BEST OF BRITISH: ADUR / CULT BURIAL / TRUDGER

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 082025
 

(Andy Synn has three more slabs of home-grown heaviness to recommend today)

If you’ve been keeping track recently you may have noticed a slight dip in my output frequency, mostly because I’m having to also focus on recording the last few vocals and bass-lines for our upcoming release (which we’re aiming to have out towards the end of November).

Unfortunately (for you, not so much for me) I’m likely going to be even more busy for the next few weeks, not only finishing off the recording process but also getting ready for my upcoming wedding so… well, I’ll do what I can to help keep the lights on around here, but you might be seeing even less from me for a little while.

That being said, I’m not going to let another opportunity to highlight some home-grown heroes pass me by, so prepare yourselves for three more delicious metallic morsels which represent the “Best of British”.

Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CULT BURIAL — “BESEECH”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 232025
 

(written by Islander)

We ran out of fingers. It took all 10 of them and one toe to count the number of articles we’ve published here about the London band Cult Burial, all of them in just the last five years. The attention began with the release of their 2020 debut EP Sorrow and has continued through their release of numerous singles, another EP, and two albums. Now this duo of Simon Langford and César Moreira will release a third album in September named Collapse of Pattern, Reverence of Dust.

The new album is described in these haunting and harrowing words:

Collapse of Pattern, Reverence of Dust is a record about erosion — of structures, of certainty, of meaning. Across eight tracks, Cult Burial tears through the frameworks we cling to, carving out something that sits between aggression and despair, weight and absence. The music is dense and layered, yet unafraid of space; at times claustrophobic, at others stripped to bare wire and exposed edge.

Each song peels back the layers between memory and oblivion, order and chaos. Built on jagged riffs and drenched in haunting textures, this album traces the gradual decay of mind, identity, and ritual. From the first shudder of collapse to that final, ash-choked breath, it offers no solace. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: CRYPT SERMON, CULT BURIAL, AMIENSUS, DEFACEMENT, TETRAGRAMMACIDE, BEYOND MORTAL DREAMS, BRUXIST

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jun 282025
 

(written by Islander)

As usual I had a lot to choose from for this Saturday’s roundup. I gravitated to six bands whose music I and/or others at NCS have showered with past praise, but chose to end it with one band’s first release.

Geographically you’ll bounce back and forth across the Atlantic, take a trip to the Indian subcontinent, and then go further west and south to Australia for the final two records. Your head will probably bounce around a lot as you go through the music too. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: CAVEMAN CULT, CULT BURIAL, MAIRU

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jul 312023
 

On Saturday morning I mentioned that I would be involved in an Event that I expected would consume the weekend, and so it did. I didn’t fall into any fires, which is a minor miracle given the volume of intoxicants I consumed, but I didn’t have time for NCS after that brief Saturday morning roundup.

In a rare display of wisdom, I didn’t agree to do any song premieres today, anticipating that I would still be trying to recover from a weekend of debauchery. But of course I did feel the old obsession today – how could I let a day go by without recommending something musical at the site, even though we did share Andy‘s latest Synn Report and a good interview by Aleksey? Well, as you can see, I couldn’t.

CAVEMAN CULT (U.S.)

Eventually, my eyes were able to focus this morning, so I decided to take a quick look at what landed in the NCS in-box since Saturday morning. There I found a notice of a new post at the starkweather SubStack. I slowly read through it and bookmarked some music I hadn’t been aware of, to explore when my brain was less fogged in. Then it dawned on me that something I discovered there would probably blow the fog away like a hurricane, along with my brain itself. A rough cure, to be sure. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2022’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 22): ASHENSPIRE, TURBOCHARGED, CULT BURIAL, FALLS OF RAUROS

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2022  2 Responses »
Jan 312023
 


Ashenspire

I began rolling out this list day-by-day on January 2nd, promising that I’d force myself to stop at the end of the month. The end of the month has now arrived, and sadly for me, today is the final installment. I mean, it would seem odd to continue a year-end list into the second month of the next year, but I easily could have kept the list going for another month.

That’s because many worthy songs still remain on my list of candidates, and in fact many are just as worthy as the 66 I’ve included through today. I readily admit that, and I only regret that I couldn’t name more before running out of time. So please hold your fire because a bunch of your own favorite tracks didn’t make it.

