SMIQRA — AN INTERVIEW OF MINOTAURIAN MEANDERINGS

 Interviews  No Responses »
Apr 092026
 

“Das Grausen” (1901-1903) – Alfred Kubin. Sourced from the Obelisk Art History project and serves as the Smiqra and Ὁπλίτης banner image. Expressionist symbolist and at times avant-garde Austrian artist who also wrote one novel.

(The release of the debut album Rɡyaɡ̇dźé! by the Chinese project Smiqra probably provided the motivation for our contributor Vizzah Harri to get in touch with the project’s creator JL, but the interest had already flourished due to JL’s other previous musical projects. In any event, the interview that Harri presents below was the result of a roughly year-long dialogue, and it is a fascinating thing to read at your leisure.)

The multi-instrumentalist, linguist, and shapeshifting artist JL, of Smiqra, Ὁπλίτης and Vitriolic Sage fame, graced us with a correspondence in a language they are not fluent in. It’s remarkable that they set aside time to read, translate, and answer our questions while they were still very busy academically.

The term avant-garde often gets thrown round without much thought as to what it means or pertains to. If you ask a philosopher, art professor, music theorist, and a critic you might come to a bunch of different answers as to how it relates to their context. Generally, it has to do with exactly what it means in the original French, advanced guard. That which pushes the boundaries of convention. In that comfortable niche of discontent with the status quo, Smiqra and Rɡyaɡ̇dźé! comes across as a logical evolution from Ὁπλίτης, an album that was reviewed here last year. Continue reading »

DIE LIKE GENTLEMEN: “DIE LIKE GENTLEMEN”

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Apr 092026
 

(This is DGR’s review of the swan-song release by Die Like Gentlemen from Portland, Oregon. The eye-catching cover artwork is a painting circa 1910 called “The Drinker” by German artist Erich Plontke.)

Many, many moons ago, in an era before space and time, when the world was just an idea in the eyes of the gods, we published an interview with Portland, Oregon’s Die Like Gentlemen.

That’s it, just wanted to check in and point people to an interesting interview we did about five years ago as we have some new readers on the site and sometimes it is nice to highlight the fact that we’ve been publishing stuff for a while at this point and there are plenty of rabbit holes to fall down. You can go about your day from here.

Actually, here’s the thing. While diving around the underground world and exploring music I saw the name and cover art for Die LIke Gentlemen’s recent self-titled – and apparently final – album go floating by and it must’ve re-lit some incredibly old neurons in my brain because it is one of the few times where I found myself doing the CSI detective thing of tapping the desk and going “why do I know this, why do I recognize this, why is this familiar?” over and over until I would soon discover that the primary suspect was well… us.

For some reason, be it the name, excellent choice of outfits, or the fact that I do make a valiant attempt to scroll through everything here, that previously mentioned interview for Die Like Gentlemen stuck with me enough that years later I would find myself very interested and intrigued by the group’s newest release, the self-titled Die Like Gentlemen, at four songs and nearly forty-minutes of prog-metal weird and avante-garde doom exploration at its most adventurous. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GOHOLOR — “DIVINE BLOOD INVOCATION”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 082026
 

(written by Islander)

Gaze upon the daunting cover art above for Locus Damnatorum, the debut album from the diabolical Slovakian band Goholor — whose name is an Enochian word for “ascend” and begin to imagine what primordial terrors it holds in store. The album follows by a decade the band’s debut EP In Saeculis Obscuris, and it seized the attention of the esteemed Personal Records, which will release the album on May 8th.

On behalf of the label, the press materials describe the album’s music by invoking such names as Unanimated, Necrophobic, Sacramentum, Gates of Ishtar, and Sweden’s Sacrilege, and more general references to “black/death’s late ’90s heyday”. They also divulge that the album’s themes “focus on the dark and demonic side of society, such as hypocrisy, perversion, insensitivity, and obsession with religion.”

To delve further into the album’s marauding madness, what we have for you today is the premiere of its second single, “Divine Blood Invocation“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: COGNIZANCE — “THE ZONE”

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Apr 082026
 

(written by Islander)

We’ve been avidly following the evolving adventures of Cognizance for quite a while now. When Willowtip Records released the band’s Phantazein album in early 2024, our DGR wrote: “[W]hile Cognizance have remained a sleek and ultra-precise machine for over a decade since the release of their first full length – after having subsisted on a series of singles and EPs – they’ve also slowly hammered and forged their sound into something as fiercely creative and memorably groove-ridden as it is terrifyingly technically proficient.”

And so it’s no surprise that we’ve been greedily rubbing our hands over the prospect of getting the follow-up to Phantazein. Lo and behold, it will arrive on May 1st (again via Willowtip) in the shape of In Light, No Shape.

As DGR further observed in that previous review, Cognizance “always seem to be finding new twists on their particular style of Tech-Death – while still sounding like an absolute hurricane of riffs.” What twists might this new album bring us?

We’ve had a couple of signs so far, two songs from the new album that have already debuted, and today we present an official video for a third one — “The Zone“. Continue reading »

BLACKER THAN THE BLACKEST BLACK: NATURE MORTE / NON EST DEUS / SISYPHEAN / ULTHA

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Apr 082026
 

(Andy Synn presents a quartet of recently released Black Metal recommendations)

For reasons we may never understand a huge percentage of the Black Metal scene decided to release their new albums last week – including a surprise drop from long-time NCS favourites Ultha – and, despite our best efforts, we’re probably not going to be able to cover all, or even most, of them here.

