NO CLEAN SINGING

TWO MORE FOR 2024: FRONTIERER AND SACRAMENTO

Jan 032025

(Though we’ve turned the corner into 2025, DGR has a couple more records from 2024 he wants to recommend, through the reviews below.)

Ah, it’s the most wonderful time of a website’s year. That brief breather where we get to both get started on stuff coming out in 2025 and kick ourselves in the shins over stuff we missed over the course of the previous year – usually in about equal measure.

It is imagined then, that I shall not be the only one with a few demons still resting on my shoulders that I felt compelled to acknowledge before fully launching myself into the inevitable shitshow that will be the new year. This time around, I’ve managed to dig up two more – one which saw very late release at the end of the year and another that I am in awe I did not come across during my many bandcamp and youtube music rabbit hole tumbles.

So, I shall attempt at the very least to see that they get some sort of spotlight here lest the guilt overwhelm me to the point where I become locked in a paralysis unknown to man up to this time. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2024’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 1): DARKTHRONE, CRYPT SERMON, DÖDSRIT

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Jan 022025

(written by Islander)

I wasn’t able to make this list last year due to the rude demands of my day job. Especially because of that, I’ll repeat some things I’ve written in the past about this final part of our annual LISTMANIA orgy:

This particular series isn’t about best albums or best shorter releases, and it isn’t even about best songs. As the title says, it’s about “most infectious” songs. Some of those might be among the year’s best songs, but in every year there are stand-out songs that aren’t immediately infectious, and actually might never be. Conversely, there are some highly infectious songs every year that most people wouldn’t critically acclaim as great works of art.

The process of compiling this list, as in every previous year, is a bit bizarre, or at least very poorly planned. Let me explain: Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DEJECTER — “FIENDS”

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Jan 022025

On January 31st the Kansas City outfit Dejecter will build upon and expand what they’ve done on two previous EPs through the release of a new one named Oblation Husk, and today we’re helping to introduce it through our premiere of one of the four new songs. Its entirely fitting name is “Fiends.”

For those who haven’t yet discovered the band, it began in the summer of 2022 when Sean Rehmer (Mercurial) and Josh Caldwell (Godhammered, One Inch Punch) begun writing together at Storm Crow Studio just outside of Kansas City. Some months later, they sought out a vocalist to complete their vision and found what they sought in Silas Olson (Devourist).

They then put out those two EPs mentioned above, Human(v)oid in 2023 and Majesty Artificial last year. Those two led Metal Archives to brand Dejecter‘s music as “Death/Sludge Metal,” and you’ll detect both of those genre ingredients in the new EP, but other ingredients are now also apparent. Continue reading »

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Jan 022025

(Andy Synn isn’t quite ready to say goodbye to 2024 just yet)

Well, here we are. It’s 2025 and time to start looking towards what this new year has to bring.

Or, should I say, almost time… because first I want to highlight a quartet of releases which – for various reasons (namely that either they hadn’t actually come out, or I hadn’t stumbled across them yet) – I didn’t have chance to include in my annual “List Week”, but which all definitely deserve some extra attention before we finally consign 2024 to the gaping maw of history.

SEEN AND HEARD ON NEW YEAR’S DAY: AVULSED, CRAWLING CHAOS, ARGWAAN, SERPENTS OF PAKHANGBA, AWRIZIS, STRESS TEMPLE, GROUND SWEAT, HUSMANSKOST, BYFROST

Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET 4 Responses »

Jan 012025

Fireworks at the Seattle Space Needle last night (photo by Sigma Sreedharan / KOMO #SoNorthwest Photography)

(written by Islander)

Happy New Year to all of you! May the turn of the calendar page begin leading you to many good things over the coming year, even if it mainly leads you to still write “2024” in your date entries over the next few weeks.

Yesterday we finished the main part of our annual LISTMANIA series, and I posted a “wrap up” for it earlier today. All those lists verified what we already knew as the past year crawled by, i.e., that 2024 was another great interval for metal, even if it was a garbage fire in many other respects.

