AN NCS INTERVIEW: PROFESSOR EMERITUS

 Exceptions to the Rule, Interviews  1 Response »
Sep 042025
 


photo by Liz Gollner

(In June of this year Chicago-based Professor Emeritus released a long-awaited second album, and our Comrade Aleks was so taken with its melding of epic doom metal and traditional heavy metal that he reached out to the band’s founder, guitarist, and keyboardist Lee Smith for an interview that we now present below. As you might have already guessed, the music is an earned exception to the “rule” in our site’s title.)

Born in Chicago, 2010, Professor Emeritus didn’t hurry: their debut album Take Me to the Gallows (2017) gave the world a formula for not the newest, but a refractory alloy of epic doom metal and traditional heavy metal. The resulting blend was further alloyed with a fantasy concept, and in the end this material, enlivened by a passionate presentation, was good despite all the rough edges.

It took eight more years to make the second album, and the reason is simple: only guitarist Lee Smith remained from the first lineup. I don’t know what happened there, but the former bassist and the vocalist of Professor Emeritus started their own doom band, Fer de Lance, so in the end everyone wins, yet it obviously took time to find replacements.

Having retained a significant influence of Candlemass in their doom, Professor Emeritus strikes with the power of bands like Argus and Memento Mori, and even the rudeness of archaic Manowar. The mood of the new vocalist Esteban Julian Peña’s lines in A Land Long Gone changes from ominous battle cries to melancholic philosophizing. Esteban became a real find for Lee, and I suppose here he has more opportunity to open up than in his original band Acerus. Continue reading »

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 042025
 

(Andy Synn has four suggestions, taken from a long list, of stuff to check out from August)

August was a busy month for me, for a lot of different reasons, which is why it feels like I missed out on covering a lot of artists/albums I normally would have made/found more time for.

Those artists include – but are not limited to – Arrows (though at least Islander was able to give that a bit of a write-up), Innumerable Forms (hopefully someone will get to that?), Lowheaven (which I wish I had more space for… but Slow Crush took their slot in the end), Pilgrimage, Ethereal Wound (which I’m more and more gutted not to be including), Spire of Lazarus, Hexrot, and Porenut (whose new album I still might review, possibly next week) amongst many, many more, so I encourage you all to go check them out if/when you have time after reading this article.

Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: UNSOULING — “YOUR MOMENTARY PASSING”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 032025
 

(written by Islander)

Even after the enthusiasm that greeted I, Voidhanger Records‘ release of Unsouling‘s 2024 debut album Vampiric Spiritual Drain, it’s likely that the band’s Minneapolis-based creator Andy Schoengrund still remained best-known for his work in Feral Light. That’s likely to change after the release of Unsouling‘s forthcoming second album, Outward Streams Of Devotional Woe, and not simply because Feral Light has split up. As Andy has shared with us:

“Outward Streams Of Devotional Woe differs from its predecessor in that the meandering exploration of the first album has been replaced with a more sure-footed and focused journey. The anchor of black metal with the bleed into gothic, dark wave, and death metal influences is still very much present, but it is more reigned in and pointed.”

The new album will be co-released by I, Voidhanger Records, Canti Erectici, and Unsouling, and to help pave the road toward its October 3 release we’re now premiering the album’s first single, “Your Momentary Passing“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: KOSTNATĚNÍ — “SAMOTÁŘ (LONER)”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Sep 032025
 

(written by Islander)

At the end of this week, the Bandcamp Friday for September, Willowtip Records will launch pre-orders for a new album from Minneapolis-based Kostnatění. Titled Přílišnost (Excess), it’s this constantly surprising project’s third full-length overall, and follows the blend of technical black metal and Middle Eastern folk revealed in 2023’s Úpal (“Heatstroke”) — an album we described as “extravagantly head-spinning – dizzying, dazzling, and disorienting.”

Willowtip states that on the new album Kostnatění “has packed into this bizarre base an even stranger array of influences that must be heard to be believed,” resulting in “the band’s heaviest, most compact and violent songs to date.”

You will be able to test these claims today as we premiere the first advance track from the album, a song named “Samotář (Loner)“. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A TUESDAY: EXITIUM SUI, STARER, OLD YEAR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Sep 022025
 

(written by Islander)

I only had one premiere to write up for today and only one other post on the calendar (an interview you can find here), so I felt a compulsion to add something more, hence this brief roundup of new songs.

The first two picks were pretty obvious to me, coming from bands we’ve been following at NCS for a good long while. The third one was from a project I knew nothing about before this morning, but after hearing it I felt like a cut of meat that had been “tenderized” until paper thin, and I thought you might like to feel that way too. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HORROR WITHIN — “TEARS OF ANGELS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 022025
 

(written by Islander)

On October 3rd Dolorem Records will release Soul Awakening, the debut album of the French death metal band Horror Within. After listening to the song from the album we’re about to present, it would be a good guess as to why they named it “Tears of Angels” — because they apparently want to make the heavens cry and plead for mercy.

