(Andy Synn goes from a long-term favourite to a brand new one from German Metalcore marauders Inherit the Curse)
If there’s one thing we try to avoid doing here at NCS, it’s repeat ourselves.
So since yesterday was all about a legendary, long-running band and what could possibly be their final album, today I’m going to shift my focus to a much, much younger band who just put out their first full-length release.
Sun rise, sun set.
(It’s with a heavy heart, and a deep sense of responsibility, that Andy Synn sets out to give the new album from the one-and-only At The Gates – featuring the final recorded performance of the dearly-departed Tomas Lindberg – a proper eulogy in advance of its release next week)
Ever since I first received my copy of The Ghost of a Future Dead I’ve been struggling… not just with what to say about it, but how to say it.
After all, any time a new release from a seminal, life-changing band like this one – I’m sure that a fair few people reading this now probably owe their Metal awakening to the seminal Slaughter of the Soul – appears people are inevitably going to come at it with a whole host of preconceived notions, opinions, and expectations, and the last thing some of those people want to hear is any actual criticism.
And when you add in the fact that not only is this the last At The Gates album featuring their much-loved, and much-missed, voccalist Tomas Lindberg, but it also might even be the last At The Gates album ever (as the band, understandably, have acknowledged that they have no idea if they’ll want or be able to continue without their fallen frontman) that makes it even harder to know exactly how to approach things.
But, thankfully, messrs. Lindberg, Larsson, Erlandsson, Björler and Björler were kind enough to make at least one part of my task easy… as The Ghost of a Future Dead is the band’s best album in over a decade.
(written by Islander)
You could make a nearly endless list of traumas experienced by human beings that are more severe than having a sick pet. But having a sick pet can still be traumatic. I speak from experience — uncomfortably recent experience.
My wife and I live with two brother cats to whom we’re intensely attached. They have the run of our house but they’re never more than a few feet away from us. They’re very affectionate, very smart (for cats), very beautiful. We’re careful not to let them outside because they’re small, they’ve never been in the wild since birth, and we live in a forest full of predators of different species.
Last night after my wife and I had returned home from dinner and watching a ballgame, one of the cats began foaming at the mouth and manically racing around the room. We keep anything that might be an ingestive danger to them out of their reach, so it was perplexing. We scurried around trying to help him and trying to discover what might have caused this.
After about 15 minutes passed with no change, we managed to catch him and put him in a cat carrier, got in the car, and started driving to a 24-hour emergency animal-care clinic. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
Last month we published an interview by our Comrade Aleks with the two members (U. and M.) of the Italian band Urluk, focusing on their new album Memories In Fade. Aleks introduced it with an explanation that although the band had remained true to their haunted lyrical themes, the music has changed direction significantly as compared to their last album More. Urluk’s U. acknowledged the change, commenting in the interview that “[t]he atmosphere surrounding Urluk today is less about aggression and more about reflection, decay, and memory — things slowly dissolving rather than burning violently.”
In the interview, the band’s members provided further insights into their music’s evolution from the doomed black metal of their last album. As U. described, “Memories In Fade draws from a broad palette: Post Black, Gothic Rock, post-punk atmospheres, touches of Dream Pop, and even hints of 60s folk-blues. Keyboards play a larger role this time, sometimes creating that bittersweet, almost life-affirming melancholy reminiscent of Type O Negative.”
What we have for you today is a full stream of this very interesting new album in advance of its April 10 release by Pest Records. Before we get to our own thoughts about it, let’s share one more excerpt from the interview which compares the new album with the one before it:
Conceptually, the albums are connected, but musically they stand quite far apart. More was still deeply rooted in black metal — dense, abrasive, and very direct in its emotional expression. Memories in Fade feels like the aftermath. If More was about the weight of experience, this new record is about the residue it leaves behind: fading memories, nostalgia, and the strange calm that follows turmoil. The sound has become softer in some ways, yet more vulnerable. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn presents a quartet of recently released Black Metal recommendations)
For reasons we may never understand a huge percentage of the Black Metal scene decided to release their new albums last week – including a surprise drop from long-time NCS favourites Ultha – and, despite our best efforts, we’re probably not going to be able to cover all, or even most, of them here.
But I’ve chosen four visceral examples from this veritable smorgasbord of blackened delights to highlight here today all the same, as I refuse to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
(Our friend Daniel Barkasi returns with another monthly collection of reviews for recommended releases, and this time draws his lot from what the month of March brought us.)
I had a bit of a different angle planned for the beginning of this edition until April 2nd, but we’re going to take an unwelcome detour.
News that day came out informing us that we lost two important artists – James Lollar, known as the darksynth legend Gost, and Harms Way guitarist Bo Lueders. Both had an indelible impact in their respective genres, and their losses are a devastating shock to the friends and family of these two fine folks, but of course also to those who followed and embraced their creative endeavors. Harms Way’s crushing, vibrant approach to hardcore is a go-to for me, and Lueders came across as an excellent guy who touched the lives of many through his music, his podcast, and his all-around good nature.
