SHADES OF BLACK: GATES OF DAWN, HANDFUL OF HATE, THE BLOOD MOUNTAIN BLACK METAL CHOIR, ISLEPTONTHEMOON, WOUNDS OF RECOLLECTION

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Dec 282025
 

(written by Islander)

We’ve arrived at the last SHADES OF BLACK column for 2025.

If you read yesterday’s column (and surely you did, and no I’m not calling you Shirley) then you’ll know I’m flying the coop mid-morning today to watch a football game at the local sports bar (there’s only one), accompanied by my spouse and a good old friend. Despite that plan I did not wake up extra early (it is a Sunday, after all) to finish today’s column, and I wasn’t able to make much of a head start yesterday due to watching a very long movie set on a planet where the indigenous peoples have tails (watching in 3D, no less), followed by dinner at the very same sports bar where we’ll be returning in a couple of hours.

Given my limited time, I had to make some hard choices, but also some extremely impulsive ones. How impulsive? Well, despite the fact that I had my own very long list of candidates from which to select, I chose one thing I didn’t know about until this morning. However, the first thing below has been on my radar for a while. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: JUODVARNIS, ANGERSEED, MAGNACULT, SKULLD, GAMO GRIND, GRAVETAKER

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Dec 272025
 

(written by Islander)

We all made it through Christmas week more or less intact, not just those of us who toil here at NCS but you too, or you wouldn’t be reading this. Taking some deep breaths, we now look ahead to the final five days of 2025. We have a few more year-end lists to share from friends of our site, although I think one or two of those won’t appear until on or after New Year’s Day. And somewhere around the first day of 2026 I’ll start rolling out the last part of our year-end LISTMANIA celebration, the only one I’m responsible for — our list of 2025’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs.

In the meantime, here’s one last 2025 edition of SEEN AND HEARD, and tomorrow I hope to bring you the year’s last edition of SHADES OF BLACK (it’s more hope than promise because there’s a mid-morning start on Sunday to an NFL football game that will rivet my attention; one does not live by metal alone).

As usually happens, the flood of new music diminished during Christmas week, although there was plenty of actual flooding out here on the U.S. West Coast. However, the diminished music stream still included some very good offerings, on top of what had breached the levees in the weeks before that. As you try to recover from the week just ended and begin peering ahead toward 2026 with some combination of fear, loathing, and maybe glimmers of hope, I hope you’ll enjoy what follows. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BLACK MOLD — “ANTINOMY”

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Dec 242025
 

(written by Islander)

On this Christmas Eve don’t worry that your stocking (mental or physical) will be filled with lumps of coal come the dawn. Worry instead that it will be filled with Black Mold. Although, depending on your tastes, that might be one of the best gifts you could hope for.

To be clear, we’re not talking about Stachybotrys chartarum, the fungus whose musty spores can cause mycosis or trigger illness or even death among those allergic to its spores. Instead, our subject today is a new outgrowth of punk-infused black metal by the Portuguese band Black Mold — seven poisonous new songs collected on an EP named Antinomy that’s set for tape release by Helldprod Records on Christmas Day, December 25th. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: LUNAR AMULET, MISERERE LUMINIS, FYRNASK, BLACK EDIFICE, KASM

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Dec 212025
 

(written by Islander)

Today is the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere. I suppose everyone knows its astronomical significance — that it is a day of transition between the year’s shortest and darkest day into a period of increasing daylight. That is the source of its symbolic and spiritual significance, an annual representation of rebirth that human beings in far-flung cultures have commemorated and celebrated since prehistory.

But obviously, the overnight change doesn’t happen dramatically. Where I live in the Seattle area, on this shortest day of the year the sun will rise at 7:55 a.m. and set at 4:20 p.m., bringing eight hours, 25 minutes, and 25 seconds of daylight — though the term “daylight” is misleading because the skies will be deep gray and sodden. Daylight hours will begin to grow longer, but at first very slowly, only a matter of seconds per day. By the spring equinox in March the change will peak at around three and a half minutes per day.

Apart from how gradually the change occurs, the days will actually seem darker because we will experience less and less twilight as we move through January and February, twilight being the time of day when the sun is just below the horizon, before sunrise and after sunset. Here at this northern latitude, we will actually lose about 10 minutes total of twilight (five minutes on each end) between New Year’s and the vernal equinox. On top of that, January is historically the coldest and cloudiest month of the year. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: PRISON OF MIRRORS, ERZ, MOTLJUS, LEBENSSUCHT

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Dec 142025
 

(written by Islander)

When you live with another person during “cold and flu season” there’s always the risk that one of you will get sick and then sicken the other a few days later. However, my wife and I gradually began getting sick at the same time last week and yesterday we both simultaneously had full-blown colds.

