TOGETHER TO THE STARS: “IRIDESCENCE”

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Oct 202026
 

(Our writer DGR is still playing catch-up in reviewing albums released earlier this year, but now taking them one at a time instead of presenting collections. Today the subject is the fourth album from the Swedish post-black metal band Together To The Stars.)

Much like actual interstellar travel (or interstellar travel as we would imagine it) it has taken a while for us to come into the orbit of Sweden’s Together To The Stars. The group, having existed for seven years and four albums, have never found themselves on a trajectory that brought them close to our lovely little corner of the internet. Their newest album Iridescence – which saw release in early June, though truthfully yours truly finally glanced in the direction of its eye-rending pink in early August – offers us an opportunity to rectify that.

Together To The Stars’ take on black metal – of the much acclaimed post-metal variety – is both enrapturing and infectious, without devolving into a series of tropes or markers so recognizable you can hear the gears of the machine turning in the background. By focusing heavily on climactic moments within each song, as well as memorable guitar work, and a shade of the depressive world of black metal, Together To The Stars find themselves with a gorgeous amalgamation of music that lands them pretty close to Harakiri For The Sky territory while still maintaining an identity free of expected histrionics. Continue reading »

BITTER LOSS: “THE FUTILE DREAM OF BEING”

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Oct 192026
 

(The Greek band Bitter Loss released their second album last April, and DGR has gotten around to reviewing it in the following paragraphs.)

Greece’s Bitter Loss is a band who have sat on the backburner for a little while, joining an honored class of groups who’ve not been done right by my personal gauge. Forever in a stasis of being promised a discussion but never quite reached even though they would’ve been fully deserving of their own articles were it not for life and work continually planting their foot on my throat. Thus the continued olive branch extension and attempt to make amends continues, and Bitter Loss’ album The Futile Dream Of Being deserves just as much spotlight as any other – even if in truncated form.

Thrash is a hard genre to quantify and write about these days given its existence being so integral to heavy metal’s cultural explosion over the years. As with many of the initial foundations of a music style, thrash can often feel as if it has been frozen in amber and evolution has long since sailed by – reducing it to a constantly repeating collection of tropes and circle-pit starters, sometimes entry level and otherwise unwilling to change without fearing the offense made to the old guard.

Obviously that isn’t the case, and as with any genre that has been around for a while it has splintered off into its own subfactions – some more fascinating than others in the sheer amount of musical virtuosity required – and many of those can be lively and vibrant even when it seems like the main umbrella is being held up by a collective of aging pillars sticking to what they know is best and true. Continue reading »

AMON AMARTH: “THE ALLFATHER AWAKENS”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 152026
 

(Earlier this month Metal Blade Records released the latest album from Amon Amarth, and DGR decided to share his thoughts about it — below.)

Oddly, it did not feel as if close to four years had passed for Amon Amarth between the release of 2022’s The Great Heathen Army and their latest release The Allfather Awakens. Perhaps, because somewhere along the way we finally decided in our collective subconscious to elevate Amon Amarth to both meme status and as one of the bigger metal bands out there, it has felt like they’ve been ever-present. They seemed to tour very hard behind The Great Heathen Army as well, and a decent drip-feed of singles kept the band in the limelight.

It’s easy to see why, because at this point in their career – and thirteen albums in – Amon Amarth really don’t have to work hard to establish themselves. You could pick vocalist Johan Hegg by sound out of a lineup while you had leaf blowers aimed directly at your face at this point. They’re inescapable on any metal shuffle playlist that the internet’s beloved algorithms throw at you, having found such a steady median to exist on across a few different genres. You don’t even need to describe the band by the quality of their music anymore as they’ve become one of the few that’ve codified a specific sound, spread neatly among galloping riff work and power metal adjacent guitar leads.

They’re “the Viking band”, and for a lot of people that descriptor is entry-level enough that they don’t really need to devote much thought to whether that actually means anything. Amon Amarth certainly haven’t needed to, essentially locked in place since the days of Twilight of The Thunder God. A steady mechanism of solid music with the occasional fun experiment, with only The Great Heathen Army representing a dip in quality as the band went a little too hard into medieval times cosplay territory. The course correction is even an easy one for the group, and it is one they perform on their newest album The Allfather Awakens. Continue reading »

BEHEMOTH: “I, SCVLPTOR”

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Oct 132026
 

(Here is NCS writer DGR’s take on the assembly of songs released by Behemoth, Massacre Records, and Nuclear Blast in September under the title of I, Scvlptor.)

Even though yours truly is personally knee-deep in slowly trudging through a backlog that is forever growing for a series of articles that have rapidly spun out of control, one cannot take a fully ascetic approach to music and its releases.

The difficulty that arises in reviewing stuff from months ago is that there are always options and things to explore that’ve come out more recently, and sometimes the distraction is enough to reset one’s brain and get the gears back in motion.

Subject matter is just as important and sometimes the theory is simple: If it caused my brain to wander and wonder about the music therein, it might be a source of good discussion, and even though it may seem like all the reams in the world have run dry of their ink and all discussions have been had, Behemoth and their continual artistic pursuits is something that people seem to love to talk about. Continue reading »

WEREWOLVES: “YOU’RE WEAK AND YOU KNOW YOU’RE WEAK”

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Oct 082026
 

(Australia’s Werewolves are still on track to release 10 albums in 10 years or kill themselves, and our guy DGR continues running right along with them. This time he has managed to write up their newest album (the 7th in the sequence) before its release — which arrives tomorrow via Back on Black.)

