SHADES OF BLACK: FYRNASK, MAERUND, CON, ARS MORIENDI, NIVEOUS, SNORLAX

 SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
May 312026
 

(written by Islander)

This is the final edition of SHADES OF BLACK.

The final edition of May 2026! (Sorry if I made you gasp – but I hope I did.)

The last day of May marks the end of Spring in the northern hemisphere, at least if you use the common meteorological definition of the season. In astronomical terms, it won’t until June 20th this year, the day before the summer solstice.

Today is also the 151st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar, which means that 41.37% of this year is over. Not exactly a memorable percentage, and not really far enough along for us to be taking stock of anything. We won’t reach the halfway point until noon on July 2nd.

And that’s nearly all I have to say by way of introducing this column today, other than this: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: THE OCEAN COLLECTIVE, RIPPER, HIPPOTRAKTOR, ABSOLUTISM, DEAD SLEEP, PYLAR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
May 302026
 

(written by Islander)

Here we are again, another day of difficult decisions. Even after the modest head-start I got a couple of days ago, I still found myself staring at dozens of links on my list of new songs and videos.

DGR compounded the problem by popping up two days ago with another half-dozen I hadn’t yet noticed. My fellow writers around here don’t often suggest things for this roundup (maybe they take pity on me), so when they do, I try to pay attention. Hence, half the songs in today’s collection were among DGR’s suggestions.

Two of the songs he proposed include (gasp) singing, but I knew from past experience with the bands that it would be good, even if I didn’t foresee that it would vary from what I thought I’d be hearing.

As a counterweight, I’ve filled out the post with sounds from beastly and blowtorch throats. I also made the usual effort to include a genre-variety of songs (though I pushed off a lot of the black metal to tomorrow’s column), because no one but me likes everything, do they? Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TEMPLE OV AHRIMAN — “WHITE DEATH”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 292026
 

(written by Islander)

The worst years of the covid pandemic were in many ways a truly terrible time, although it often seems like for many people it has already become a distant memory. But that’s often the way memory works, when forgetting bad times becomes a survival mechanism, or at least eases the way forward.

But it’s equally true that the pandemic years yielded unexpected opportunities for creative activity that otherwise wouldn’t have existed, or would have existed in very different forms. The band we’re focused on in this article is one such example of that.

Temple ov Ahriman is a one-man black metal band hailing from Austin, Texas that was conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic. Its mastermind Thornicator explains what happened: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: KA’APER — “A REASON TO GO INSANE”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 292026
 

(written by Islander)

For the second year in a row we’re premiering a song by Ka’aper, a collective of musicians who now call Cyprus their home. It is happening for a second year in a row because Ka’aper have quickly followed their 2025 debut album While Flows the Nile with a second album titled When Gods Walked the Earth that’s set for release on June 12th by Satanath Records.

As described by the label, the new album encompasses “ten heavy and melodic stories about life and death, love and betrayal, the fleeting and the eternal,” moving “between visions of ancient mythology and reflections on the present day seen through its prism.”

For those visitors here who are familiar with While Flows the Nile, the new album includes similar musical ingredients, but with further variations and iterations. Some might call it melodic death metal, some might use the more amorphous term “dark metal”, but it’s probably better for us to use the song we’re premiering today as a more concrete representation of Ka’aper’s musical proclivities. Continue reading »

DAWN OF ASHES: “ANATOMY OF SUFFERING”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
May 292026
 

(Before DGR and others around here embarked on two weeks of recent festival activity, he pollinated our archive of drafts with a great many reviews, and today we’ve plucked another one. This time his focus is the latest album from L.A.-based Dawn of Ashes, released in March of this year.)

Many, many moons ago – like last year for instance – I wrote about Dawn Of Ashes’ return to the industrial and electronic sound on their album Infecting The Scars. The group have gone through a few metamorphoses over the course of their career, careening into a symphonic black metal sound for two albums before settling on a harsher industrial metal approach for a few and creating something of a ‘scars’ trilogy, of which the current final act was the aforementioned return to the sound they started with on Infecting The Scars.

