ABHORRENT EXPANSE: “ENTER THE MISANTHROPOCENE”

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Aug 142025
 

(We present Todd Manning‘s vivid review of the second album from the deliciously demented Midwest US band Abhorrent Expanse, which will be released tomorrow by Amalgam Music.)

For all the talk of demons and quantum physics and Lovecraft and heavy metal, how many bands can actually take you outside mundane human experience? You may love Judas Priest as much as the next person, but listening to them isn’t going to warp your sense of time and space and take you to other dimensions. Conventional song structures might just be for conventional lives.

Arriving from the Midwest by way of R’lyeh, Abhorrent Expanse‘s journey began with 2022’s Gateways to Resplendence, a stunning hybrid of extreme metal and avant-garde improvised music. Now, in 2025, they’ve returned with Enter the Misanthropocene, due out August 15th, courtesy of Amalgam Music. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ANTHRODYNIA — “UNSPEAKABLE HORRORS EMANATING FROM WITHIN”

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Aug 132025
 

(written by Islander)

Anthrodynia is a new two-person band formed last year in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, uniting the talents and experience of Derek Orthner (Begrime Exemious, Azath) and Durell Smith (ex-Mahria, ex-Kuroi Jukai). Their music, as captured on their blood-congealing and blood-rushing debut album Unspeakable Horrors Emanating From Within, manifests a love for both death and doom metal and a shuddering aptitude for marrying the mauling, miserable, and supernatural qualities of those genres.

Undeniably well-named, the album will be released this Friday, August 16th, by Nameless Grave Records, but you’ll have a chance to listen to all of it through our full streaming premiere today. Continue reading »

STARLIT PYRE: “VEINS OF SULFUR”

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Aug 132025
 

(We present DGR‘s review of Veins of Sulfur, a debut EP by the French band Starlit Pyre that was released last month.)

Observing the changes and outside perspectives people bring to melodeath has often been as interesting as the permutations people make of the music itself. It’s a long-been-known quantity, and as we’ve witnessed cycles upon cycles of retrograde nostalgia and the ‘influenced by the influenced by’ crowd slowly becoming crowd-becoming forces of their own, so too does the genre change. Not necessarily evolving, but new strains are born or echo outwards into the wider metalsphere.

Given melodeath’s already pretty blatant mass-market trappings, the chosen aesthetic for some groups to approach the genre’s two-step-heavy guitar leads and thrashier rhythms to make it appear ‘refined’ qualifies for a certain amount of sense. We have grown older, so too does the genre. We’re past the days of snot-nosed kids sticking the middle finger up at a bunch of old folks in favor of an ambitious wildness and an ear for the catchy.

The calling cards that we’re following down that path are pretty recognizable as well, one being an ever-present keyboard layer in the band’s music… and the other? Well, sometimes that other one is uniforms, and French melodeath group Starlit Pyre seem to have both in spades with their July EP Veins Of Sulfur, a solid seventeen-minute block of melodeath that goes on a whirlwind tour through the genre before quietly sneaking out of the back of the room. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: PSILOCYBE LARVAE

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Aug 132025
 

(The long-running Russian band Psilocybe Larvae will release a surprising new EP on August 15th, and on the eve of that release we now present Comrade Aleks‘ interview with founding member Vitaly Belobritsky.)

Psilocybe Larvae, once one of the key teams of the Russian underground extreme scene, are confidently approaching their thirtieth anniversary. But there is still a year left before that date, so I did not expect any news from the band, and therefore I was surprised with the news about their new EP Novyi Divnyi Mir (Новый Дивный Мир/“Brave New World”).

Throughout their entire discography Psilocybe Larvae have tried different things, and in order to make life easier for themselves and the public, they defined their style as “manic-depressive metal”. This concept included a combination of melodic doom, death, and black-metal, with straightforward extreme vocals. Therefore, the material of this EP shocked me at first. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: KRIGSGRAV — “GHOSTS”

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Aug 122025
 

(written by Islander)

Let’s be honest, life is mostly a trudge from one mundane thing to another, flowered by moments of happiness, the petals soon enough fallen and stepped on by the need to keep moving — unless your shit is even worse than that and is more like one fall after another that makes you wonder how you keep getting upright, until you can’t.

Let’s be honest, this is also why so many of us search for experiences that banish the mundane, seeking our personal bouncers at life’s barroom door that won’t let the soul-draggers in. The musical banishers come in different shapes and sizes. Some just pump your heart and muscles full of electricity; some fire up your imagination; some give voice to your hurts and hopes.

Krigsgrav do all of that, and have done so for a long time. They do it again on their forthcoming eighth album, the perfectly named Stormcaller. They call it “the best album of our career thus far”, and while every long-running band says that about every new album, this claim is honesty in advertising. We have proof in the song we’re premiering today: “Ghosts“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: INFERNAL THORNS — “BLACK FLESH”

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Aug 122025
 

(written by Islander)

When I listen to music I know I’m going to write about I don’t do it the way “normal” people do (I use the term loosely because I know our usual visitors would abhor being labeled that way, and with good reason). I tend to jot down words and phrases, trying to capture what I’m feeling so I can write about it.

