SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: FROST, EXCAVATED GRAVES, DWELLNOUGHT, A LIGHT WITHIN, GROS ENFANT MORT, NEON SCAFFOLD

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jan 032026
 

(written by Islander)

Here we have the first Saturday NCS roundup of new songs and videos in 2026. It’s a temporal and stylistic mix of things. Temporally, some of it is from records released in 2025 and some from releases slated to happen this year. Stylistically, it will jump you around like popcorn kernels getting hot, including one new song and video that’s well outside our usual musical focus and a closing selection that’s beyond categorization.

I don’t expect everyone to enjoy everything I’ve assembled here, even though I do. That would be too much to expect. I do hope you’ll find at least one thing to brighten your day (i.e., to darken it like a storm cloud). Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HARROWED — “BLOOD COVENANT”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jan 022026
 

(written by Islander)

I suppose I should make one thing clear right up front: The song we’re about to premiere is from a forthcoming album by the Swedish death metal band Harrowed, not the British metallic hardcore band Harrowed about whom our Andy Synn has sung praises here a couple times in the past.

The Harrowed that’s our focus today has an enticing pedigree, featuring as it does guitarist Tobias Alpadie, who has spent time in VAK and previously as a member of Tribulation’s live lineup (among other things), and vocalist/drummer Adam Lindmark, a member of Morbus Chron before their dissolution. Harrowed’s live lineup now also includes bassist Dag Landin (ex-Morbus Chron, Tøronto) and guitarist Estefan Carrillo (Hazemaze, Morbid Breath).

What’s coming our way in February is Harrowed’s debut album The Eternal Hunger, previewed on behalf of their label (Dying Victims Productions) as “a twisted mass of putrid filth, incorporating elements of old-school American and Scandinavian death metal, a lethal dose of punk riffage, and mind-bending weirdness (and even some shattered shards of skewed melody, if we’re counting).” That’s enticing too, isn’t it? Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2025’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 1): CORONER, NITE, PIECE

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2025  3 Responses »
Jan 022026
 

(written by Islander)

Today we begin the final part of the annual NCS LISTMANIA orgy:

This particular series isn’t about best albums or best shorter releases, and it isn’t even about best songs. As the title says, it’s about “most infectious” songs. Some of those might be among the year’s best songs, but in every year there are stand-out songs that aren’t immediately infectious, and actually might never be. Conversely, there are some highly infectious songs every year that most people wouldn’t critically acclaim as great works of art.

The process of compiling this list, as in every previous year, is a bit bizarre, or at least very poorly planned. Let me explain (again): Continue reading »

ULVER – NEVERLAND

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Jan 022026
 

(Andy Synn begins another new year here at NCS with a new album by an old favourite)

The turning of the year is all about change, about rebirth and renewal… and if one band’s career has epitomised all of these things it’s that of Black Metal’s very own “lost boys”, Ulver.

That being said, as someone who’s been a fan of the band for a long time (especially since they fell out of the Black Metal pram and landed somewhere much stranger), the group’s last couple of albums (Drone Activity excluded) have – in my opinion, at least – fallen into a bit of a creative rut, with their attempts to follow in the footsteps of 2017’s fantastic, career redefining, The Assassination of Julius Caesar resulting in increasingly diminishing returns.

Thankfully, however, if history has taught us anything about Ulver it’s that they’re never too far from another stylistic shift, and with the start of a new year comes the start of yet another new era for the band.

Or does it?

Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A NEW YEAR’S DAY: KARLOFF, TOMBSEEKER, HEXER, 1986, KATHAREIN, HURSAN

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jan 012026
 


Seattle Space Needle in the fog, Dec. 31, 2025, photo by Akash Pamarthy for The Seattle Times

(written by Islander)

Yesterday a newsletter I subscribe to (“This, Not That“) compiled quotations by many famous writers about New Year’s Day and the ending of the previous year, some of them humorous, some of them depressing, some of them wise. One of the quotes, by Charles Lamb, seemed to sum up all the others: “No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference.”

I’m certainly not indifferent. I’m determined… determined not to let the day go by without posting here about new music, notwithstanding the likelihood that many people are too hungover or sleep-deprived to wreck their heads with our preferred sonics today. It’s a compulsion of long standing, one that has resulted in our making some kind of music post 365 days a year, or close to that, with fewer than a dozen missed days over the 16+ years of our site’s existence.

As it always does, the new year of heavy music won’t waste much time taking off and achieving orbit velocity. We’ve already seen and spotlighted lots of songs from albums slated for release in the new year’s first quarter, and more will begin surfacing at an accelerated rate after this relatively slow week ends. I’ve picked an array of recent surfacings in this New Year’s Day column.

But, for better or worse, we haven’t completely finished reflecting in other ways on the music that 2025 brought us, including a few of today’s picks. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT (PART 190): JOURS PÂLES

 THE SYNN REPORT  4 Responses »
Dec 312025
 

Recommended for fans of: Heretoir, Harakiri For The Sky, Gaerea

Well, here we are everyone, the very last post of the year… before we begin all over again tomorrow.