Tomorrow I’ll have a “wrap up” post that lists all the songs in one place, with links to each of the 22 installments. Here are the final four: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): NOCTEM, CULT BURIAL, INNUMERABLE FORMS, CRIPPLED BLACK PHEONIX

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jul 222022
 

Welcome to Part 2 of this Friday round-up of new songs and videos. It includes perhaps even more musical scatter than what I collected in Part 1 (be forewarned, there’s singing in the last of these tracks!), which may increase the odds that you’ll find something to like. And if you don’t, try your chances tomorrow when I’ll have one more collection to throw at your head.

NOCTEM (Spain)

We’ve been following the twisting and turning path of this Spanish band for a lot of damned years. It has been something of an adventure to witness their musical evolution, but a generally exiting one, and now we get to discover their next steps through an album named Credo Certe Ne Cras that’s coming out in late October via MNRK Heavy. Just today they released a video for the album’s first single, “We Are Omega“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: CULT BURIAL — “DISORDER”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Mar 172022
 

It’s fair to say that we here at NCS have been following the UK band Cult Burial very closely. We’ve reviewed and recommended every one of their releases so far — their debut EP Sorrow in 2020, their self-titled debut album that same year, and their second EP Oblivion in 2021. It thus took no second thoughts nor any pause for us to leap at the chance to hear the band’s new single, “Disorder“, and we leaped equally fast at the chance to premiere it (as soon as we re-assembled our spine and picked our teeth up from the floor).

In a broad way, Cult Burial‘s music can be described as a changing amalgam of Black, Death, and Doom Metal, but while the band are capable of creating dark, dense, and oppressive soundscapes, this new song is a high-speed hurricane of obliteration. As the band have explained to us, “The aim was to create a nasty, aggressive, energetic piece of music that would leave the listener suffering under the weight of the song.” Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ASHEN / THE CIRCLE / CULT BURIAL / ENSLAVED / GIANT OF THE MOUNTAIN / MALADIE / TEITAN / TRIBAL GAZE

 SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Sep 272021
 

(Andy Synn takes some time out of his busy schedule to celebrate some short but sweet releases by a variety of big names and new faces)

One unfortunate result of the endless scramble to stay on top of the relentless torrent of new album releases is that the humble EP often gets a little overlooked.

Which, obviously, is a real shame, because a good EP can often be just as fulfilling as an album in its own way, especially when a band uses it as an opportunity to explore a different side of themselves or to create something that works within the constraints of the format to tell a complete and fully realised story.

So while I’m working on a number of different full-length reviews (as well as the next edition of The Synn Report) I thought I might as well take a few moments to jot down a few quick reviews for some of the EPs I’ve enjoyed the most over the course of the year so far.

Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): ALDA, ARAN, CHROME WAVES, CULT BURIAL, EUCHARIST, FAMISHGOD, KAECK, KORPIKLAANI

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Aug 132021
 

 

It’s a rare day when I have no premieres to write for our site, and no posts to edit and format from any of our other writers either. So I spent the extra time listening to more than the usual number of new songs and videos released this week, and found a whopping 16 of them I wanted to recommend.

Rather than put them all in a single post, which might have been like hitting you in the mouth with a bag of nails, I’ve divided them into two parts, arranged alphabetically from the beginning of Part 1 to the end of Part 2 — beginning with A and finishing with Z.

ALDA (US)

It’s been a long wait for something new from this very talented Washington State black metal band, but now they’re back with a new album named A Distant Fire, and a first advance track from the album that’s a sure sign the wait has been worthwhile. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH 2020: BA’AL / COUNTLESS SKIES / CULT BURIAL

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Nov 052020
 

 

(Here’s another installment in Andy Synn‘s long-running series of reviews devoted to releases by bands from the UK, where he’s based.)

Oh, what big plans I had for this week. I was going to write so much more for the site, about so many different bands/albums, some new, some old, that it was going to take most of you another whole week just to get through it all.

But, as it is wont to do, life got in the way, with work pressures and some last-minute setbacks in preparation for filming our next music video taking up more and more of my time (and adding more and more stress) with every passing day.

Still, things have slowly started to ease off now, meaning I’ve got just enough time to sneak in a brand new entry of “The Best of British” for you all to enjoy going into the weekend. Continue reading »

 Older Entries