(written by Islander)
It’s a Bandcamp Friday. But you probably knew that. I failed to put it on my calendar but the engorgement of our in-box over the last 24 hours reminded me. So even though we’ve already published our usual three features for the day I decided to do this fourth one so I don’t feel quite as overwhelmed in preparing the usual Saturday roundup.
Be forewarned: you might experience whiplash as you move from song to song today (and within some of the songs too). Continue reading »
(Below is a review by a former NCS writer who now goes by the moniker Obsolete Mystic. His subject is the debut album from a Nevada-based duo who call themselves Fog Wall, an album they are independently releasing today.)
I love FromSoftware. In the realm of video games that studio have always been visionaries and avant-garde pushers of the artform. The cultural impact they’ve had ever since a little game called Demons Souls (OG Japanese importer right here) came out has permanently changed gaming and dark fantasy imagery and thematic elements in a huge way. FromSoftware games also happen to be metal as fuck and could easily inspire metal, especially in the death and black metal categories. As a result, there is in fact a whole grouping of bands that are FromSoftware worshippers.
Today’s focus is on one such band, Fog Wall, who named themselves after the signature walls of fog you traverse in FromSoftware games to begin boss battles. Like a lot of these bands, Fog Wall is a blackened death metal outfit, and they are offering up a very impressive debut in Gloomweaver. Continue reading »
(Today our Denver-based contributor Gonzo brings us high points of his conversation at the recent Fire In the Mountains festival with members of the Montana band Galvanist, intertwined with his thoughts about their new album The Silence Between Stars, released in May of this year via ATMF.)
There’s a particular kind of magic that only happens when you’re standing out on tribal land in the shadow of the mountains, dust coating your boots, cold drink in hand, talking heavy music with people who live and breathe it. Festivals like Fire in the Mountains aren’t just weekend party stops; they’re cultural touchstones where you discover something deeper about the music, the setting, and the people making the noise.
That’s precisely the headspace I was in when I sat down with Bozeman, Montana’s Galvanist to unpack one of the most cerebral, devastatingly heavy, and quietly fascinating projects brewing in Bozeman’s DIY heavy music underground. Continue reading »
(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 »
(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).
(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 »
(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 »
(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.
(Andy Synn has five recently, and one not-so-recently, released recommendations to share with you all today)
People sometimes ask me how I stay on top of all the new releases every month, and the answer is… I don’t.
Case in point, I haven’t managed to find time to get my thoughts about all of these artists down on paper – Profeci, Dreadnought, Trenchwar, Sea Sleeper, Quicksand, Vulgar Mephitis, Iskald, Wharflurch, Tombstalker – despite just how good so many of them are.
Still, I suppose that once you’re done reading today’s bumper crop of recommendations (all of which I’m really happy to have been able to include here) I’d recommend trying to find time to give at least some of them a listen, as you never know what you might discover/uncover!
(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 »