NO CLEAN SINGING

HAPPY 16TH BIRTHDAY TO US!

Nov 212025

(written by Islander)

For another year, our 16th overall, we’ve raced through the ongoing firestorms of heavy new music without being thrown off and trampled, and so it’s time to celebrate survival again.

On November 21, 2009, I made the first post at this blog (other than a 2-line placeholder thing on November 12th). On the 21st day of every November since then (except one year when I forgot to do it until a few days later) I’ve made a post commemorating our birthday. (If you’re curious to see how everything started, and what our starting goals and principles were, find that first post in 2009 here.)

In these annual posts I used to explain how I had no ambitions or expectations when I started the blog, nor any training or experience as a music writer, and that the sum total of my motivation was to create an enjoyable diversion for myself from the grind of daily life, and to indulge my burgeoning interest in heavy music. And there, I just did it again, albeit in fewer words than in some earlier years.

In these annual observances I also tended to reminisce about how many things about NCS have changed from the early days, and about how surprising it is to me that we’re still here. Some of you remember the early days, because you were here with us then. Others who have begun checking in here more recently might yawn if I indulged in that kind of nostalgia, so once again I’m going to skip that and get right into expressions of gratitude and the annual tradition of mind-numbing statistics. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: SECOND TO SUN

Interviews No Responses »

Nov 202025

(Today we present Comrade Aleks’ wide-ranging interview of the very busy Russian musician and producer Vladimir Lehtinen, and we’ll let Aleks introduce it.)

Vladimir Lehtinen is a one-man army, as he has managed not only to rule one of the most prolific and exemplary Russian black metal bands, Second to Sun, but also stay as one of the organizers of an annual festival of extreme music known as T’ma Fest (Darkness Fest) and to keep on working as a sound engineer who has mixed and mastered dozens of metal albums.

Second to Sun remains Vladimir’s main outfit, and together with Theodor Borovski (drums) and the Sysoev brothers from cult bands Grima and Ultar, he manages to keep the balance between quality and the quantity of music he produces. The band’s most up-to-date release is the EP Thunderbolt, which you may have heard as it was out in February 2025; yet you need no special reason to make an interview with such a man, as Vladimir, being deeply involved in the underground, has a lot to tell. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: ASIRA / FALSE REALITY / GNASCH

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Nov 202025

(Andy Synn presents another terrific trio of albums from the UK underground)

I’m going to level with you, I’m running out of time… I’ve got recording to finish off, my annual work review coming up, and then I’m off on my mini-honeymoon at the start of December… and I still haven’t properly started work on my yearly round-up of all the “Great”, “Good”, and “Disappointing” albums of the year.

But that’s not stopping me trying to highlight as many examples of the “Best of British” as I can before the year is out, and today I’ve got a killer mix of “blackened” Prog, Metallic Hardcore, and nasty Sludge that should appeal to a variety of tastes.

So, without further ado…

TUMBLEWEED DEALER: “DARK GREEN”

Album Reviews No Responses »

Nov 202025

(Our site has had a long and warm relationship with the Canadian musician Seb Painchaud, whose year-end lists have always provided eclectic cornucopias of music for all of us to investigate. His band Tumbleweed Dealer released a fascinating new album way back in February of this year, an album that really needed the unusual voice of Vizzah Harri to express a review of it — which at last he has managed to do. It was worth the wait.)

Sometimes if we don’t carefully watch our daily intake of the ‘terribles’ online, it can seem a bit too much Everything Everywhere All At Once (warning, flashing images). It is good to keep oneself updated if any online life or profile exists because outside of our daily intake of horror, two pretty big leaks of personal data happened over the space of about 8 months. The Internet Archive (NPR link) was one, and on Saturday June 21st this one got confirmed too. It’s an AP link, not an attempt to hack you.

You won’t exactly need a machete to hack your way into the shadowy thickets of marshy vegetation when imagining the source material; but Tumbleweed Dealer’s album Dark Green pays tribute to one of the greatest pieces of fiction stemming from the 20th century, Swamp Thing.

Now that I’ve primed your frame of reference with the perils of the internet and mentioned horror at least once, well, Alan Moore is known amongst other things as having been the mind behind the resurgence of said comic book back in 1987. It is available to borrow or buy on the internet archives (it is probably safe by now) and Moore’s introduction to The Saga of the Swamp Thing has some passages that are worth sharing here for still being applicable in today’s climate, and also regarding the record being discussed: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SEDNA — “SILA NUNA”

Album Reviews, Premieres No Responses »

Nov 192025

(written by Islander)

Based on photographs, Cesena looks like a pretty place. A small city of roughly 100,000 people, it’s near the Apennine Mountains in Italy and about 15 kilometres (9 miles) from the Adriatic Sea on the east coast of the country toward the north. Of course, like every other place in Italy it has an extensive history, and its old architecture reflects that.

Cesena is home to the genre-bending black metal band Sedna. They have a new album that will be released in two days by the Dusktone label. The name of the album is Sila Nuna, a compound word of ancient origin that means “Sky and Earth”. But the language isn’t one of the many that have been spoken over time in the area of Cesena, or anywhere else in Italy. And you probably can’t guess what that language is, because it is so unexpected. Continue reading »

BORE – FERAL

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Nov 192025

(Andy Synn has gone Feral… and thinks you should too)

My love of Hardcore (mostly of the more “Metallic” variety) has been well-documented by now.

After all, many of my earliest, and longest-lasting, musical loves had their roots in Hardcore, and many of the genre’s ideals (or, at least, what I still think of as the genre’s ideals) – of promoting community and collaboration, of building bonds and breaking down boundaries – are ones which still resonate with me today.