In listening to it, you could still hear parallels between the abrasive electronics, immensely catchy multi-layered keyboards, and effects-riddled vocals, and the more traditionally heavy metal influences that’ve played on the band’s shoulders for a while now. The distance between where they had started, where they wound up, and black metal’s taste for theatrics suddenly did not seem all that far from one another, and Dawn Of Ashes were acting as a bridge of sorts. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: PSYCROPTIC, FEN, CONDUIT, SUFFERING QUOTA, SKELETAL SERPENT, THEURGIA

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
May 282026
 

(written by Islander)

We had an 11th-hour cancellation of a premiere I had committed to write for today. With the unexpected free time dropping in my lap like that, I thought I ought to get a head-start on the coming weekend roundups.

A head-start is sorely needed because the backlog of new music I haven’t had a chance to include here has swelled to humongous proportions, thanks to me shirking my duties while at Maryland Deathfest last weekend. The swell has become even more swollen in light of all the new songs that have surfaced just since last Sunday.

To reduce the swelling, we’ll lance the infection and let the following new songs and videos spurt out. (Yeah, that was a gross analogy, but the music isn’t gross, although a lot of it is indeed infectious.) Continue reading »

SHIT I SLEPT ON (A LIST BY SEB PAINCHAUD)

 LISTMANIA 2025  2 Responses »
May 282026
 

(Last December as part of our LISTMANIA series, for the 10th year in a row, we shared an eclectic year-end music list from Canadian musician Seb Painchaud — whose band Tumbleweed Dealer also came out with a great new album last year. But that 2025 YE list turned out to be incomplete. Seb missed some shit, and now makes up for it with this supplemental collection of 18 titles.)

We are almost halfway through the year, and I’ve been sitting on this list for months. Let’s just blast through it real quick and get this off my to-do list. Continue reading »

DESOLUS: “DWELLERS OF THE TWILIGHT VOID”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
May 282026
 

(Our Norway-based contributor Chile wrote the following very enthusiastic review of the sophomore album released earlier this month by D.C.-based Desolus.)

For a guy who’s constantly (or often enough) on about how he likes his metal fast, I feel like I am not listening to nearly enough thrash metal, arguably one of the fastest genres around. Furthermore, since thrash can be easily welded together with influences from both death and black metal, thus making it even more interesting and varied, I really have no excuse.

So what better chance to indulge in such activities than to wield some wicked new thrash album and give it a proper review in the process (I am also not claiming here that I can actually write a proper review), and therefore we are joined today by Washington D.C.’s Desolus and their just-released sophomore album Dwellers of the Twilight Void. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CROCELL — “SWARM OF INSECTS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
May 272026
 

(written by Islander)

Nearly 20 years into their career, which in the context of metal is akin to a geologic epoch, the Danish band Crocell prove through their latest album that they are at the peak of their powers rather than on a downhill slide. They have used their accumulated experience to create a harrowing adventure, equal parts furiously violent, oppressively crushing, and deeply haunting — an adventure threaded with dark melodies that are just as vital as Crocell’s ability to hammer hearts and fracture spines.

The name of the album (Crocell’s seventh full-length) is Swarm of Insects, and it will be released on May 29th through Emanzipation Productions. As the label’s texts explain, “The album title evokes images of biblical plagues, but may just as well reflect a humanity blindly swarming and feeding on whatever scraps are thrown its way.” And thus “the lyrics explore tyranny, oppression, betrayal and demagoguery.”

As for the music, Crocell’s evolved hybrid of death and black metal often does sound like audio portrayals of plague, but it drives a listener’s imagination toward other visions as well — which you can now experience for yourselves through our full streaming premiere. Continue reading »

DECIBEL TOUR 2026: CRYPTOPSY, NECROT, SPIRIT ADRIFT, BLOOD MONOLITH

 Concert Reviews  2 Responses »
May 272026
 

(Our friend and contributor Ben Manzella caught the Los Angeles stop of the ongoing Decibel Magazine Tour on the night of May 12th and sent in the following thoughts about the performances, along with his own excellent photos. We’re late in posting this, through no fault of Ben’s, due to our editor’s distractions at a recent festival in Baltimore.)

As I write this review, still recovering from the welcome bangover courtesy of Northwest Terror Fest, the annual Decibel tour will be rolling into Portland this evening. While most of the lineup showcased varied interpretations of death metal, the addition of Spirit Adrift ended up being a personal highlight due to my limited familiarity with their music. Weeknight metal shows are always a gamble, and while the collective attention span at most shows seems limited, I was glad to see a good crowd show up at the Belasco this past Tuesday. Continue reading »

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