AN NCS PREMIERE: BYONOISEGENERATOR — “UVB-76”

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Apr 282025
 

(written by Islander)

If the Russian maniacs in Byonoisegenerator churned out records at the usual velocity of their music, they’d have released about 1,000 albums by now. But the pace of their releases has been much slower. First came Turbulent Biogenesis in 2015 (available here), then Neuromechanica in 2018 (reviewed here at our site), and now, seven years later, we’re going to get a third album, Subnormal Dives. It’s set for discharge on June 13th via Transcending Obscurity Records.

That seven-year wait means that many (most?) people trespassing on our site today will likely have no idea what they’re about to hear. This is a good thing. Being unprepared for what Byonoisegenerator are doing now makes it more likely that listeners’ heads will explode, and it’s fun to imagine that.

Some people do have an idea, because Byonoisegenerator released a video single about a year ago (a song named “5mgInspiredVibes” that’s included as a bonus track on the new record), and more recently Transcending Obscurity has released two other songs from Subnormal Dives. Today we’ve bringing a third one, “UVB-76“. Continue reading »

HEXEKRATION RITES: “MISANTHROPIC PATH OF CARNAL DELIVERANCE”

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Apr 282025
 

(Our Norway-based contributor Chile prepared the following vivid review of Hexekration Rites‘ debut album Misanthropic Path of Carnal Deliverance, released last week by Godz Ov War Productions.)

First things first. The listening process is never a straightforward one. There comes an album occasionally that you’d listen to once or twice, shrug and move on. Maybe you’d give it one more chance. Or not. And then sometimes comes along an album that commands your attention on the very first listen. Like putting a spell on you, stopping the thing that you’re doing. This is that album.

The French marauders in Hexekration Rites have been around for some seven years now and it says a lot about a band when it gets high praise years before them even thinking of releasing a full-length debut. Exactly this happened with their demo release and the first EP Desekration Manifesto, both getting some downright carnal love here on No Clean Singing. A recommended read and a listen, surely. Continue reading »

VOIDFALLEN: “THE RITUALS OF RESILIENCE”

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Apr 282025
 

(In February Noble Demon released a new album by the Finnish melodic death metal hellions Voidfallen. DGR held fire and allowed the album to boil through his sensorium for a while, as he often does, and he’s now ready to give us his thoughts about it.)

Like many a melodeath band in this day and age, Finland’s Voidfallen are an interesting proposition. This is a genre well-known and well-trodden with an immense body of work to its name and just as many contortions and permutations as someone could even imagine – and then some. There’s been an insane number of groups looking to put their own spin on the catchier and more glamorous side of death metal, taking its penchant for hook-heavy riff work and shred-tastic guitar soloing and continually stacking new blocks atop it or bending it to their will.

When you have regional flavorings adding to the massive subgenrification of a style, you know you’re dealing with an unruly beast, one which at this point is beyond just the territory of a devil we know and well within the realms of a devil we may have been intimate with once or twice, assuming that quiet nod and knowing wink isn’t just suggesting future adventures post-expected drunken blackout.

Noble Demon then have an intriguing idea put forth with Voidfallen‘s second album The Rituals Of Resilience. Beyond the masks and spectacle, Voidfallen are a combination of classic keyboard and guitar warrior melodeath, slamming face-first into an insane tango with the darker side of Omnium Gatherum‘s slightly more progressive flavorings. The Rituals Of Resilience has Voidfallen smashing up against the plexiglass of their chosen genre in a classic act of attempting to do what could best be defined as ‘a hell of a lot’ while still hewing hard into their foundational drawings. Continue reading »

BLOG BREAK

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Apr 272025
 

It would have made more sense to make this post on Saturday morning, but better late than never, I hope.

As frequent weekend visitors to NCS know by now, I didn’t write a SEEN AND HEARD column yesterday, and I don’t have a SHADES OF BLACK column today. On Friday I flew from Seattle to my hometown of Austin, Texas for a class reunion. As I write this, I’m in the Austin airport waiting for the return flight.

I thought I might have time to write at least short versions of the two weekend columns while I was in Austin, but when I wasn’t hanging out into the wee hours with a lot of old friends, many of whom I haven’t seen in ages, I was dead asleep in my silent hotel room with blackout curtains drawn, late to bed and late to rise. It was a luxury that I decided to indulge to the fullest. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DISPYT — “FRÅN MELANKOLI TILL MENINGSLÖSHET”

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Apr 252025
 

(Andy Synn steps in as a last minute substitute to host our premiere of the new album by Dispyt)

Up until about… let’s call it 24 hours ago… I thought I was done writing here for the week.

Unfortunately our great and glorious leader – who was originally intending to share his thoughts about Från melankoli till meningslöshet, the upcoming third album by filthy Finnish riff-mongers Dispyt (out 29 April) – ran into a few difficulties and was struggling to find time to put his thoughts into words here for us all to gorge upon.

And so, heroically and without hesitation, I volunteered my services… after all, I’ve been a fan of the band ever since I stumbled across their debut album, Den ständigt närvarande ångesten, more years ago than I care to think about, so who better to give them their due?

