest and cloudiest month of the year. Continue reading »

CLEARING THE SLATE PART IV: THE WILD, WILD, (w)REST

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Dec 162025
 

(This is the fourth and final Part of a series of record-review collections by DGR — collections of multiple reviews that are somewhat shorter by his standards than what you usually see from him — all of them intended to clear the slate in preparation for his year-end lists that will be coming soon.)

This started with the intention of me absolutely smashing out four of these and then diving head-first with wanton abandon into my year-end list collective. A final freeing of thoughts so that I could then look backward through the year and fry my brain one more time while rediscovering all of the music I had enjoyed since the beginning of 2025.

Then your pet gets sick and you wind up being told that she has three or four different things happening all at once and you now have a twice daily, six rotating medications regimen to stick to and things get sort of waylaid until you’re back to wavering on the precipice of stability and you can weasel a little time out to write something. That’s where I’m at now, I think. I should probably check on the cat again just to be safe.

Today’s final collective is a wild one, a combination of releases that kept getting back-burnered, opening and closing paragraphs rewritten multiple times, and discoveries that happened while perusing different label Bandcamp pages while writing the previous three entries in this series. In combination with my year-end list – which I do already have basically laid out albums-wise, just not written – these things have started to congeal into one mass of ideas that I’m not sure apply to each album. In order to prevent random wires being crossed I’ve somewhat sequestered this article from the year-end shenanigans, and as such, must finish this before the true descent into madness begins. Continue reading »

ARALLU: “DMOON FROM THE ANCIENT WORLD”

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Dec 152025
 

(We welcome Israeli metal writer Rafi Yovell to NCS, and for his inaugural review he brings us the following discussion of a new album by the Middle Eastern Black Metal band Arallu which was released by Arallu and Satanath Records on October 31st of this year and comes recommended for fans of Melechesh, Al-Namrood, and Behemoth.)

20 years ago, Israeli black/folk metal band Arallu released Demon from the Ancient World, which many fans consider to be among the group’s finest work yet. Since then, most of their earlier albums got remasters, so it seemed making one for Demon from the Ancient World was only a matter of time. But instead, this Halloween, we got hit with a full-blown re-recording under the title DMoon from the Ancient World.

That begs the question, however: how does it compare to the original? Is it a worthy remake, or just another failed experiment?

You know the drill by now. Stick around and find out! Continue reading »

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