Attention metal sophisticates and other souls in search of nuance and meticulously stitched musical finery: The door is over there. Please show ourselves out before we turn on the hellfire furnace. Those who don’t mind reveling in a bestial orgy with the hot fumes of sulphur in your nostrils and Abysmal Lord‘s teeth in your throat, make yourselves right at home.

Yes indeed, four years after their Disciples of the Inferno debut album, and following on from their 2018 split with Crurifragium, this New Orleans-based war command is returning with a new full-length — and it could hardly have been better-named: Exaltation of the Infernal Cabal. In addition to exalting the powers of hell, the music also fulfills the other meaning of that initial word — it’s exultant. Although it is a berserker form of ecstasy that explodes from the speakers, for the right kind of reveler, the album’s over-the-top mayhem is fiendishly contagious.

As a prime example of the album’s nuclear-strength depravity, we present “Nuclear Absolution” in advance of the record’s August 16 release by Hells Headbangers. Continue reading »

Louisiana’s Abysmal Lord chose well when they named their debut EP Storms of Unholy Black Mass. The five songs on this forthcoming release deliver an unstoppable deluge of massively destructive blackened death metal, a bestial onslaught that vividly creates an atmosphere of pestilence and unholy malignance. Yet the music is more than merely ruinous in its intent and effect. The riffs crackle with ebon energy, the drumbeats strike with bone-jarring immediacy, and the slithering, doom-stricken melodies prove to be unexpectedly seductive. As undeniably venomous as it is, listening to the EP is an electrifying experience.

Today we bring you a taste of what Storms of Unholy Black Mass holds in store, as we premiere the EP’s third track, “Angels of Persecution”. It rains unholy fire and brimstone from the skies in a torrential downpour of grinding, radioactive riffs, thundering percussion, and lightning-strike guitar solos, with ghastly vocals that vomit forth noxious clouds of sulfurous poison. The slashing storm breaks periodically, long enough for the band to deliver slow, skull-flattening hammer blows, just in case you missed the message: only doom awaits. And that rhythmic dynamism is a hallmark of the EP as a whole — Abysmal Lord are as adept at delivering crushing beatdowns as they are at mounting assaults of accelerated violence. Continue reading »