We have abundant reasons to expect that 2025 will also bring us abundant metallic goodness and greatness, and some of those reasons are already concretely apparent, witness the music I picked for this New Year’s Day roundup (though some of it also comes from the later days of December — and a couple songs are from 2010!). Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2024 WRAPUP

LISTMANIA 2024 1 Response »

Jan 012025

(written by Islander)

We posted the last of our many year-end lists yesterday, on the last day of 2024. As in previous years, the volume was extensive. As usual, some of them were re-postings of lists that appeared at “big platform” web sites and print magazines, and others were prepared by our own stable of race-horse writers. And once again we had a large group of lists from other guests and old friends. Plus, we’ve again received valuable, extensive lists in reader comments on THIS POST (new lists can still be added there).

In this article I’m setting forth links to all of the 2024 year-end lists that we published, divided into categories and listed within each category in the order of their appearance. For people who are looking for the best metal that 2024 had to offer, these lists and our readers’ lists provide a tremendous resource, as they have in past years. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2024: A LIST OF LICORICE ALL SORTS / SPONGIFORM LONG FORMS – AN EDGING OF MUSIC EXPERIENCED AND AN (KIND OF) UNRANKED LIST OF 2

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Dec 312024

(It’s fitting that the last installment in our main LISTMANIA series comes from one of our newest contributors, who made his first NCS appearance in early February of this year. Of course, this being Vizzah Harri (born in South Africa, now living in Vietnam), this isn’t a conventional list, but more like an ongoing diary of the year, which isn’t musically limited to metal nor even limited to music, though it begins with reflections from the present.)

It’s been a year of bi-polarities and absurdism. The Onion bought Infowars and Vice started writing Onion articles. The level of fakery doesn’t even matter anymore because it seems like reality has itself been augmented into a surreal hellscape. It takes but one lie to fool one man or a thousand for a lifetime; it is immeasurable how hard it is to turn back that lie. Randi and his partner once tried to prove how easy it is to fool people, and they succeeded but proved unknowingly that people didn’t want to know the truth in the end, they wanted to remain suspended in fantasy. The cognitive dissonance was too tough to reconcile.

In brighter news, there will be new music from our favorite caterpillars in öOoOoOoOoOo and the teaser they dropped way back on April 1st is alluring as fuck: Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2024: A YEAR-END LIST FROM JOHAN HULDTGREN (OBITUS)

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Dec 312024

(For the 14th year in a row, our friend Johan Huldtgren of the Swedish black metal band Obitus — whose 2017 album Slaves of the Vast Machine is still their latest release — has again allowed us to share with you a year-end Top 10 list.)

As I usually remark, lists like this are always somewhat arbitrary, it’s ten releases I picked, from the longer list of albums I liked, whittled down from albums I’ve heard released in 2024. If as to underscore that this year I made several lists, this being the NCS edition.

Some of the albums on this year’s list were released fairly late in the year, so there is a risk of recency bias, but that is simply something we’ll have to let time sort out. As at least a few of the releases below I’ve not seen on other lists published here, I hope you find something here you enjoy which you may otherwise have missed. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT (PART 178): TEMPESTARII

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Dec 312024

Recommended for fans of: Ultha, Wiegedood, Altar of Plagues

Well, it seems that we have once again completed another rotation around the sun.

And so, with thoughts of celestial cycles and perpetual cosmic patterns at the forefront of my mind I present to you the last Synn Report of 2024, wherein we journey deep into the soul and psyche of Tempestarii.

AN NCS PREMIERE: FELL OMEN — “DUNGEON METAL PUNKS BESIEGING DIGITAL CASTLES”

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Dec 302024

(written by Islander)

There are so many aspects of the Fell Omen song and video we’re about to premiere that are just… bonkers. But I hasten to add, they are bonkers in very good and highly entertaining ways. Let me count the ways:

There is the name of the song: “Dungeon Metal Punks Besieging Digital Castles“. There is the fact that Fell Omen‘s Greek mastermind Spider of Pnyx performs the song in a suit of medieval armor. There is this armored warrior’s use of a hurdy-gurdy to open the song, and the fact that it’s not even the most “out there” aspect of the music. Continue reading »

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