THE HALO EFFECT: “WE ARE SHADOWS”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Nov 142025
 

(On November 21st Nuclear Blast will release a new EP from the Swedish metal band The Halo Effect, an EP named We Are Shadows that includes five cover songs, featuring one track picked by each band member. Our writer DGR has been a fan of the band, spent some time with this new EP, and wrote the following review.)

The year in heavy metal is going to have peaks and valleys. Previously, we could’ve viewed years in heavy metal as one seemingly unending torrential flood or the polar opposite in a semi-peaceful consistency, a steady flow of new albums, discoveries, and distractions in equal measure. The past handful of years, however, have been so brain-fried and birdshot when it comes to any form of a consistent release schedule that you could never tell what was going to arrive and – part of this due to getting older and being blissfully unaware of the world surrounding us – more often than not now it feels like we’re constantly getting blindsided by something just off in the distance arriving at the front door with all the aplomb and grandeur one might afford to a distant cousin deciding to bike across the country and wanting to crash at your house for the day. Not to say that there’s any personal experience in the matter, but come the fuck on dude, we’ve spoken one time in nearly forty years?

2024 could have been kindly described as a year of fits and starts at best, were it not for the feeling of burning the candle at both ends – as well as just immolating the whole fucking thing after dousing it in kerosene with the amount we wrote – but 2025 has been the first time in some time that things have felt… consistent. Sort of. We still seem to be drunkenly stumbling to a semblance of previous reality at times but this is more like the occasional stumble one might make when they’re just on the legal line and walking home after having cut themselves off hours ago. Continue reading »

AN NCS SPLIT PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MNAJDRA AND SAĦĦAR — “MDLXV – FIDI, VENDETTA”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Nov 122025
 

(written by Islander)

Two days from now Snow Wolf Records and Fiadh Productions will co-release a special collaborative split album of black metal inspired by Maltese lore, focusing on the renowned Great Siege of Malta. One of the bands, Mnajdra, is a U.S. band but with a long-standing interest in the history and culture of the island of Malta (indeed, the band is named for a megalithic temple complex found on Malta). The other, Saħħar, is a Maltese band with an extensive discography dating back to its 2007 full-length debut.

In their musical re-telling of the Great Siege, Mnajdra represents the Turkish invaders and Saħħar represents the Knights of Malta. The tracks of the two bands alternate across the course of the album, but the record also includes one song in which the two bands collaborate.

To help spread the word, we’re sharing a full stream of the album today, along with some thoughts about the music, but before we get to that we ought to provide a brief sketch of the Great Siege of Malta for people who aren’t as steeped in that history as Mnajdra and Saħħar. Continue reading »

CKRAFT: “UNCOMMON GROUNDS”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Nov 122025
 

(Settle in, make some time, prepare for detours into a labyrinth of rabbit holes, and eventually reach a wildly inventive discussion of wildly inventive music. In other words, we have another remarkable review by Vizzah Harri, this time focusing on a remarkable album by the French band CKRAFT that was released way back in January of this waning year.)

One type of madness is to take pattern-seeking to the level where one actively looks for connections. It’s been pretty stormy in my neck of the woods this year. Not being able to account for how others experienced a year filled with despair for many, no-one can claim to be able to right or mend all wrongs on our earth in the current zeitgeist. There is however a criminally underplayed and underrated album that demands attention. It will be revealed after a bit of a detour. People that groan about nothing good coming out anymore are living under a rock and probably still send each other this meme for kicks.

Every now and then you hear a melody that reminds you of something else. Only recently becoming acquainted with Emerson, Lake & Palmer led me to listen to their Tarkus album and when Stones of years came around I was pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I heard that vocal melody before. I was like, this is Hail Spirit Noir, but it very obviously was not. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: DIVINE HATRED / VANDAMPIRE / WAR CLUB

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Nov 122025
 

(Andy Synn has three more bands from the UK underground for you to check out today)

There’s a passage in One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (which I’m currently re-reading) where he talks about his experiences as a young journalist and his desire to tell “stories of consequence… stories that, had you not read about them in my articles, you wouldn’t have read at all.”