We’ve tried to figure out who we were both around outside the house when we got infected earlier this week (we’d hate to murder the wrong person). It was probably when we went to our local sports bar for drinks and dinner, but we know lots of regulars there plus the waitstaff, and we don’t remember anyone sounding sick so it’s tough to pin down the culprit. I suppose we could resort to the maxim attributed to Arnaud Amaury during the Battle of Béziers in 1209, but we’re both atheists so the faith-based solution doesn’t seem right. Oh well, guilty people often escape retribution. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): UPON THE ALTAR — “PROFANATION’S VAPOR”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Dec 102025
 

(written by Islander)

In thinking about the music from Upon the Altar’s side of a 2022 split with DeathEpoch, we wrote that it left “no doubt that Upon the Altar’s mission is to devour all light.” The music was often toxic, suffocating, granite-heavy, vicious, and vocally horrifying. They allowed very little wholesome light to shine in their second album, Descendants of Evil, which followed that split. What did shine through was the band’s talent for creating hateful musical horror — a complex of vile, malicious, oppressive, desolate, and violently furious experiences.

Those of us who’ve enthusiastically fallen beneath the previous malign assaults of this Polish band will be thrilled to learn that on December 12th Godz Ov War Productions will release a new Upon the Altar EP, a six-track manifestation of pitch-black ruin named Profanation’s Vapor — and even more thrilled to hear it today through our full streaming premiere. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: SODALITY, GORRCH, THE RUINS OF BEVERAST, SAINTE OBYANA DU FROID

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Dec 072025
 

(written by Islander)

Greetings on another Sunday morning. As you can see, I have only four selections to recommend for today, but that’s mainly because two of them are complete albums just released on Friday, and thus it took me some time to get immersed in those and try to wrestle my thoughts about them into some kind of order. I’ve positioned those two as bookends around singles from two forthcoming albums.

I can’t say these choices were the kind that put me in a fugue state. Each one is very different from the others, and the shifts are pretty dramatic, maybe especially the changes wrought by the last one, the debut release of a band I knew nothing about before listening (unlike the first three). But I think you’ll also discover a kind of through-line that ties all four selections together, and I’ll touch on that as we go.

As always, I hope at least one of the four, if not all four, will resonate with you in some powerful way. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: NECROFIER, CONSUMPTION, EXIMPERITUS, DER ROTE MILAN, SMEARING, MARTIRIO

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Dec 062025
 

(written by Islander)

For you music lovers out there who just crawled out from under a rock, yesterday was a Bandcamp Friday, the last one of 2025. During those 24 hours we received more than 300 e-mails in the NCS in-box, at least half of them Bandcamp alerts, and that’s not counting the flood of digital traffic that rolled in the day before. Many of the messages were about music that had just been released.

I figure I have about a 50/50 success rate in getting new-music roundups posted on Bandcamp Fridays, which for obvious reasons would be an ideal time for them. Yesterday goes in the failure column. Just couldn’t get it done yesterday, what with other distractions getting in the way and the desirability of allowing Andy Synn’s list-week pre-launch to be our last post of the work-week.

I do feel guilty, but would have felt guilty anyway: Even rounding up a handful of new songs yesterday wouldn’t have made a very big dent in the wall of new tracks that slammed down this past week. Today’s roundup is just a modest dent too, but hopefully sufficient to start your weekend off with a dented skull. As usual, I’ll attempt to do additional cranial denting (of a more consistently blackened variety) tomorrow. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SOREWOUND — “ESPANTO”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Dec 022025
 

(written by Islander)

Like almost all genres of metal, sludge has evolved and branched in numerous directions since origins that saw hardcore bands slowing down and delving into doom. These days, calling a band’s music “sludge metal” is still useful in some measure, but still leaves a lot un-said because the musical variations within that broad genre have become so wide-ranging.

Which brings us to Sorewound, a Costa Rican band that seems bent on turning back the clock by a couple of decades. Their music, as represented in their debut EP Espanto, is by some current measures primitive and “stripped down,” ugly and corrosive, punk-influenced and capable of creating grisly harmonies that might be abysmal in one minute and feral the next — but always seem horrifying.

Here’s how Sorewound’s label, Cursed Monk Records, introduces the EP: Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: UMBRÍO, MOON WISDOM, ULTIMA NECAT

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Nov 302025
 


Valerius de Saedeleer (Belgian, 1867–1941) – “A Winter Landscape”, 1931

(written by Islander)

That painting up there popped into one of my news feeds today. I saw it on my phone this morning as I was sitting outside having a cup of joe and a few smokes before daybreak, with the outside temperature at 37°F. With about 17 hours to go at this point before December begins, that all seemed like fitting synchronicity.

Where I live in the Pacific Northwest we’re well into what everyone here calls The Big Dark. No snow (that rarely happens), but the days are short and usually beset by wet gloom even when the sun is (allegedly) above the horizon. Perfect days for chilly and gloomy music, but also good days for music that lights fires. What I’ve picked for this column today manifests in both those ways.

Of course, December brings more than The Big Dark in the earth’s northern latitudes. It will also bring a rising tide of year-end lists. Tomorrow we’ll be re-posting one from another site much larger than ours, and also asking our visitors to share their own. And then one week from tomorrow we’ll begin rolling out the lists of our own writers, beginning with Andy Synn’s usual weeklong takeover. (Actually, it will probably begin this coming Friday, if Andy does what he usually does and shares his list of the year’s best EPs in advance of his main list week.) Continue reading »

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