That didn’t happen when I listened for the first time to the Infernal Thorns song “Black Flesh“. I didn’t freeze up, but something like the opposite of freezing, caught up in the sheer flood of adrenaline in the bloodstream, marveling at the hellishness of the heat and the bolting changes, muscles twitching from all the diabolical musical barbs, and not one word jotted down.

It was so much hellish fun, such a bacchanal of barbarism, that I didn’t keep track of how many times I listened before reminding myself I needed to organize some thoughts as a way of introducing our premiere.

But fuck, I guess I just introduced our premiere. Continue reading »

ASHEN – LEAVE THE FLESH BEHIND

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Aug 122025
 

(Andy Synn continues to be the biggest advocate of Australian Death Metallers Ashen here at NCS)

Let me ask you something… do you ever feel out of step with the (music) world?

I mean, I know we all do at some time, that’s a given, but every so often something comes along to really drive home to me how the bands I want to be bigger and more successful in the Metal scene (particularly the Death Metal scene) are rarely the ones who receive the biggest push.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a bit of Undeath, Gatecreeper, and 200 Stab Wounds now and then, but I’d be much happier to see the likes of Baest (whose new album I reviewed last week), Tribal Gaze (whose upcoming second album, Inveighing Brilliance, was just announced) and Ashen receive the same level of attention.

But, let’s face it, there’s probably a reason I’m not an A&R guy, since I’m demonstrably terrible at assessing which bands are going to be the most marketable and most successful… although I’ve still got a pretty big platform here, and if I can use it to get some more of you to jump onboard the Ashen bandwagon in advance of their upcoming second album (out next week on Redefining Darkness) then I’ll consider it a job well done.

Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BRAIN DEAD — “SPEED LASER PENETRATION”

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Aug 112025
 

(written by Islander)

Prepare to put your higher faculties on hold for a few minutes. That won’t require any conscious decision on your part after you press Play below, because the song we’re about to premiere will wake up your reptile brain and light a fire under it. It will then romp and run wild and body-check your thinking mind into the wall of your skull.

The Italian satanic speed metal band responsible for this song make no pretenses. Hell, they named themselves Brain Dead! As you’ll learn for yourselves when you listen to “Speed Laser Penetration,” the music is “stripped down” and feral, nothing fancy and nothing clean, as nasty as a wolverine pack with rabies. But it’s also damned compulsive – your reptile brain will thank you – and your thinking mind will probably appreciate the break too. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LVTHN — “MOTHER OF ABOMINATIONS”

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Aug 112025
 

(written by Islander)

The abandonment of vowels doesn’t obscure the meaning of LVTHN, a plain enough reference to the titanic serpent of primeval origin, the draconic embodiment of chaos, and in Revelations a manifestation of the power of the Devil. Isaiah prophesied that this “tortuous serpent” would be destroyed by the Almighty at the end of time, but in the meantime the Belgian band LVTHN continue offering musical devotionals of revelation and ruin in the name of the Adversary.

The title of LVTHN‘s forthcoming second album, The Devil’s Bridge, emblazons their inspiration. As described on behalf of Amor Fati Productions, which will release the album on September 6th: “This is a work of devotion. A weapon of Will. A hymn to Lucifer, as light-bearer and destroyer alike…. It is music as weapon. Music as curse. Music as rite.” The bridge is both a metaphor and a a real place of experience, and on the other side the Devil awaits: “Not as myth, but as force, as initiator, as destroyer of illusions.”

We have one aspect of the architecture of this bridge in a song from the album we’re now premiering: “Mother of Abominations“. Continue reading »

OBSCURITIES – VOLUME XIX: MR. OZZY

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Aug 112025
 

(Here’s Daniel Barkasi‘s monthly NCS roundup of reviews, focusing this time on records released in July 2025.)

To begin, a quick word about the loss of one of the legends of legends in metal music. Not long after my last column for June releases, we lost Ozzy Osbourne. To say it was a surprise would be disingenuous, as his health hadn’t been great for a time. The rousing performance he and the rest of Black Sabbath gave everyone at Back to the Beginning was nothing short of stunning, a perfect sendoff for the band who is responsible for all of this.

A quick anecdote: I actually met the man, albeit very briefly. I was set to interview Silenoz of Dimmu Borgir at Ozzfest 2004. I was waiting backstage, and he was running a little behind. Lo and behold, here comes Ozzy with his entourage. He just wanted to make the rounds and say hello to people. I was lucky enough to get a brief greeting, and starstruck, I managed to thank him for making all of this possible. He just thanked me for being there, and moved on, holding court like only he could.

A blip in his day, I’m sure, but he made you feel like you were the most important person in the world for those few seconds. Silenoz came by not too long after, and I thanked him for his delay; he couldn’t have been cooler and still is one of my favorite interviews that I’ve done. The performance that evening was nothing short of brilliant, of course, and how can one complain about seeing Dimmu Borgir, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath on the same bill? Continue reading »

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