Reviews Archives - Page 8 of 606

BOG MÖNSTER: “DUELLING HORRORS”

Mar 172026

(This is DGR’s review of a new EP released earlier this month by the Australian trio Bog Mönster.)

When the collection of everything you intend to review consists of a smorgasbord of EPs and albums, tackling two songs can feel both like cheating and like mana from the heavens. The brain doesn’t have to keep track of as much but also you’re kicking yourself for daring to veer from the intended path. However, sometimes you will have a release that speaks loud enough that it compels you to spread the word about it.

Australian sludge group Bog Mönster’s newest EP Duelling Horrors is one such release, consisting of the aforementioned two songs and about ten and a half minutes of music. Bog Mönster had an EP and an album to their name prior to these Duelling Horrors, and their newest arrives close to two years after their previously mentioned album Servants Of The Necrosect back in 2024. Continue reading »

LAMB OF GOD – INTO OBLIVION

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Mar 162026

(Andy Synn makes a rare exception to our rule about mainly covering underground bands to share his thoughts on some of the Metal scene’s most infamous sons)

Longevity, as the book I’m currently reading would tell you, can be both a blessing and a curse.

And while Lamb of God have certainly been blessed with a long and successful career, they’ve also been cursed – even if it’s the sort of curse I think most of us would be happy to accept – with having to constantly try and live up to the very high standard set in their early years.

Let’s face it, that initial trilogy – New American Gospel, As The Palaces Burn, and Ashes of the Wake – continues to cast a very long shadow, and while there have certainly been moments of brightness here and there (both Wrath and Resolution in particular have some underrated bangers on them) their work since then has, in hindsight, been more about consolidating their position at the top of the card than trying to re-set the bar.

But that was then, and this is now, and – despite the old truism that you shouldn’t judge a book (or album) by its cover – the decision to switch to a new logo for the first time in 20+ years suggests that there might just be something more going on this time than simply going through the motions or fulfilling contractual obligations.

Is it a rebirth? No, I wouldn’t go quite that far. But a renewal? Now that’s where things get interesting…

BOSSE-DE-NAGE: “HIDDEN FIRES BURN HOTTEST”

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Mar 162026

(The Flenser has released the first new album by Bosse-de-Nage in eight years, and today Todd Manning shares his thoughts about it.)

Avant-garde metal band Bosse-de-Nage disappeared from the scene years ago, their absence as mysterious as their sound. They appeared dormant if not disbanded, but in truth, they have been slowly crafting their new album, Hidden Fires Burn Hottest. Now it’s time for the world to hear what they have been working on.

Bosse-de-Nage has always been hard to pin down, usually classified as black metal but that only works compared to other genres. Trying to understand Hidden Fires Burn the Hottest is like engaging in negative theology, it is easier to list the things it is not rather than define what it is. Continue reading »

DISSENTIENCE: “KAIJU”

Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET 1 Response »

Mar 132026

(Here’s DGR’s enthusiastic review of a new EP released last month by Pennsylvania’s Dissentience.)

For being such a short month, February was a wildly creative time for heavy metal. Perhaps, for all our prognosticating and bullshit being pulled from a hat in regards to how the year was starting, it was time for the dam to finally burst and unleash upon us a musical flood of sorts. You can get a real sense for this when you glance around our site for instance and see multiple summary articles of music that has been unleashed throughout the month, and barring the minor occasion of a crossed wire or two, there’s barely any crossover whatsoever.

It seems like our attention was so divided in so many different directions that we could just as easily portray our focus as a scatter plot drawn by someone in the middle of an earthquake while they fell into a manhole. If there is a unifier or throughline to be found, it seems it lays not so much in where our easily distracted pack of Golden Shepherds we call the writing staff here are looking at this moment, but what we are looking forward to in the future. We’re probably going to need assistance from multiple deities if we hope to make it through the April/May pre-summer festival torrent in one piece.

February’s EPs fell upon us like rain, alongside a sizeable gathering of albums, and thankfully there was even enough spread between the tried-and-true trying new stuff out and new bands to be discovered that it didn’t feel like we were subsisting on bite-sized morsels. One band that happens to have made very good usage of the EP format this time around is Philadelphia’s Dissentience, who took four massive songs and combined them into an equally massive movement of music they have named after the EP’s final song “Kaiju“. Twenty-three-and-a-half-minutes later you will feel as if you have been placed under the footfall of a gargantuan monster as well. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TRAGOS — “BELLICUM”

Album Reviews, Premieres No Responses »

Mar 122026

(written by Islander)

We’re about to lead you off our usual well-beaten paths, or rather the French band Tragos will do that through their debut album Bellicum that will be released by Fetzner Death Records on March 13th.

Gazing at the album’s cover art will give you a hint about the music within, which is an exhilarating alchemy of savage and slaughtering death metal and classical elegance influenced by baroque composers such as Matteo Carcassi, Fernando Sor, Scarlatti, and Bach.

