SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: BLACK ROYAL, MOTHER OF GRAVES, ANAGNORISIS, OFFERNAT, STATIC ABYSS, LACONIST

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Aug 222026
 

(written by Islander)

My short vacation which spanned last weekend prevented me from writing both this Saturday column and the usual one on Sunday. So for today I had two weeks’ worth of possibilities to choose among, along with many more on my list from previous weeks. Deciding what to recommend is always difficult, but today’s decisions were monumentlly difficult. That will be true for tomorrow’s column as well.

I think I’m best advised to cut this introduction short and get right into the music. Continue reading »

YOU’RE NOT HARDCORE UNLESS YOU LIVE HARDCORE: CHICO / DEAD TIRED / R.O.S.A.

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 202026
 

(Andy Synn is a punk rocker… yes he is… for today, at least)

There’s been some interesting discourse – and for once I do actually mean “interesting” and not “irritating” – about the difference, if there is one, between the terms “Hardcore” and “Hardcore Punk”, and what the use of either (or both) of these terms says about the person using them.

You see, even as someone who prefers their Hardcore on the more “Metallic” side (including a lot of the current wave of Death Metal/Hardcore crossover) it feels like the “Punk” side of the scene is getting a little boxed-out (with one or two large exceptions, of course) in favour of breakdowns, beatdowns, and chunky-chuggery.

Purely by coincidence, however, I recently stumbled across a trio of albums that definitely err more towards the punkier end of the spectrum, and it’s these I want to talk about today.

Continue reading »

BLACKER THAN THE BLACKEST BLACK: BJES / GROUSE / PETRICOR

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 192026
 

(Andy Synn has three more albums for the more Black Metal inclined among you)

I’m a busy, busy man at the moment, both in my personal life (it turns out selling a house is hard), and my musical one (did I mention we’ve got a new EP out?).

But I’m still making sure to find time to listen to – and, just as importantly, to write about – new music that I think our readers might appreciate.

And with my recent focus being mostly on various forms of Death Metal and/or Hardcore I felt this week it was about time to get back to our more “blackened” roots with a collection of three relatively recent records dedicated to the glory of Black Metal.

Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TERATUM — “ORDNANCE OF SPIRITUAL WARFARE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Aug 192026
 

(written by Islander)

The Swedish group Teratum rose up from the ashes of the band Beastiality in 2024, and the next year they viciously announced themselves with a two-song promo tape made available in extremely small quantities. They are now following that with a debut EP named Ordnance of Spiritual Warfare, which will be widely released by Dying Victims Productions on August 21st.

The EP includes re-recorded versions of both songs from the demo, and two more. For those who weren’t exposed to the demo tape, Teratum’s music does draw upon the violent black/thrashing antecedents of Beastiality, but it has other dimensions as well — and we’re revealing all of them in our premiere of the EP in its entirety. Continue reading »

SEPULTURA: “THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Aug 182026
 

(What follows is TheMadIsraeli’s review of an EP announced as the final release by Sepultura. It came out in April of this year via Nuclear Blast.)

Some of us here at NCS are believers in modern Sepultura. I’ve always come to bat for them because the thing that spoke to me of a band who shamelessly and uncompromisingly followed their creative instincts was how, even by the sub-genres of metal they are considered part of, they have chosen to take progressive off-kilter approaches to all of it.

Ever since Max’s departure, and especially from Roorback onward, Sepultura have chosen the hard path. I’m not saying that to imply that Against and Nation aren’t good in and of themselves, by the way, but there is a definitive locking-in that occurs at Roorback. I’d chalk this up to those two records being the warm-up, adapting to Derrick’s inclusion and trying to find who they wanted to be. Some people may not fully appreciate what Sepultura was faced with when Max left and Andreas Kisser had to overcome the perception which had taken over that Max WAS Sepultura.

Andreas Kisser will forever be one of my favorite songwriters and guitarists in metal purely because his answer to that challenge was to not play the fame game at all. He essentially ditched the band’s previous legacy for a new one. I think this decision obviously paid off, but they’ve had to deal with a never-ending barrage of people crying about how this wasn’t the old thing anymore. Continue reading »

WARFORGED – THE GROVE | ALMANAC

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 172026
 

(Andy Synn courts controversy yet again with his review of the new Warforged album, out now)

We should probably start things out today by laying all our cards on the table, yes?

While many people were impressed by Warforged‘s debut album, I: The Voice, I’m afraid I wasn’t one of them.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still an impressive number of ideas, and a lot of technical talent, on display across the album’s unwieldy, almost 73 minute run-time (this is definitely not a band who ascribe to the theory of “less is more”, that’s for sure) but I ultimately found the execution to be disjointed and uneven, with too much of it just haphazardy thrown at the wall in the hope that something would stick.

