AN NCS “PREMIERE”: NOOTHGRUSH — “USELESS”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Oct 012026
 

(written by Islander)

My introduction to Oakland’s Noothgrush came in 2011 via Southern Lord’s The Power of the Riff tour, a limited run of west coast dates that marked the band’s return after splitting up in 2001 (and their first show in Seattle since 1997). What I wrote about that show (here) was my best effort to explain the impact of the music:

Imagine this: You’re chained in an iron receptacle, and through vents in the bottom, hot paving tar slowly flows in. Inexorably, at a glacial pace, it covers your feet, it climbs up your legs, it reaches and passes the part of your body that does all the thinking, it covers your abdomen and your chest, your arms strain at their chains and you scream as the tar boils the flesh away until it reaches the empty cavity on top of your shoulders and pours into your ears, mouth, and nose, suffocating you in a blistering black agony. Your last sensations are the smell of your own incinerating flesh and the shrieking chants of this band’s vocalist…. Sick, sloooooow, sludgy, and ultimately irresistible.

The band Pelican, who performed later the same night, posted this on their Facebook page right about the time Noothgrush finished their set: “Good lord, Noothgrush are heavier than a knapsack full of anvils.”

Hell yes they were. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SINISTRUM — “SCOURGE AWAKENED”

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Oct 012026
 

(written by Islander)

We welcome the Kentucky extreme metal band Sinistrum to our menacing and morbid halls for the first time today, and it’s long past time that we did that.

They have an experienced lineup that includes members of acts including Fornicus and Kentucky death metal veterans Abominant. They made their first mark in 2022 with the three-song demo/EP Trichotomy of Death, and then followed that with their debut full-length, Infernal Dawn, released in February 2024 through Adirondack Black Mass and Morbid and Miserable Records. Now they’re preparing for the November release of their second album, the aptly named The Hammer of Conquest, via Remorseless Records.

This new album is what woke us up to Sinistrum. It’s accurately described as a musical conjunction of death metal brutality, black metal savagery, and flashes of thrashing, riff-driven aggression. It’s also the first work of a revised lineup that features lead vocalist and drummer Scott Briggs, guitarist and vocalist Timmie Ball, guitarist and vocalist Matthew Smith, and bassist Mike May.

As a pulse-pounding, soul-shuddering, and quite quickly addictive sign of what The Hammer of Conquest brings to the table, today we’re premiering an album track named “Scourge Awakened“. Continue reading »

OBSCURITIES – VOLUME XXXII: 99.130%… GUILTY

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Oct 012026
 

(Here is a new monthly roundup of album reviews by Daniel Barkasi, which includes recommendations for six albums released in September 2026.)

With the fall season having officially started, the cool air has been refreshing. With that comes the start of football season – well, no, the other kind of football for this fella. The one that’s played with your feet that aligns with the name. You can have your throwball.

The big news, besides the kicking off the club game – it’ll be an interesting tale for my beloved Liverpool, though technically undefeated – was the very long awaited news about the accusations against Manchester City and their famed 115 charges of financial doping, irregularities, fake sponsorships, and a couple other things: they were reported to have been found guilty on 114 of them. This investigation was conducted by an independent commission to ensure neutrality, and their findings may somehow be worse than anticipated. Continue reading »

SRPNTS: “SECOND SHAPE”

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Sep 302026
 

(This is Daniel Barkasi’s review of a debut album by the German occult black metal band SRPNTS, which will be released on October 2nd by Serpent Sun Records.)

Discovery is at the heart of what makes our music-craving juices flow, for this scribe anyway. There’s always the insufferable “nothing good came out since 1991” curmudgeons, but to the truly initiated, the current day is quite an exciting, and sometimes overwhelming, time to be in the thick of the near constant barrage of quality music that comes our way most weeks. While plenty of the best musical moments do come from acts that we’re already familiar with, sometimes that thrill comes from a completely fresh entity that couldn’t have been predicted.

With that in mind, enter SRPNTS. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: JÖJJÖN — “MUTABILITY”

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Sep 302026
 

(written by Islander)

Obviously, we host a lot of premieres here — we’ve done so almost every weekday for many years. The point, of course, is to introduce people to new music they haven’t heard before that we’re inspired to support. But our tradition of premieres holds the same benefit for us — it introduces us to music we haven’t heard before, and even more than that, to bands we haven’t previously discovered.

In the case of this premiere, it has introduced us to the intriguing Hungarian black metal band jöjjön (the solo work of Zsolt Sipeki). Jöjjön has already released two albums, Faust’s Grave in 2022 and Stoic Neurotic in 2024, but those eluded our attention. And now jöjjön has readied a third album, Szelet Vet, which will be released via Bandcamp on November 6th.

This new one we have discovered in a timely fashion, thanks to the invitation to premiere a song from Szelet Vet named “Mutability“. It is an entirely captivating piece of music, and the album’s thematic conception and lyrical composition is equally eloquent and enthralling, as you’re about to discover. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NYRAK — “THE SATURNALIA PROPHECY”

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Sep 302026
 

(written by Islander)

The Belgian progressive black metal band Nyrak has enjoyed what we can fairly call a meteoroic ascent. It did not exist until late 2021, when it was founded by Guy “Nevel” Van Nieuwenhove as a solo studio project, but in relatively short order Nyrak released their debut album Malvs in 2022, expanded into a full band and released their second album Devourer Of All in 2024, and in 2025 released both the Faceless Tyrant EP and a third album, Phoenix Mortis. Moreover, Nyrak toured the UK and Europe in support of that most recent album.

