MR. CRABMAN AND THE SEAWEEDS: “NOTHING IN RETURN”

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Mar 232026
 

(DGR has made a fortunate new discovery, one outside his usual musical wheelhouses, and seeks to spread the word about it in the following review.)

Every year brings a cycle in which I swear up and down to try and expand my musical horizons, which for the most part I absolutely fail at. The early reaches of the year are usually the prime territory for this grand venture to have any hope of success though, because it is somewhat reliable – save for an odd plotting of years wherein January saw a giant flood – that those early parts will have plenty of room for new artists to take a shot at being out there and get some spotlight.

That beginning part of the year is a time of discovery, and every year does have a few interesting acts manage to break through the white noise in comparison to the summer exploraitons of old reliables and groups timing their releases around festival runs. This year, like I have in years past, has had me attempting to explore the doom genre some more, because if there’s any blind spot that I can openly admit to, the fuzzier side of doom is absolutely one of them. These ventures are a lot of fun because you can break past a surface-level understanding of things and actually acheive some sort of musical growth. If nothing else, it provides a new perspective point from which to see things.

The shaggier, fuzzed-out, and stoner side of doom will always have its fair share of oddballs. The walls of reverb and slow to mid tempos must be artistically freeing, and in that respect you do get groups who will name themselves some eyebrow-raising things just for the sheer fun of it. To explore this side of the genre is to be willingly caught off-guard from all ends, and that is how you wind up with a name like Mr. Crabman & The Seaweeds crossing your desk, amplified even more by their home location of the obviously well-known yet clearly easily missed psychadelic doom capital of the world…Finland. Continue reading »

ENSHINE: “ELEVATION”

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Mar 182026
 

(In January of this year the Swedish/French duo Enshine released their first new album in more than a decade. The odds or DGR failing to review it have been slim or none, and at last he has done so.)

Tenured readers of the NoCleanSinging hallowed halls will recognize the name Enshine as one we have covered a decent amount in years past. The introspective, philosophical, skyward-gazing melodrama of the death and doom duo has held much appeal around here during their times of activity. Comprised of musicians Jari Lindholm and Sebastien Pierre, Enshine have sought to unify the strengths of the pair’s many other projects into something that utilized the aspirations of a genre that often evokes dreamlike qualities.

Positioned within a subset of doom with a stronger focus on beauty within the idea of melancholy rather than an outright crushing of the spirit. Atmospheric without being overwhelmingly sad, you’re just as often made to feel like you’re a piece of cloth caught in the wind floating high in the clouds just as often as you are brought back down to Earth and pressed into the ground. Little wonder then, that of the three Enshine releases up to this point, the band’s cover art has either been picturesque hues of blue and white among mountainous landscapes or hyper-colored renderings of the stars. Enshine combines the aspirations of two individuals whose other bands and their own solo careers have aspired to set listeners in a similar head space, both spiritual and introvertedly-philosophical – and very, very heavy on the keyboard leads. Continue reading »

BOG MÖNSTER: “DUELLING HORRORS”

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Mar 172026
 

(This is DGR’s review of a new EP released earlier this month by the Australian trio Bog Mönster.)

When the collection of everything you intend to review consists of a smorgasbord of EPs and albums, tackling two songs can feel both like cheating and like mana from the heavens. The brain doesn’t have to keep track of as much but also you’re kicking yourself for daring to veer from the intended path. However, sometimes you will have a release that speaks loud enough that it compels you to spread the word about it.

Australian sludge group Bog Mönster’s newest EP Duelling Horrors is one such release, consisting of the aforementioned two songs and about ten and a half minutes of music. Bog Mönster had an EP and an album to their name prior to these Duelling Horrors, and their newest arrives close to two years after their previously mentioned album Servants Of The Necrosect back in 2024. Continue reading »

DISSENTIENCE: “KAIJU”

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Mar 132026
 

(Here’s DGR’s enthusiastic review of a new EP released last month by Pennsylvania’s Dissentience.)

For being such a short month, February was a wildly creative time for heavy metal. Perhaps, for all our prognosticating and bullshit being pulled from a hat in regards to how the year was starting, it was time for the dam to finally burst and unleash upon us a musical flood of sorts. You can get a real sense for this when you glance around our site for instance and see multiple summary articles of music that has been unleashed throughout the month, and barring the minor occasion of a crossed wire or two, there’s barely any crossover whatsoever.

