(Andy Synn presents four releases from January which you might have overlooked)
It’s a new year which means… new bands!
And so, to celebrate this, here’s four debut albums from last month which I strongly urge you all to check out.
Feb 042025
Feb 042025
(Today we bring you Zoltar‘s review of the recently released third album by the Swedish death metal band Disrupted.)
There’s a good reason why Lik got signed to Metal Blade Records a few years back, and no, it hasn’t anything to do with both their guitar players joining respectively Katatonia and Bloodbath. No, if on the surface their classic down-to-earth approach to SweDeath may not look and sound that much different from the 7,564 Entombed clones popping out here and there (although it should be said that their main influence remains Dismember but I digress), underneath the fat layers of HM-2 effects pedals and downtuned guitar, they had, one could say, class. Yep, that extra-but-fuck-I-can’t-really-put-my-finger-on-it-although-it’s-here element, that Midas Touch if you will, that set them apart. Or maybe they just had better songs?
Off Ludvika in the dead center of the country, the very same little town where Peter Tägtgren’s Abyss studio is located, Disrupted have the same problem, so to speak. To those of the outside, they’ll probably look like another bunch of dudes pretending it’s 1993 all over again who hired Daniel Liljekvist back in 2018 right after he had left his drum stool in Katatonia (them again) to get some attention. Especially since their early material – 2014’s Heavy Death EP and the equally imaginatively-titled Morbid Death three years later – didn’t exactly set the world on fire. Continue reading »
Feb 032025
(Last week Islander finished his month-long list of 2024’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. It included 69 songs in all. Today DGR has provided an addendum. It includes… 70 SONGS! Though there is some small overlap with Islander‘s list.)
At the time this article is being published we’ll have drawn our Most Infectious Songs of 2024 rollout to a close. There are likely a handful of questions surrounding how such a list gets put together or why I am once again exhuming the corpse of 2024 for a few more stick-whackins that are swirling around your mind.
To put it bluntly, the idea of doing an addendum to the 2024 song list was offered to me by the NoCleanSinging head honcho, in part due to a desire for differing opinions from his own but also to highlight, once again, just how wide the spread of music was in the 2024 world of heavy metal and just how much you’re likely to miss no matter how much you try to keep up. It’s fucking impossible.
Originally, this was just going to be an Andy shindig as a sort of quick “here’s a few more that might’ve been overlooked,” but then I was asked to contribute as well so I thought it might be a fun exercise to peel the curtain back a bit and show just how much the internet cabal decides who is going to break through and be famous this year.
The answer is, simply put, “fuck all”. Continue reading »
Feb 032025
(written by Islander)
Impurist are a new death metal band formed in Hull, England in 2023. Their lineup features former and current members of Extreme Noise Terror, Gorerotted, Winterfylleth, and Introrectalgestation. They proudly proclaim that they have taken influence from the bands they grew up listening to, and they obviously must have grown up listening to violent horrors.
Impurist made their recording debut in April of last year with an EP aptly named Punishment Without Mercy. Since then they’ve recorded a second EP entitled Evolving Cortex. It will be released by 783label on CD, cassette tape, and 12″ vinyl — and the vinyl edition will include the band’s debut EP as the B-side.
The new EP, Evolving Cortex, includes three songs, and we have some thoughts about each of them — along with the premiere of a frightening animated lyric video for the title song. Continue reading »
Feb 032025
(written by Islander)
The Dutch two-man formation All Are To Return describe their creations as “extreme, experimental music with an urgent sense of dread.” They began with a self-titled EP in 2020 and have followed that with three more releases, most recently a 2024 album named AATR III on Tartarus Records. Simply reading the eloquent but harrowing thematic descriptions of these records at Bandcamp demonstrates the duo’s extremely grim, indeed nihilistic, perspectives on humanity’s degraded past and hopeless future.
The music has been in line with those perspectives. It has often generated massive and caustic assaults on the senses, hostile and brutalizing, furious and doomed, sometimes cinematic in its sweep, but also deeply chilling and relentlessly unsettling.
For their most recent effort AATR have created a new audio/visual work named Limen. It consists of four pieces of music, each of them with a video, that present an interconnected narrative. Limen is also intensely disturbing, but represents a variation that makes greater use of haunting and harsh ambient sensations, though the band haven’t abandoned their industrial proclivities. It also again vividly displays the duo’s talent for crafting harrowing poetry.