And while the whole book is an excellent piece of work – engaging, insightful, and unapologetically devastating in the way it dissects and analyses why the world is the way it is, right here and right now, and what that really means when you strip away all the constant obfuscation and abnegation of responsibility by those who bear the lion’s share of the blame – this particular passage stood out to me a little more this time around.

Because, really, that’s something we try to do here at NCS – albeit, obviously, on a much smaller scale – when we focus on covering bands who we believe haven’t received the attention or acclaim they deserve (which, in some cases, means any at all).

Sure, we’re not afraid of writing about bigger bands who already have a decent level of exposure – they help bring eyes to the site after all, which in turn benefits their lesser-known cousins – but the ethos here has always been to try to use our platform as a place for articles and opinions you might not get elsewhere.

So, with this in mind, today I’ve chosen three debut albums by a trio of bands who don’t necessarily have the biggest profile outside the UK – even Divine Hatred, who have crossed the channel a couple of times already (and if they want to share some info about that with us, that’d be appreciated), don’t appear to have received much coverage for their new record – but who could (and should) all benefit from this article.

Continue reading »

NOVEMBRE: “WORDS OF INDIGO”

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Nov 112025
 

(Last week Peaceville released the ninth studio album by the revamped Italian band Novembre, and as our DGR is a long-term follower of the band’s music, there’s no one here better suited to review it — which he does below.)

It could never be perfect, one guesses, that the timelines of releases would line up perfectly so that the opening ‘fun with statistics’ paragraph could already be pre-written for us. Alas though, we do find ourselves cycling back around anyway with Italy’s Novembre, who’ve returned to us after another near ten-year period of inactivity as a renewed creature and full band.

It has been close to nine and a half years since the group’s previous album Ursa was let loose upon the world, to unleash its melancholy and general sadness upon unsuspecting citizens who might’ve thought they would be enjoying a beautiful spring and bright summer back in April of 2016. We’ll just gloss over the fact that yours truly actually scribbled something up about the album at that time as well, itself a victim of a long retreat from the public eye on the band’s part.

Yet even as a new creature, Novembre find themselves existing in cycles, and their newest album Words Of Indigo springs to life just as we enter the cold peace of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere yet somehow still finds itself conjuring up the spirits of blue-hued cover arts and siblings of old, as if it were the unintentional completion of a trilogy begun all the way back in 2002 with Dreams D’Azur, revitalized in 2007’s The Blue, and now 18 years later summoned once again for the aforementioned Words Of Indigo. Continue reading »

ASTRONOID – STARGOD

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Nov 102025
 

(Andy Synn continues our unexpected love affair with Astronoid on their new album, out now)

It’s funny to think about it – especially given the name of our site (which, again, should be taken with at least a pinch of salt and tongue firmly planted in cheek) but we’ve been supporters of whatever it is that Astronoid do (Post-Rock? Post-Metal? Prog-Pop?) for a long time now.

Heck, if you go all the way back to their time as Vattnet (formerly Vattnet Viskar) then our shared history goes back even further… and while that history hasn’t always been smooth sailing (I still stand by my opinion that their 2019 self-titled was a big let-down after their absolutely stunning first album) we’ve always tried to encourage our readers to give the band’s distinct, yet oddly divisive, sound a chance.

That being said, there’s a couple of things you need to bear in mind before giving Stargod a listen.

The first of which is that Stargod is not Air, and shouldn’t be judged as such (in fact one of the biggest mistakes you can make, whether as a reviewer or just as a listener, is to judge an album based entirely on what it’s not, rather than what it actually is… or, at the very least, what it’s trying to be).