It seems like our attention was so divided in so many different directions that we could just as easily portray our focus as a scatter plot drawn by someone in the middle of an earthquake while they fell into a manhole. If there is a unifier or throughline to be found, it seems it lays not so much in where our easily distracted pack of Golden Shepherds we call the writing staff here are looking at this moment, but what we are looking forward to in the future. We’re probably going to need assistance from multiple deities if we hope to make it through the April/May pre-summer festival torrent in one piece.

February’s EPs fell upon us like rain, alongside a sizeable gathering of albums, and thankfully there was even enough spread between the tried-and-true trying new stuff out and new bands to be discovered that it didn’t feel like we were subsisting on bite-sized morsels. One band that happens to have made very good usage of the EP format this time around is Philadelphia’s Dissentience, who took four massive songs and combined them into an equally massive movement of music they have named after the EP’s final song “Kaiju“. Twenty-three-and-a-half-minutes later you will feel as if you have been placed under the footfall of a gargantuan monster as well. Continue reading »

WORM SHEPHERD: “DAWN OF THE ICONOCLAST”

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Mar 122026
 

(We present DGR’s review of a new EP by Massachusetts-based Worm Shepherd which was released last month by Unique Leader Records.)

Sometimes a band will find themselves unwittingly serving a purpose beyond the basic enjoyment of music/listener exchange. Worm Shepherd are one such group, as their sort of alternating status between fully activated live act, in-home studio project, nebulous existence altogether has served a somewhat unintentional beacon on the wider evolutionary path of the deathcore genre as a whole.

Built out of constituent parts of various other deathcore groups based along the East Coast and couched in the current day bombast and spectacle of the symphonic and blackened absorbtion, Worm Shepherd have become a sort of guide to the genre as a wider whole – you could explode the band out into seperate guide stones and each one would walk you into a different path of recognizable artists. As these many influences converge, so too does Worm Shepherd reassemble itself.

It is not whether the band itself exists in some instances but the larger picture they paint, and in the case of Worm Shepherd they’ve been excellent as that sort of aforementioned snapshot of where the deathcore genre may be as a whole – especially in its current moment of trying new things again, as the influenced by the influenced by the influenced by the influenced by crowd find themselves facing diminishing returns.

Worm Shepherd’s new EP Dawn Of The Iconoclast is representative of some of this, as the group’s formula was built out of a distilled-down through psychotic chemistry approach to symphonic deathcore, yet slowed down to such a point that it seemed less like we were doing big roaring breakdowns for the sake of declaring just how immensely heavy something feels but because they were a group verging on stumbling into funeral doom territory and just couldn’t figure out how to make the macho hoody aesthetic work with it just yet. Continue reading »

EXHUMED: “RED ASPHALT”

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Mar 102026
 

(Here we have DGR’s review of the latest album from Exhumed, which is out now on Relapse Records.)

When you start writing you assume you won’t ever be on the journalistic “beat” of some bands, yet somehow you seem to fall into a routine and over time wind up covering their releases far more than you’d expect. For this writer, Bay Area death metal veterans Exhumed are one such band. Such a long-running hallmark of an act isn’t one you’d expect to be continually checking in with, as they’ve been able to develop a large enough catalogue of music that they could coast for a lifetime bouncing between albums they put out up to a decade ago.

Yet the crew behind Exhumed remain fiercely creative and infected with an inability to sit still for even a second, spreading themselves far and wide among a baker’s dozen of projects and even then still finding time to launch the occasional new one, and then somehow after all of that… loop back around to Exhumed. Even when they share lineups among other different projects, it seems that the foundational spirit of the band still calls to them as something to be unified around. Continue reading »

SWÆRMMM: “Γ”

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Mar 032026
 

(Our editor recently gave a quick take on a new EP by the Swedish lunatics Swærmmm, which is the second part of a planned trilogy, and today DGR gives it a longer take, while wishing he could see what the EP will do to you.)

Swærmmm –

While the brain is tempted to take a shortcut and hallucinate its own phrase in the same way many of our current AI overlords are hallucinating medical advice and legal procedures, if memory serves correctly there is an old shopping bag of a saying which states that everyone has about one good book in them.

We’re of course discussing humanity’s wider ability to create in that aspect, as I highly doubt many of us could pen a full book and have it be a combination of cohesive or interesting. But if taken on a holistic level, everyone has at least one good “something” they can unleash out into the world whether it be music, artwork, writing, or any other combination of craft.

On that same aspect it seems that every musician has one project in them that boils down into abject chaos. It is as if the idea of regular musical creativity is not enough anymore, and at a certain point a sort of subconscious gremlin speaks up and utters the musical creative equivalent of “what if we just burn it all to the ground?”. Continue reading »

BLOOD RED THRONE: “SILTSKIN”

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Feb 102026
 

(Soulseller Records launched Blood Red Throne’s latest album in December of last year, and of course we knew the time would eventually arrive when our DGR would write it up (because he loves this band’s music) — and now he has.)