If you’re unfamiliar with Tragos, you might now be imagining heavy doses of keyboards or synthesized violins or cellos, or perhaps the kind of over-the-top bombast that some classically inclined death metal bands put forward, but you’ll learn that’s not what Tragos are up to. You might also be wondering how well their unusual fusion of beastliness and elegance will work, and you’ll get your answer (it works exceedingly well) through our complete premiere of Bellicum today. Continue reading »

WORM SHEPHERD: “DAWN OF THE ICONOCLAST”

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Mar 122026

(We present DGR’s review of a new EP by Massachusetts-based Worm Shepherd which was released last month by Unique Leader Records.)

Sometimes a band will find themselves unwittingly serving a purpose beyond the basic enjoyment of music/listener exchange. Worm Shepherd are one such group, as their sort of alternating status between fully activated live act, in-home studio project, nebulous existence altogether has served a somewhat unintentional beacon on the wider evolutionary path of the deathcore genre as a whole.

Built out of constituent parts of various other deathcore groups based along the East Coast and couched in the current day bombast and spectacle of the symphonic and blackened absorbtion, Worm Shepherd have become a sort of guide to the genre as a wider whole – you could explode the band out into seperate guide stones and each one would walk you into a different path of recognizable artists. As these many influences converge, so too does Worm Shepherd reassemble itself.

It is not whether the band itself exists in some instances but the larger picture they paint, and in the case of Worm Shepherd they’ve been excellent as that sort of aforementioned snapshot of where the deathcore genre may be as a whole – especially in its current moment of trying new things again, as the influenced by the influenced by the influenced by the influenced by crowd find themselves facing diminishing returns.

Worm Shepherd’s new EP Dawn Of The Iconoclast is representative of some of this, as the group’s formula was built out of a distilled-down through psychotic chemistry approach to symphonic deathcore, yet slowed down to such a point that it seemed less like we were doing big roaring breakdowns for the sake of declaring just how immensely heavy something feels but because they were a group verging on stumbling into funeral doom territory and just couldn’t figure out how to make the macho hoody aesthetic work with it just yet. Continue reading »

NECROPOLISSEBEHT: “TAURUNOVEM – TH’ASTRAKTYAN SERFDOME”

Album Reviews No Responses »

Mar 122026

(Norway-based NCS contributor Chile has an amazing new find he wants to recommend today, even if spelling or pronouncing it poses a challenge.)

We have already spoken many times about all the good sides and the benefits of metal music as a whole. In fact, there is so much metal going around that we will never run out of it, as opposed to water, clean air, or soil to grow our food, just to name a few. In effect, you’ll be hungry, thirsty, and full of pollutants, but at least you’ll have some great music to accompany you.

Anyway, this abundance makes life that much easier for all of us, listeners and reviewers alike, and especially those of us lucky enough to be both. Just close your eyes and at a stone’s throw in any direction, there is a great band waiting to be found.

In comes Necropolissebeht. The strangely named international crew (ok, it’s Germany and Canada), with just one previously released EP from 2022 under their belts, comes back to drain your world of hope and any traces of light in the form of their just-released debut album, similarly strangely named Taurunovem – Th’Astraktyan Serfdome. Continue reading »

MONOSPHERE – AMNESIA

Album Reviews No Responses »

Mar 112026

(Andy Synn goes all in on the unforgettable new album from Monosphere, out Friday)

If yesterday was all about turning OFF your brain and cranking UP the volume (and the violence) – check out my review of the new album from Acranius for more info on that – then today is all about getting those synapses firing on all cylinders again with the latest slab of cerebral-yet-crushing Prog Metal from Monosphere.

ACRANIUS – WHITEOUT

Album Reviews No Responses »

Mar 102026

(Andy Synn says get ready to turn off your brains and turn up the volume with Acranius)

It’s pretty well-established that we tend to favour music of the more cerebral and artistic type… while still, for the most part, being heavy as hell… here at NCS.

In fact, it’s almost become something of a running joke (just take a glance at any handful of my most recent reviews, such as the artful blackened beauty of Miserere Luminis, the abrasive, pitch-black anarchism of Trespasser, or the complex Prog-Tech contortions of Cryptic Shift) that the older we get the more “progressive” (or “pretentious”) our tastes are getting.

But there’s a time and a place for proggy pretensions and artsy indulgence… and this is not one of those times.

EXHUMED: “RED ASPHALT”

Album Reviews No Responses »

Mar 102026

(Here we have DGR’s review of the latest album from Exhumed, which is out now on Relapse Records.)

When you start writing you assume you won’t ever be on the journalistic “beat” of some bands, yet somehow you seem to fall into a routine and over time wind up covering their releases far more than you’d expect. For this writer, Bay Area death metal veterans Exhumed are one such band. Such a long-running hallmark of an act isn’t one you’d expect to be continually checking in with, as they’ve been able to develop a large enough catalogue of music that they could coast for a lifetime bouncing between albums they put out up to a decade ago.

Yet the crew behind Exhumed remain fiercely creative and infected with an inability to sit still for even a second, spreading themselves far and wide among a baker’s dozen of projects and even then still finding time to launch the occasional new one, and then somehow after all of that… loop back around to Exhumed. Even when they share lineups among other different projects, it seems that the foundational spirit of the band still calls to them as something to be unified around. Continue reading »

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