The music, which draws influence from the likes of Entombed and Dismember, is mercilessly mauling, brutally bone-smashing, reflexively head-moving, and as chilling as it is electrifying — and that’s true of the album as a whole. While noting that the band draw on “the roots of Swedeath — that saturated sound typical of the HM-2 pedal”, Dolorem makes another accurate observation about the album:

Horror Within isn’t just organized chaos: it’s a constant search for balance between old-school savagery and a modern aesthetic. Syncopated rhythms, dissonant textures, unexpected breaks, oppressive atmospheres — the band injects contemporary tension into their music, without ever sacrificing coherence or impact.

Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: ORDO KARNIVORUM

 Interviews  1 Response »
Sep 022025
 

(Here is Comrade Aleks‘ interview of guitarist/vocalist Sergey from the Russian black metal band Ordo Karnivorum, who released their second album last spring.)

Ordo Karnivorum was founded in Ivanovo, Russia two or three years ago. It is now a trio: Sergey (guitars, vocals), Alexander (guitars), and Eugenia (bass). Their unholy debut as a duo, Noir (2023), drew some attention to the band, but due to the low live activity it was easy to get lost among other black metal bands. However, their new crushing full-length work The Restless should change the rules of the game.

Live, unpolished sound, high-quality stuff, and a fanatical approach to deathly black metal with harsh vocals and macabre philosophy make me feel some sympathy to the wicked Ordo Karnivorum. Let’s take a look at the band’s inner machinery, maybe we’ll find something interesting there! Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HASARD — “ABGNOSE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Sep 012025
 

(written by Islander)

It’s tempting to think of the French artist Hazard as a musical Jekyll and Hyde. In his longest-lived solo project, Les Chants Du Hasard, he is committed to “revisiting nineteenth-century symphonic music in the light of a black metal attitude” (to quote the label I, Voidhanger Productions). In his more recent solo project Hasard (again to quote the label), “the perspective is reversed: the darkest and most dissonant black metal is the fertile ground on which fascinating orchestral melodies with a dark, melancholic and resigned mood flourish.”

And so it’s tempting to compare these two different aspects of Hazard‘s musical talents to the creations of Robert Louis Stevenson (who frantically wrote his novella in the grip of illness or drugs or both) — to compare them to Dr. Jekyll, the educated and erudite Victorian-era physician who was nevertheless beset with persistent urges he considered depraved, and the outright evil and remorseless monstrosity of his alter ego Edward Hyde, in whom Jekyll fruitlessly sought through potion to confine impulses he wished to suppress, an experiment that ended in despair.

I don’t intend to press the comparison too far, despite the fact that photos of Hazard themselves seem to be set in a much older era than our own, but it serves at least a superficial purpose, because it may help you prepare yourself for the ravages of Hasard‘s new album Abgnose, which I, Voidhanger will release at the end of this week (a Bandcamp Friday). Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT (PART 186): MODERN LIFE IS WAR

 Album Reviews, THE SYNN REPORT  No Responses »
Sep 012025
 

Recommended for fans of: Comeback Kid, Shai Hulud, Rise Against

One of the best things about a band announcing a new album – especially a band as seminal to their scene as this – is that it often acts as a prompt to go back and re-listen to their previous works, which often (in my case, at least) results in you developing a new appreciation for their earlier material.

Case in point, when prodigal Punk/Hardcore legends Modern Life Is War announced their upcoming fifth album (set for release this Friday, some twelve years since their last full-length record) I took it upon myself to revisit their discography just in case I wanted to write something about them to commemorate the occasion.

And not only did I end up rediscovering the band – while also developing a greater appreciation for the impact that legendary acts like Minor Threat, Rancid and Black Flag have had on their music – but I also found myself connecting even more deeply this time around with their intensely personal, yet intimately relatable, lyrics and their distinctly dystopian (yet not hopeless) take on modern life (it’s war, don’t you know?).

Now, a word of warning… I’m off to Islay this weekend to spend a couple of days touring some of the island’s many distilleries (it’s my stag-do, if you were curious), so this article will be a little different to most of its predecessors as I’m going to focus my attention mostly on my favourite songs on each of the band’s albums, rather than trying to cover them all comprehensively.

But the one positive side-effect of this of course is that – if you like what you’re about to read and/or hear – you’ll still have lots to discover and appreciate on your own time!

Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ONE OF NINE, WALDGEFLÜSTER, KALEŽ, ARROWS

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  5 Responses »
Aug 312025
 

(written by Islander)

Today I decided to focus on four selections: two songs from forthcoming albums, a debut EP, and a debut full-length. The two songs are tragic but breathtaking. The EP and the album are also stunning, in different ways.

The world often seems like it’s either burning or devolving into a deep and disgusting pool of glop (“shit” is an overused word), but if you immerse yourself in what I’ve chosen today I wager you’ll forget all about that, even if it will all eventually come back to you. Continue reading »

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