Due to my personal experiences, I want to focus on Gost/James Lollar for a moment – an artist who holds an esteemed place for myself and many others due to his extremely innovative and genre-molding music, which in tandem with Perturbator, Carpenter Brut, Dance with the Dead, Mega Drive, and Dan Terminus, invented and perfected the darksynth sound. His dense, incredibly aggressive and monolithic productions are ones for the ages. A discography that has been in regular rotation since hearing Behemoth in 2015. My wife and I were lucky enough to cover a live show of his in December of 2023 – the only time either of us got to view his work live, and what an indelible experience it was. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
The Russian band Goatpsalm first caught our attention almost a full decade ago, when we reviewed their third album Downstream a few months before its February 2016 release by the UK’s Aesthetic Death label. Back then I wrote (in part):
The music of Goatpsalm is spacious, mystical, shamanic. It conjures images of aboriginal rituals, as if holding the keys to dark communions with nature and with spirits that have been long lost to time. Some of this effect comes from the band’s frequent use of sounds from the natural world — rain, wind, waves breaking on a shore, bird song — and some derives from unusual instruments….
While all of the songs on Downstream make significant use of dark ambient and electronic music, sometimes touching the edge of industrial music, that’s only one aspect of the album. Yes, there is a meditative, and even narcotic, quality to the album, but it’s often heavy as hell and chilling, too….
[I]t’s the kind of album that really will carry you away. In your head, you’ll be far downstream from where you started by the time it ends — and for me it has been a trip worth repeating. I haven’t heard anything else quite like it this year.
And now here we are, a decade later, and Aesthetic Death will be releasing Goatpsalm’s fourth album, Beneath, at the end of this week. There’s an interesting story about how the album came to exist and why its completion took so long, and we’ll share that with you later in this article, but first we’ll give you a chance to hear Beneath in its entirety. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn finds love in the hyperdrive all over again with Witch Ripper)
Let me begin by telling you a little story I don’t think I’ve shared before.
I’ve been a big fan of Seattle-based Prog-Metal maestros Witch Ripper for some time now – I first wrote very positively about their first album, Homestead in 2018, and lavished even more praise on 2023’s outstanding, album of the year contender, The Flight After the Fall – but, due to the exorbitant postage costs involved in shipping anything from the US over the last few years, getting a hold of either of these albums in physical form proved to be prohibitively expensive.
Thankfully I’d become friendly with the band’s vocalist/guitarist, Curtis Parker during this time, and while I was in Seattle for Northwest Terror Fest in 2024 (tickets for this year’s edition still on sale, btw) he very kindly offered to hand-deliver copies of both record’s to me at my hotel, an offer which I duly accepted.
But here’s the thing – and the thing that Curtis himself didn’t know (but absolutely will after this) – I thought I was getting CD version of both albums, so when he walked around the corner with two LPs in hand, well… let’s just say I was very surprised, but tried not to show it, even though I had no idea how was going to get these two pieces of vinyl back to the UK without breaking them.
Thankfully I was ultimately able to transport them both home safely (and then, not long after, track down affordable copies of both albums on CD as well) and they now sit proudly on my vinyl shelf as part of my small, but much-loved, LP collection, and I’m hopefully going to add their excellent new album, Through the Hourglass, to the shelf right alongside them very soon.
(Gonzo makes another of his monthly appearances at NCS today, with reviews of four albums released in March 2026.)
We’re only three months and some change into 2026, and I swear on Satan’s taint that I’ve already identified at least 3 new albums fighting for contention in my annual top 20 list. Dark and uncertain times always make fertile ground for raw, ferocious music, and if we can take anything from the hellscape we’re all currently stuck in, let it be that.
Let’s take a look at four of them that helped March suck a whole lot less for me. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
I had planned to post most of this SHADES OF BLACK column last Sunday. I obviously failed to get it finished in time for posting then, the result of being out very late on Saturday night and having to leave home very soon after waking up the next morning. I thought about finishing and posting it during a weekday last week, but never had enough time, so here it is at last on this resurrection day.
For the original version of the column I picked new music from six bands, which included four singles, two albums, and one EP — obviously a hell of a lot of music. But for today I’ve made the collection even bigger by including individual songs from three more bands at the end.
I found all the opening selections (the first five) to be emotionally very powerful — authentically powerful — and much of it apparently reflects its creators’ own sometimes difficult inner journeys (and some geographical ones as well). The results are sometimes haunting and sometimes harrowing, sometimes solemn and sometimes shattering or wondrous. They move moods as well as channel them; they’re often inspired by memories, and they’re likely to inspire a listener’s own memories too, as passionate music often does.
I don’t mean to suggest that the final four songs are lacking in emotional power — far from it — but they’re more what I’m prone to call mind-benders.
I haven’t written as much about the albums and EP as I think I should. Time still hasn’t been generous with periods of solitude over the last few days. But of course my own thoughts about the music are surplus to requirements — all you really need are working ears and freedom from distractions. Continue reading »