But I’ve chosen four visceral examples from this veritable smorgasbord of blackened delights to highlight here today all the same, as I refuse to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VEILCASTE — “EMBEDDED”

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Apr 082026
 

(written by Todd Manning)

“If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?”- Charles Fort

The Midwest’s best-kept secret is Indianapolis’s doom/sludge juggernaut, Veilcaste. Every time they hit the studio, their sound grows, the space between the stars grows darker, the universe gets a bit heavier. Their latest single, “Embedded”, marks the current apex of their enormity.

These guys sound like a sentient black hole, with guitars that exert an unfathomable gravitational pressure, and the vocals sound like a god, both divine and unhinged. This is just a small preview of their forthcoming album Hellward, due out on August 7th courtesy of Third House Communications.

Now if only a universal mind, sane or insane, could take control of this world… Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: TELOCH VOVIN — “PANZER FIST”

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Apr 072026
 

(written by Islander)

We are about to present an ultra-long song, one that extends for nearly 17 minutes. However, it is not one that allows attention to wander, not even for a moment. It is instead an astonishing sonic spectacle that creates scenes of cataclysmic destruction and unchained madness, but also includes elegant, exotic, and unearthly melodic sensations that transport listeners into occult experiences. It presents chaos on a truly devastating scale but also becomes strangely spellbinding.

The song is a four-part suite named “Panzer First“, and it’s the closing opus on a new album titled Towards The Inevitable by the Long Island band Teloch Vovin. It will be co-released on May 8th by Thus Spake Qayin Records in conjunction with the band’s new An Eastern Temple Productions. Continue reading »

OBSCURITIES – VOLUME XXVI: RIP BO LUEDERS AND JAMES LOLLAR

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Apr 072026
 

(Our friend Daniel Barkasi returns with another monthly collection of reviews for recommended releases, and this time draws his lot from what the month of March brought us.)

I had a bit of a different angle planned for the beginning of this edition until April 2nd, but we’re going to take an unwelcome detour.

News that day came out informing us that we lost two important artists – James Lollar, known as the darksynth legend Gost, and Harms Way guitarist Bo Lueders. Both had an indelible impact in their respective genres, and their losses are a devastating shock to the friends and family of these two fine folks, but of course also to those who followed and embraced their creative endeavors. Harms Way’s crushing, vibrant approach to hardcore is a go-to for me, and Lueders came across as an excellent guy who touched the lives of many through his music, his podcast, and his all-around good nature.

Due to my personal experiences, I want to focus on Gost/James Lollar for a moment – an artist who holds an esteemed place for myself and many others due to his extremely innovative and genre-molding music, which in tandem with Perturbator, Carpenter Brut, Dance with the Dead, Mega Drive, and Dan Terminus, invented and perfected the darksynth sound. His dense, incredibly aggressive and monolithic productions are ones for the ages. A discography that has been in regular rotation since hearing Behemoth in 2015. My wife and I were lucky enough to cover a live show of his in December of 2023 – the only time either of us got to view his work live, and what an indelible experience it was. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GOATPSALM — “BENEATH”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 062026
 

(written by Islander)

The Russian band Goatpsalm first caught our attention almost a full decade ago, when we reviewed their third album Downstream a few months before its February 2016 release by the UK’s Aesthetic Death label. Back then I wrote (in part):

The music of Goatpsalm is spacious, mystical, shamanic. It conjures images of aboriginal rituals, as if holding the keys to dark communions with nature and with spirits that have been long lost to time. Some of this effect comes from the band’s frequent use of sounds from the natural world — rain, wind, waves breaking on a shore, bird song — and some derives from unusual instruments….

While all of the songs on Downstream make significant use of dark ambient and electronic music, sometimes touching the edge of industrial music, that’s only one aspect of the album. Yes, there is a meditative, and even narcotic, quality to the album, but it’s often heavy as hell and chilling, too….

[I]t’s the kind of album that really will carry you away. In your head, you’ll be far downstream from where you started by the time it ends — and for me it has been a trip worth repeating. I haven’t heard anything else quite like it this year.

And now here we are, a decade later, and Aesthetic Death will be releasing Goatpsalm’s fourth album, Beneath, at the end of this week. There’s an interesting story about how the album came to exist and why its completion took so long, and we’ll share that with you later in this article, but first we’ll give you a chance to hear Beneath in its entirety. Continue reading »

WITCH RIPPER – THROUGH THE HOURGLASS

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 062026
 

(Andy Synn finds love in the hyperdrive all over again with Witch Ripper)

Let me begin by telling you a little story I don’t think I’ve shared before.

I’ve been a big fan of Seattle-based Prog-Metal maestros Witch Ripper for some time now – I first wrote very positively about their first album, Homestead in 2018, and lavished even more praise on 2023’s outstanding, album of the year contender, The Flight After the Fall – but, due to the exorbitant postage costs involved in shipping anything from the US over the last few years, getting a hold of either of these albums in physical form proved to be prohibitively expensive.

Thankfully I’d become friendly with the band’s vocalist/guitarist, Curtis Parker during this time, and while I was in Seattle for Northwest Terror Fest in 2024 (tickets for this year’s edition still on sale, btw) he very kindly offered to hand-deliver copies of both record’s to me at my hotel, an offer which I duly accepted.

But here’s the thing – and the thing that Curtis himself didn’t know (but absolutely will after this) – I thought I was getting CD version of both albums, so when he walked around the corner with two LPs in hand, well… let’s just say I was very surprised, but tried not to show it, even though I had no idea how was going to get these two pieces of vinyl back to the UK without breaking them.

Thankfully I was ultimately able to transport them both home safely (and then, not long after, track down affordable copies of both albums on CD as well) and they now sit proudly on my vinyl shelf as part of my small, but much-loved, LP collection, and I’m hopefully going to add their excellent new album, Through the Hourglass, to the shelf right alongside them very soon.

Continue reading »

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