That being said, I’d never claim to be an expert on the current state of “the scene”… I’ve always been a bit of an outsider, truth be told, and rarely do I have any idea what (or who) is currently cool (or not), which means I’m often late to the party (if I even get invited at all).

For once, however, I feel like I’ve got my finger if not smack-dab on the pulse (today’s band already have a couple of EPs and splits to their name prior to this release) then at least pretty close to it considering that Bore‘s debut album, Feral, was released just last week but is already making some well-deserved waves.

CENTINEX: “WITH GUTS AND GLORY”

Album Reviews No Responses »

Nov 192025

(We present DGR’s lively review of the 12th album by the Swedish death metal band Centinex, recently released by Black Lion Records.)

If the smoking rubble of the American public school system and, by some extent given how intertwined they are nowadays, Google A.I., are to be believed, then a famous playwright once wrote that “brevity is the soul of wit”. But, a curious idea arises in reading the quote as literally as possible, and a new quest alights as the result:

Is there wit to be found in something that exists solely for being brief? Are the attempted jokes and madcap hilarity of many-a-plug-and-play grind bands secretly the funniest things metal has to offer? Is there something of wit to be found in an album that has shown itself to be surprisingly and unexpectedly short? Is there wit to be found in that unexpectedly short romp in what might feasibly be some of the purposefully dumbest music put to record?

The Swede-death stomp, writ large, has been the proprietor of hundreds of markedly stupid circle pits, a lowbrow artistic effort of high reward in the unleashing of rotational energy, and the revivalism of the last decade of “old school death metal” has seen the dead walk anew; bands returning from long trips to farms upstate or groups who’ve been in the game for a while yet playing a different subgenre of metal’s increasingly fractalized musical tree declaring to the world “we can make that bullshit too!” and succeeding for the most part. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): LOCUSTS AND HONEY — “SHADOW OF MY END”

Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET No Responses »

Nov 182025

(written by Islander)

The London band Locusts and Honey released their 28-minute debut record in May 2024. Its title was interesting (and still is): Teach Me to Live That I Dread the Grave as Little as My Bed. It was “inspired by the bog bodies of Ireland and Denmark – people of the Iron Age who were sacrificially hanged and found extremely well-preserved in peat.” They described it as “a meditation on death and living well.”

That debut release was the work of a duo — composer and instrumentalist Tomás Robertson and vocalist/lyricist Stephen Murray. Since then the lineup has expanded to five members, and the quintet now have a new EP scheduled for release on November 21st by Toronto-based Hypaethral Records. The title of this one is Shadow of My End. Its inspiration, as described by Stephen Murray, is also interesting: Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: SLAUGHTERDAY

Interviews No Responses »

Nov 182025

(The German death metal band Slaughterday signed with a new label, Testimony Records, and their first release for Testimony (which will be out on November 21st) turns out to be something different from what you might expect. We’ll let Zoltar explain, just before he dives into a discussion with Slaughterday bassist/guitarist Jens Finger.)

When former Obscenity guitar player Jens Finger caught up with his old friend Bernd Reiners to go see Autopsy play at the Party San Festival on August 13th 2010, the pair quickly realized that the song title “Slaughterday“ off the classic Mental Funeral album performed that night would make a great band name.

Since then, besides setting a live line-up to play shows around their native Germany, the two have laid out four great albums of doomish old school death metal in between 2013 and 2022. After over a decade on FDA Records, Slaughterday have just signed a brand-new contract with Testimony Records (Deserted Fear, Carnal Tomb, Leper Colony). Yet, as suggested by its cover artwork (a spoof of the mighty Horrified album), the very first result of this new alliance ain’t exactly what you would have expected from those guys.

Instead of their usual downtuned catchy style, Terrified turns out to be a four-tracks, nine minutes, in-your-face grindcore EP, but the kind of grindcore only metalheads raised in the ’80s on a severe diet of thrash metal and hardcore/crust could really muster. We caught up with Jens, who handles guitar and bass in the studio, to see if this was just a spur of the moment thing or an indication of a sudden change of heart… Continue reading »

PHOBOCOSM – GATEWAY

Album Reviews No Responses »

Nov 182025

(Andy Synn enters the gateway… and likes what he finds there)

One of the biggest issues, for any band at any level, is finding a way to stand out from the crowd.

I’m not saying that every band has to be totally unique by any means – hell, there’s an argument to be made that the more “mainstream” side of the scene actively favours bands all sounding the same way (that’s how trends work, after all) – but, at some point, you have to have at least something distinctive to offer, right?

It’s an issue that Canadian catastrophists Phobocosm have been dealing with from the beginning, as the sound they’ve chosen – although perhaps “chosen” isn’t the right word, as it’s clearly more of a “compulsion” than a conscious choice – is one that sits smack-bang in the middle of the increasingly crowded and intensely contested sonic territory between Immolation and Ulcerate… two bands who cast some very long shadows indeed.

But while the influence of these two seminal acts has continued to loom large over Phobocosm throughout their career – beginning with their 2014 debut, Deprived, and then continuing to make its presence felt on 2016’s Bringer of Drought (a personal favourite of mine that year) and 2023’s Foreordained – the band have stubbornly persevered, refusing to divert from their chosen path in an attempt to assert their mastery over this particular brand of dense, dissonant, and doom-laden Death Metal through sheer force of will.

And now, with the upcoming release of Gateway, we get to see them take their next step towards domination.

Older Entries Newer Entries