This is a review for a 2025 release

A hair under two years is pretty quick turnaround time in the world of heavy metal. That doesn’t translate much to a layman’s way of thinking of course, as the old adage still holds true that creativity does not exist in a vacuum nor could you every try to put any time scale on inspiration. Some groups are prolific, others move at a snail’s pace – it’s a case of what works for some, may not work for others.

That said, it’s hard not to get a little spooked when turnaround time feels too quick between albums. Any number of events could take place in the background to cause it: new contracts may require new albums in a year, sometimes material gets backburnered or banked for future releases, but the year over year turn has just as often resulted in releases coming out as straight-shooting and “expected” as an album could be. Quick releases are likely the home of more solid-sevens out there than anything else.

But what then do you do when a band whose very existence is consistency, as if they themselves are the universal continuity upon which the world is built? Anything lesser would result in galactic cataclysm and anything more would equal a galactic sublimation. What if a band just exists on that line of “good-to-great” or “inarguably-solid-as-a-rock”? What then does a quick-feeling turnaround time do to them?

Even though the year may have ended, we still have to touch base with a few releases and one we weren’t about to let escape from our sight was the mid-December unleashing of Blood Red Throne’s latest album Siltskin. Continue reading »

BLACK RABBIT: “WARREN OF NECROSIS”

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Feb 052026
 

(Below we present our warren-dweller DGR’s review of the most recent release by the Dutch band Black Rabbit.)

Reminder for self at end of year when going backwards for year-end purposes: This is a review for a 2025 release.

I find myself musing on this constantly, if not just because it serves as a suitable cattle-prod to the brain to lure me from my “catch up on a whole year’s worth of sleep in two-weeks” stupor that the post-holiday season seems to have lulled me into. It is interesting that the first few releases of the year always find themselves entangled with a demented form of catch-up from the previous year.

Time being the non-infinite resource from a mortal standpoint, it has not allowed us to cover the myriad things we wish to write about. There will always be one more, one late discovery, and often we invent excuses to continue looking backwards because a signal cast off into space still exists in some form of radio wave. We quest to find it and ackowledge it, and so the tail end of one year hangs on like the most stubborn bastard out there, refusing to let us continue forward into the next series of unending car-crashes that we adoringly refer to as our favored musical genre.

We also, as a result, have compulsions and imagined debts that must be repaid and a mused-over line in a year-end list quickly becomes a one-way directive of something owed, whether a band is aware of it or not. Thus, it was promised that we would dive into Black Rabbit’s December-released EP Warren Of Necrosis and goddamnit here we are, only two months later – as opposed to say five or ten as our previous records have been – looking at the continuation of the death and thrash metal act’s conceptual universe, the follower EP to May 2025’s Chronolysis. Continue reading »

CARRION VAEL: “SLAY UTTERLY”

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Feb 022026
 

(Today we present DGR’s first review of 2026, a full-throttle rush through the full-throttle rush that is Carrion Vael’s new album, which was released two weeks ago by Unique Leader Records.)

The first few reviews of every year lately have felt like an exercise in madness, an attempt to conjure spirits out of thin air while dressed in the most ritualistic way possible. Me, seated with my skirt of bone and three-times-too-big mask in front of a fire and various runes and sigils that may or may not just be permutations on the Pepsi logo – we can’t all be as creative as The Infernal Sea with their logo or draw inversions of an Asmodeus sigil ala Gaerea – and you wait for the year to speak to you. Last year’s end-list was an exercise in scrying to see what the future holds and now we are waiting for the first spirit to reach across the void and grab us by the throat to compel us into 2026.

So far, in spite of all the varied exhortations and exultations, that has no happened yet to this writer. 2026 remains frustratingly silent and has instead gifted us chances to catch up with late-2025 releases that were absorbed into year-end festivities alongside the initial wave of those brave enough to be the vanguard of a new year. It is the amorphous and fungible time that has us attempting to neatly can one horror only to open up the next can of worms to be unleashed.

It’s similar to how decades never end culturally right when a year turns over; it’s more like there is a two-to-three year hangover period before one finally shuffles out the door and the next dumbass thing the kids repeat ad-nauseum can rule the roost. Eventually life becomes a series of checkpoints where you’re counting decades by being thankful one particular bit of bullshit is done with and you don’t have to hear about it anymore. Continue reading »

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