And the second is that if you weren’t a fan of Astronoid prior to this, well, there’s a pretty good chance that Stargod won’t change your mind about that… in fact, if anything, the band’s decision to not only double-down on certain aspects of their sound (their self-appellated brand of “Dream Thrash” always been more Coheed and Cambria than Carcass and Coroner, and that’s even more apparent this time around) but to also give their early 80s Synth-Pop influences (think Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, A-Ha, etc) even more prominence will probably be a deal-breaker for anyone of a more musically “conservative” bent.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t give the album a try if you’re curious… I just want to make sure you’re in the right headspace to appreciate it, and aren’t caught by surprise by what you’re going to hear.

Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: PSICOSFERA, VARMIA, KREYLL, FLOWERS OF RUST, VACUA, HAKLA

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Nov 092025
 

(written by Islander)

Like yesterday, I got a late start on today’s column, due to festivities with spouse and some new friends last night. Like yesterday’s column, this one includes more full-length releases than normal (alternating with some single songs), and I only have time enough to offer some impressionistic thoughts about them rather than carefully thought-out reviews.

My overarching impression is that most of what you’re about to hear sounds… possessed. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: GOJIRA, ZADISM, ZAKAZ, ZEIT, ZMEY GORYNICH, JOROGUMO, CHRIS GEBAUER

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Nov 082025
 

(written by Islander)

Welp, I got another very late start on this Saturday. Of course, for most well-adjusted people Saturday is made for getting late starts. Not being well-adjusted, I get anxious when it happens, nervously staring at the clock and realizing I have to hurry or I won’t get roundups like this one finished in time for anyone in quadrants east of here to pay attention before sundown.

Enough of that. I should use my diminishing time to introduce the large handful of things I picked for today’s recommendations, including the semi-usual curveball at the end. Continue reading »

VAELRAVYN: “THE VEIL” AND “SUN GOD”

 SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Nov 072025
 

(In this feature our friend Vizzah Harri shares his thoughts about two singles this year released by the Tennessee collective Vaelravyn.)

Wikipedia lists nearly 150 sun gods throughout human history, roughly 17%, or 26 of them, are Filipino in origin. Interesting fact number one, The Philippines have around 1000 deities listed on the page for Filipino mythological figures. Way more water gods than lords of light, wonder why? Must be wet there or something, perhaps they don’t even have a word for drought? They do, it’s ‘tagtuyot’. Absent father jokes aside, I lost count at around 981 seeing, as I refuse to use LLM’s, and Wikipedia lists both mortals and immortals in their mythological figures of The Philippines article, and quite a few of the gods like Diwati aka D’wata and Kabunyan aka Kabunian crossbred across islands and waterways putting Zeus to shame, so the actual number of gods is hard to count.

Fact number two, if your name is Alan, I have only known two in my life and they both left impressions on me of being pure souls that took life by the horns and lived it to the full, but if your first or last name is Alan, you might want to go read that Wikipedia article up there cos you might get some weird looks if you ever decide to visit the wonderful country of The Philippines. Of the two gods with that name I spotted, one was a shapeshifting corpse thief and the other one a cannibal; someone needed to do the honest work of scouring the internet to make a weirdly adjacent point after all.

I’ve been in Vietnam too long, and one complaint I’ve often heard from students when they bemoan one of their most hated subjects, literature, is that the authors always had this wild-goose-chase tactic in their storylines, going all around the forest to come back to the tree of import. Guess it rubbed off on me. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: CELLAR VESSEL / MALADIE / SPLITJAW

 SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Nov 052025
 

(Andy Synn has three more EPs for you to check out today)

It might be controversial to say so, but I don’t think that 2025 has been quite as strong as 2024.

That’s not to say there haven’t been some truly excellent albums released this year (there’s only about a month or so until my regular annual round-up, where you’ll get to see the evidence for that statement) but I feel like there’s been fewer soaring highs, and a few more unexpected disappointments, compared to last year (don’t quote me on this though, as I still need to run a final analysis).

The exception here, of course, is in the realm of the short-but-sweet release (aka, the EP), as I’m constantly finding new bite-sized morsels of brilliance to sink my teeth into (for a while, anyway), with all three of today’s records being prime examples of what you can find if you just keep your ear to the ground.

Continue reading »

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