Late last month the first chapter of the new EP was revealed, and today we’re revealing the fourth one. Continue reading »
Feb 032025
(Here we have Wil Cifer‘s review of the second album by the UK death metal band Vacuous, which is set for release on February 28th by Relapse Records.)
Death Metal continues to gain popularity with bands like Cannibal Corpse as festival headliners and playing arenas. Its aggressive release makes it perhaps the most fun of all metal sub-genres yet it is all too often stuck in its ’90s nostalgia. This leads to bands idolizing the Morbid Angel‘s and Obituary‘s of the past and not always pressing forward with fresh new sounds and songwriting that moves beyond the bounds of its double-driven and growled vocals.
The sophomore album of Vacuous, In His Blood, finds the band breaking out from the pack to create their niche and find their way without leaning too heavily on their influences. Sure, guttural vocals are the main narrative, but other anguished vocalizations are employed, to give the tormented-larynx approach more purpose, rather than an obligatory gurgle underlying the frantic din. Continue reading »
Feb 022025
(written by Islander)
In both these Sunday columns and the more genre-scattered ones I do on Saturdays I tend to write about individual songs more than complete EPs or albums. That allows me to cover more ground, and to bring more bands and their forthcoming releases to people’s attention.
The downside is that lots of listeners don’t really put much weight on individual songs. They want to know about the complete record, maybe through a review or more likely by listening to all of it when that becomes possible.
I don’t have any way of knowing whether the pluses of my strategy outweigh the minuses, but I’m wedded to it for better or worse. Today’s column is a classic example of that, though I have included a trio of complete but short EPs in the mix. Continue reading »
Feb 012025
These are bathrooms I visited in Port Orchard, Washington
(written by Islander)
It’s been a hell of a week hasn’t it? More like a week from hell. The daily news has become a series of Hieronymus Bosch paintings, the ghastly ones whose details have frequently appeared on the cover of metal albums.
On the other hand, it’s been a heavenly week if you focus on the kind of music that typically makes its way into these Saturday roundups. So let’s forget about the news for now and move right to that!
MANTAR (Germany)
I’m never going to not rush to check out new music from Mantar. (Forgive the double-negative, I guess I haven’t completely forgotten about the news.) Especially when it’s prefaced by this kind of statement from guitarist/vocalist Hanno Klänhardt: Continue reading »
Jan 312025
(written by Islander)
It’s the last day of January and therefore I’ve reached the end of this list. It’s still likely that Andy Synn or DGR, or perhaps some other NCS writers, will chime in next week with songs I failed to include, but my work is done, other than compiling the usual wrap-up post listing all the songs in one place, with links to where they can be found.
Approaching the conclusion has increased the internal agonies. There are so many songs I didn’t want to leave out, so many difficult decisions to make, even with a list as long as this one turned out to be. That explains why there are five songs today instead of three or four.
As for why I grouped these five together, it’s because I decided to conclude with variants of black metal, which over time has become my favorite extreme genre. Maybe it’s because I listen to a lot of such variants in organizing my weekly SHADES OF BLACK column, but my list of candidates for this list has been heavy on the metallic black. These five have their own personalities, but I’ve found all of them exhilarating, memorable, and highly likely to spin your minds like a centrifuge.
I’ll save concluding thoughts about this list until the forthcoming wrap-up post. Onward to the music! Continue reading »
Jan 312025
(written by Islander)
The musical trajectory of Nashville’s Act of Impalement has been intriguing (and scary) to observe. Their 2018 debut album Perdition Cult (released by Unspeakable Axe) quickly proved they could pull off a whole lot of monstrous magic acts, veering from one parcel of extreme influences to another without losing their footing.
Their second album Infernal Ordinance (their first one on Caligari Records), was more focused, less likely than their debut to throw listeners off-balance but still packed with thrilling and chilling variations. As one writer put it, that album was “akin to a morbid melting pot of Cianide, Bolt Thrower, Prophecy of Doom, and Archgoat.”
And now we have Act of Impalement‘s third album Profane Alter on the way, again to be ushered toward us by Caligari Records. It’s introduced on behalf of the label with these reference points:
Though still drawing from the likes of Autopsy, Incantation, and of course Cianide, Act of Impalement‘s third album is a filthy & finely honed assault of bestial death metal, drawing more inspiration from the likes of Belgium’s Possession, Finland’s Belial, and ever more Archgoat.
What we have for you today is the second song to be disgorged from Profane Altar, the vividly and accurately named “Piercing the Heavens“. Continue reading »