And it’s fitting that the last post of 2025 gets to be another edition of The Synn Report, as this series of articles was always intended to mark the transition from one month to another… or, in this case, from one year to the next.

I will say, however, that it is absolutely shocking to me that this is the first time we’re writing at any real length about prolific French “Post” Black Metal project Jours Pâles, as while we may have mentioned them here and there before (including just recently in my end-of-year round-up) the timing has just never been right for us to give them the attention they’ve so clearly deserved.

But now, at last, it’s time to change that.

So if you like your music rich in both blackened intensity and moody melodic energy – their most recent album, Résonances, in particular has some serious late-90’s/early-00’s era Dark Tranquillity vibes to it – all topped off with a blend of heart-wrenching emotional highs and immersive, introspective lows which owe a fair bit, in my estimation, to the viscerality and vulnerability of Punk/Hardcore, then you might just be about to discover your new favourite band.

Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: GRAUFAR — “VIA NECROPOLIS”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Dec 312025
 

(written by Islander)

Everything that happens today will be the last this or the last that or the last that other thing that happens in 2025. This is the last NCS premiere of 2025, and it’s a very good one.

To help ring out 2025 and to help ring in the New Year we’re premiering the first single and the title track from a new Graufar album named Via Necropolis. We present it with a lyric video that includes live footage of the band’s performances filmed across 9 different shows, including Wacken Open Air Festival.

Graufar, whose name is an old German word for the color “grey”, are a relatively new group but have quickly achieved some notoriety. Founded in 2020 in Linza, Austria, they released their debut album Scordalus in 2024 and in that same year won Wacken Metal Battle Austria and went on to place ninth in the international finals at Wacken Open Air. The forthcoming second album builds on these foundations. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2025: A YEAR-END LIST FROM THE GOAT TAVERN

 LISTMANIA 2025  5 Responses »
Dec 312025
 

(Last May we published an excellent interview of the Polish band Polish band Wędrowcy~Tułacze~Zbiegi by a metal enthusiast with some roots in Poland but based in the UK whose moniker is The Goat Tavern. With that as our introduction, today, as part of our 2025 LISTMANIA series, we’re sharing The Goat Tavern’s year-end list of 25 favorite albums. To follow The Goat Tavern, go here and here.)

Whenever it’s time to look back at the year that’s just passed, I always face the laborious task of selecting the albums that have tickled me the most and the ones I think are worth a special shout-out. I try to take different things into account but, in the end, it’s the emotions that matter to me in the first place.

Extreme metal is in a fantastic place at the moment. Each year brings more and more astonishing albums and 2025 was no different. The variety and range of music within the metal scene is overwhelming and it might be a real battle to follow everything that’s coming out.

This year, I selected 25 full-length releases that I consider my favourite ones that I’ve been listening to the most this year. The definite majority involves black metal and, this year, the list has been dominated (again!) by Polish bands.

I hope you can find something new there that you like. Enjoy! Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2025: A YEAR-END LIST FROM JOHAN HULDTGREN (OBITUS)

 LISTMANIA 2025  2 Responses »
Dec 302025
 

(For the 15th year in a row, our friend Johan Huldtgren of the Swedish black metal band Obitus (find them here and here) has again allowed us to share with you his year-end Top 10 list, originally presented on Johan’s own music blog here.)

Lists like this are always somewhat arbitrary, it’s ten releases I picked, from the longer list of albums I liked, whittled down from albums I’ve heard, released in 2025. Often times which get picked and which get left off is mood dependent, and that is only the albums which I’ve heard; experience has taught me that I will sometime down the road find albums released this year which could easily have made the list. As at least a few of the releases below I’ve not seen on other lists published here, I hope you find something you enjoy which you may otherwise have missed. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DENOMINATE — “LIMINAL”

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Dec 302025
 

(written by Islander)

The Finnish band Denominate have been on an increasingly fascinating musical journey as they’ve moved from release to release over the last decade. In one sense, they’ve always been a death metal band, but they’ve been consistently exploratory since the advent of their 2015 debut EP, Realms of Confusion, and their music is now best described as progressive death metal.

Our last encounter with them was in the context of their second full-length in 2020, Isochron, reviewed here by our Andy Synn. Even then, Andy highlighted the band’s prog-metal magic in an album that had its fair share of ingredients from the realms of technical death metal.

And now Denominate are returning with a third album, Restoration, which represents the culmination (to date) of their adventurous evolutions. It still displays a lot of eye-opening technical skill and includes a fair share of ravaging attacks, but it’s also the most multifaceted (and prog-inclined) release by Denominate so far, one in which captivating melodies and atmospheric passages play prominant roles — as you’ll learn for yourselves through our premiere of a stunning second single from the album today. Continue reading »

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