And yet Nyrak’s meteor continues soaring, apparently unhindered by gravity wells, because on November 26th of this year Void Wanderer Productions will release yet another Nyrak album, a new one named Empires of Ash. We were fortunate to host the premiere of a song from Phoenix Mortis last year, and we get the chance to do the same for Empires of Ash as we now present the new album’s opening song, “The Saturnalia Prophecy“, in cooperation with Black Metal Streams. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT (PART 199): HIPPOTRAKTOR

 THE SYNN REPORT  No Responses »
Sep 302026
 

Recommended for fans of: Hacride, The Ocean, Benea Reach

As the person who’s largely been responsible for featuring Hippotraktor here in the past, it only made sense for me to be the one to write about their upcoming third album, Annihilist, which comes out this Friday.

And when I realised that this might well be the first time some listeners are encountering the band (the fact that they’ve been announced for this year’s Damnation Festival here in the UK has certainly helped increase their exposure too) it only made sense to pull together what I’d previously written, give it a bit of a tweak and polish, and then add some (hopefully) useful thoughts and insights about the new album, and call it this month’s edition of The Synn Report.

So if you like your music proggy-yet-punchy, complex-yet-catchy, heavily down-tuned but hauntingly melodic, then you should probably get to reading (and listening) all about these bombastic Belgians.

Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: PAARA — “KYLMÄÄN KYLÄÄN”

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Sep 292026
 

(written by Islander)

We have a very unusual song for you in this premiere, one that will carry listeners through a variety of sensations and musical traditions (some much older than others), and one whose head-spinning and heart-pounding experiences are vitally connected to the band’s inspirations and ambitions for the album that includes it.

That album, Laulut tulen ja jään, is the third full-length from the Finnish band Paara, and it will be released by the Dusktone label on October 30th. Once again, it reflects Paara’s sense of place and of history, vitally connected to the brutal yet beautiful landscapes of the cold North they call home and the dark myths spawned there, but the album has other meanings as well, as Paara explain:

Laulut tulen ja jään is an allegory for death, depression and loss. In simplicity it’s a hero’s journey – war breaks, our hero needs to end the suffering and heads out to face death in the underworld. The album paints a dark picture of this mythic North with gods of old. You could also say that the album is esoteric, because it’s filled with hidden meanings, mythology and folktales. So, it’s more complex than what it first seems. It beckons for the listener to come back and dig deeper.

What we have for you today is the premiere of a Finnish-language lyric video for a song from the new album nbamed “Kylmään kylään“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: URNA — “DREAM DEATH, TOWARDS REBIRTH”

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Sep 292026
 

(written by Islander)

On October 16th ATMF will release a new album named The Great Jihad by the Italian esoteric extreme metal band Urna. It is Urna’s fifth album since the band’s inception in 2003 but their first one since ATMF released Mors Principium Est thirteen years ago. Obviously, Urna’s creation of the new album has been quite a journey, especially since early demos for songs on the new album were already taking shape in the early period after the last album’s release. We’re further told that the album was recoded through multiple sessions between 2014 and 2025, across Italy and the United Kingdom.

Urna’s lineup for The Great Jihad is a new one. In addition to founders RM and MZ it includes Sibilans (Anamnesi, Simulacro) on drums and T (Sangue Nero) on bass. It is also the first Urna album with lyrics entirely in English (with the exception of their 2003 debut Justa Funebria, originally performed in Italian, the band’s releases have traditionally employed Latin).

The album also has an unusual and deeply thought-out conceptual perspective, one summarized as follows:

In esoteric and mystical Islamic traditions (such as Sufism), the phrase “The Greater Jihad” (Jihad al-Nafs) refers strictly to the internal spiritual battle—the struggle against one’s own base desires, ego, and illusions to purify the heart and align with the divine. The entire record has been framed around this concept, defining RM’s continuous internal spiritual journey through Hermetic philosophy, Kabbalah, Buddism, and more.

The music has also evolved, and we have a striking example of that evolution in the album track we’re premiering today, “Dream Death, Towards Rebirth“. Continue reading »

SPIRIT POSSESSION – CATHEDRAL SPEECH

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Sep 292026
 

(Andy Synn prepares to worship at the altar of Spirit Possession, whose new album is out on Friday)

Allow me to begin this review with a semi-spoiler, if I may?

Because, if nothing changes between now and December, there’s a very high likelihood that Spirit Possession‘s third album will be taking one of the highly-coveted slots in this year’s “Critical Top Ten”.

But, then, something like that has been on the cards for the Portland-based pairing of Steve Peacock (vocals/guitar) and Ash Spungin (drums) ever since their self-titled 2020 debut, with the subsequent release of 2023’s stunning Of the Sign… only serving to expose even more people to the band’s riveting and instantly recognisable blend of frenzied, finger-picked riffage and equally frenetic, effortlessly fluid, drum work.

And now, with the imminent release of Cathedral Speech, it feels as though the dynamic duo are, finally, right on the verge of being accepted as true masters of the black arts.

Continue reading »

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