Their second album, however, showcased a darker, more atmosphere-heavy, sound (as well as a new vocalist) that felt – with a few slightly janky exceptions – more focussed and intentional, harnessing the band’s more experimental and unpredictable impulses with a greater sense of direction that made all the various parts, even the ones which didn’t quite work, feel like they were actually contributing to a greater whole, rather than pulling the record in a thousand different directions at once.

And, luckily for me – though this may end up disappointing a certain section of Warforged‘s fanbase – Almanac is very clearly both a spiritual and sonic successor to Sundial, continuing the ongoing story by adding a fresh new chapter to the band’s career.

Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: DARK PLAGUE, PYRE OF DESCENT, LA BESTIA DE GEVAUDAN, MATAVITATAU, SPIRIT POSSESSION, SKELETAL SERPENT

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Aug 142026
 

(written by Islander)

As many of you will know, I usually post a column at NCS on Sundays with recommendations in the expanding orbit of black metal. I wasn’t able to do that last Sunday due to leaving home on the early side of the day for what turned out to be a cool birthday celebration in a forest for a friend. I had made some choices for the column by then, and wanted to carry through with them whenever I could this week, while adding a couple of songs I’ve discovered since last weekend.

But it took me nearly all week to get this finished. It comes to you on another day when I’m about to depart from home and computer for most of the day; I have a ridiculously early start on a journey to the Seattle airport for a long weekend vacation. I’m doubtful that I’ll be able to assemble the usual new-music roundups for this coming Saturday and Sunday, but we shall see.

In the collection you’re now looking at I’ve interwoven an album, an EP, and four singles. Continue reading »

NERVOSA: “SLAVE MACHINE”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 142026
 

(Erstwhile NCS writer TheMadIsraeli returned to us with a review earlier this week, and he’s already back again, this time writing about a new album by Brazil’s Nervosa that was released in April by Napalm Records.)

I know the band we’re reviewing today is Nervosa, but I just need you guys to take a detour with me, okay? We’re doing a Tarantino sort of introduction here. It will come together with time. I want to talk about Arch Enemy first.

We’re talking about Arch Enemy because I love Arch Enemy. Well, mostly… The Johann Liiva era of Black Earth, Stigmata, and Burning Bridges is arguably still the strongest first three-record run of any of the Gothenburg bands during the ‘90s. If I make a list of my top 100 albums of all time, there’s more than one Arch Enemy record in there, including even the Gossow era for a time or two. Their music was sonic indignation. You felt this unhinged lashing out at the world and all of the unfairness of it in everything they wrote, on top of first-class guitar work both from a riff-writing and a lead-playing standpoint.

I ate and breathed this band for a long time. Then Rise Of The Tyrant came out, and while it’s a solid record, it’s the start of a very noticeable slide into complacency and just… you could tell Michael Ammot was in full careerist mode. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: EXTINCTION OF MANKIND / HAAST / THE SALT PALE COLLECTIVE

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 132026
 

(Andy Synn tries to beat the heat with three more home-grown recommendations)

It’s another hot one here in the UK right now, and people are definitely looking for something to take their minds off the oppressive heat.

And in the absence of any particularly icy Black Metal to cool us down, I thought I’d instead focus on a trio of recent releases (“recent” being a relative term) all capable of capturing your attention and distracting you from the oppressive weight of the weather, in three distinctly different ways.

Continue reading »

APOGEAN: “WASTE WHERE LIFE BEGINS”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 122026
 

(Former NCS writer TheMadIsraeli returns after a long absence with the following review of a new album by the Toronto death metal band Apogean, which was released on July 10th by The Artisan Era.)

It sounds so fucking stupid to say, but a pretty good barometer of a good album especially if you’re on the AuDHD spectrum like I am is “does this album make me pay attention to it while grinding on Diablo 4?”. Diablo has oddly enough been a crucible through which many albums have been deemed good or bad in my mind; if something can catch my attention through the demands of playing the game especially at end-game sweat levels it means it stands out or it stands on its own.

Apogean’s now sophomore album Waste Where Life Begins is a great record, and one that oddly in my opinion takes quite a divergent path from their debut. Cyberstrictive was good, don’t get me wrong, a good but rather standard tech-death-metal/deathcore middle ground album. I liked it. My life was in turmoil at the time so it wasn’t exactly a priority list to write about in my life but it got a few spins.

Waste Where Life Begins has within the span of a week already gotten more spins out of me than Cyberstrictive ever did. Partially because those scant deathcore touches have been entirely abandoned, which to me, I’m sorry, is just always objectively good, and also due to a commitment toward an oddly more atmospheric, almost blackened death metal direction. The serpentine riffs are still there, but there’s a much greater emphasis on riffs and rhythmically impactful sections that are designed to seize your attention. Continue reading »

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