Continue reading »

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

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Apr 242025
 

(written by Islander)

We don’t need to be mind-readers to fathom why Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger named his new project and its debut album Changeling. Like the legend from European folklore, it has the musical presence of a supernatural shape-shifter whose diabolical essence diverged from the shapes that disguised it in place of the humans spirited away — except there’s no real disguise here, because the music strikingly and abundantly seems well beyond the capabilities of base-level humans.

Changeling is an entirely fitting name, but Fountainhead might also have chosen the name Phileas Fogg, the adventurous creation of Jules Verne who accepted a wager to go Around the World in Eighty Days. That idea comes to mind because the album, in its many changing escapades, in some ways does seem like a globe-spanning, head-spinning tour by ground, air, water, and subterranean passages, spanning different cultures, different sights, and different dangers.

Except this grand tour will only take you an hour, an hour very well spent, as you’ll discover today through our complete premiere of Changeling in advance of its April 25th release by Season of Mist. Continue reading »

FLESHBORE: “PAINTED PARADISE”

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Apr 242025
 

(January releases sometimes get overlooked. DGR doesn’t want that to happen in the case of the new album from Indiana’s Fleshbore, which Transcending Obscurity Records brought us in the first month of this year, and he explains why at length below.)

February brought us a new release in the tech-death world from Indiana’s Fleshbore. Painted Paradise is only the group’s second album but already has them on a strong trajectory. The issue for the band right now is that they’re competing in an incredibly crowded and flush sphere of the musical world and at such a time in which even a genre like tech-death, long known as being the swirling mass of instrumental craziness, has long since codified into something fairly recognizable.

We have labels that even specialize in this sort of thing and, depending on which one a band is on, you could even guess with about eighty percent accuracy as to what they sound like based on that idea alone. Painted Paradise, then, is an interesting release because it is an album where you can understand almost immediately why someone would want to throw their weight behind it.

One of the biggest challenges for a modern day tech-death group is differentiating themselves within the wider genre-sphere and escaping the wall-of-notes stereotype or the rapidly shifting guitar dynamic that often has parts quickly devolving into auditory mud. Yet somehow – even with a healthy dose of influence worship – Fleshbore do so on Painted Paradise, but the bigger question of how may take a little more explanation than what an opening segment may allow. Continue reading »

ZMARŁYM – WIELKIE ZANIKANIE

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Apr 242025
 

(Find out why the new album from Zmarłym is one of Andy Synn‘s favourites of the year so far)

I may catch a little bit of flack for this… but… from my perspective the first third (since we’re almost a third of the way through the year now) of 2025 has been kind of slow, musically speaking.

I’m not saying it’s been a bad year, by any means, and if it’s been working for you then that’s not a bad thing either, but for me 2025 so far feels like a bit of a step down from 2024 (and 2023, and so on), with a lot of the “big” names or highly hyped new releases just coming across as “ok”.

That being said, there have definitely been a few notable stand-outs (some of which I’ve been able to write about and review here), and a lot more potential highlights to look forward to, so I wouldn’t exactly say we should be ready to write off the whole year just yet.

Especially when we’ve got bands like Zmarłym putting out such a distinct, dynamic, and deviously unorthodox take on Black Metal with their recently-released second album, Wielkie Zanikanie.

Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: OMINOUS RUIN — “ETERNAL”

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Apr 232025
 

(written by Islander)

After a run of short releases beginning in 2011, the Bay Area band Ominous Ruin released a debut album in 2021 via Willowtip Records, Amidst Voices That Echo in Stone, that quickly attracted a lot of enthusiastic attention. As our own DGR wrote in his NCS review, “The band’s sound is one of multiple extreme genres in all-out combat with each other, fully unloading from the hyperactive Tech Death scene even as it drains the arsenal from a very Brutal Death inspired segment as well.” But he also highlighted the even further progressions that the album included as it moved forward, becoming more labyrinthine, more ominous, more unpredictable.

And now Ominous Ruin are returning, again on the Willowtip label, with their sophomore album Requiem. No less technically impressive or brutally bludgeoning than their debut, it nevertheless represents a noticeable evolution, providing an even more expansive array of sensations and moods (including ambient and acoustic passages) in a way that makes the album even more emotionally involving — and mind-bending — than their first one.

This was evident in the first video/single off the album, “Staring Into the Abysm,” and today we have further compelling evidence in our premiere of Ominous Ruin‘s video for the song “Eternal“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BRÜKA — “ENVY THE LIFELESS”

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Apr 232025
 

(written by Islander)

Last September the Central Texas black metal band Brüka released their debut album Death’s Promise in cooperation with Khaoszophy Records and Pest Productions. Usually powered by viscerally propulsive rhythms and fronted by scalding vocal ferocity, it provides a twisting and turning experience.

At times the album provides sweeping melodic ice-storms in the vein of Dissection and Emperor, bleak and daunting but expansive, creating keyboard-enhanced soundscapes that engulf listeners, albeit with attention-grabbing bass nuances and vivid drum variations. At other times, the music attacks with barbaric savagery and monstrous death-metal roars, with maniacally boiling fretwork and earth-shaking cannonades.

At still other times, Brüka let the music extravagantly ring (and warp) like hellish and hallucinatory chimes or to become soft, mysterious, and elegantly haunting before exploding in feral and fierce attacks.

And then there’s the song “Envy the Lifeless“, which is the subject of the video we’re premiering today and a vivid sign of just how varied Death’s Promise is. Continue reading »

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