Early on within the bounds of the new Werewolves album You’re Weak and You Know You’re Weak, there is a moment in which vocalist Sam Bean declares, “I thought I told you to fuck off on the last album,” and I honestly had to check.

I understand that time gets the best of us all, and truthfully, none of us is getting any younger – though I don’t seem to be speed-running the baldness race at least – but I will admit my memory isn’t what it used to be. The sectors of my brain originally meant for family members’ birthdays that I have since overwritten with things like bands and its constituent members’ side-projects are slowly failing as well, and I know this. So when the philosophical maestros behind Werewolves are asking me if I was in fact told to fuck off somewhere in the liner notes of last year’s album The Ugliest Of All, perhaps they did.

But truthfully, at this point in our tacitly agreed upon “an album every year” suicide pact, perhaps the crew and I are at the “old men at the retirement home yelling at each other across the room” stage of our lives. Am I weak enough to know that I’m weak if I can’t remember that I’m weak in the first place? Continue reading »

CLEARING THE SLATE ISSUE FIVE

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 062026
 

(Our writer DGR has been playing catch-up on records released earlier this year when other distractions interfered with writing about them. Beginning in mid-July he has delivered four Issues (which you can find here, here, here, and here), and now we have Issue Five bringing together extensive reviews of four more records released in preceding months

For a brief period it did seem like there was light at the end of the tunnel of this experiment in trying to catch up with everything I’d been listening to and then trying to write about it here. Obviously, and as mentioned before, it has gotten out of control, but it has allowed me at least to keep up a steady pace of reviews. It looks like my overall “quantity” of reviews year over year will remain about the same, which has at the very least assuaged some of my concern that I have been slowly losing it as life has been taking turns beating the shit out of me on the other side of the virtual space.

My problem of course is that I have still kept finding new things, so I am now at a weird point where every four or five of these smaller writeups – insert laugh track here – I find some new thing that I want to tell the world about.

I’ve even seen a few of the ones that I’m intending to cover show up in other people’s musical collections that are posted here, which has lit up the center of my brain that likes to make me think that I’m smart and I am in fact on to something here. Whether this trend keeps up as I continue to carve my way through the year’s musical releases with the grace of a drunk elephant, I won’t be able to tell you, but 2026, in spite of so much of the year resting on the comfortable side of flaming dogshit, has produced a bumper crop for musical discovery.

A lot of our veteran bands may be playing it too safe and the “music as product factory” that dominates the upper part of heavy metal hasn’t done much interesting this year either, but the many bands I’ve been taking a gamble on seem to be working out in my favor. Or maybe it’s just self-hypnosis so I don’t fall into an existential crisis about what else I could have actually been doing with my time. Continue reading »

CLEARING THE SLATE ISSUE FOUR

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  No Responses »
Sep 092026
 

(Our writer DGR has been playing catch-up on records released earlier this year when other distractions interfered with writing about them. Beginning in mid-July he has delivered three Issues (which you can find here, here, and here), and now we have Issue Four bringing together extensive reviews of four more records released in preceding months.)

I don’t mind the heat too much, I’ve found that I’m still fairly operable as an individual until we reach 110 or so, which thankfully doesn’t happen too often. I get excessively grumpy when there’s humidity involved, which again, isn’t too crazy in my corner of California. Enough trips to the East Coast and the humidity there has at least pulled back the curtain a bit for me on why so many people involved in politics seems like a fucking angry moron. That sort of heat+humidity combo can rot the brain of anyone, and when you have so little to begin with, one trip to our nation’s beloved capital and you come back barely functioning. It’s why the size comparisons when people start complaining about heat make me chuckle, because there’s a different sort of suffering attached to each conception of ‘hot’, and truly, I will always feel like a soft child just barely toughing through them all as it is.

What I do hate is actually the first week of consistent heatwave wherein I have to come to terms with the fact that I’m going to have the AC unit and a fan in my room running constantly. The noise itself is enough if you’re a tender sleeper – I’m not – but what gets me is if I forget to tell the fan to stop moving back and forth, otherwise as I’m sleeping it feels like someone gently brushing across my face whispering ‘hey, heeeeeey, hey, you trying to sleep? Not today fucker’. So even for as much bragging of being able to survive on the surface of the sun, I’m still a grumpy fool.

That said, I much prefer the cold. I feel like the margin of error has an easier curve there. I can always put on more clothes, I cannot get more naked.

I do have a few more of these features to finish and I can’t make the visits to my local coffee shop with my laptop any more awkward than they are already. Continue reading »

CLEARING THE SLATE ISSUE THREE

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 262026
 

(Our writer DGR has been playing catch-up on records released earlier this year when other distractions interfered with writing about them. In mid-July he delivered Issue One (which you can find here), earlier this month he presented Issue Two (here), and now we have Issue Three encompassing reviews of four records released in March, April, May, and August.)

Over the years I’ve noticed a sort of lethargy develops when I reach the end of some sort of media consumption or project completion. The ‘Done-ness’ of it all seems to take it out of me and I wind up strangely tired for the rest of the day. I notice this more often with my videogame hobby than most, as I’ll often reach the end of some game I’ve been playing my way through – often side by side with the many albums I take a swing at writing about – and wind up tired by the end of it.

I once saw someone positing that it’s a sort of decompression, because your brain has been interacting so long with that specific ‘world’ that it is a sort of loss now that it’s over. I’ve found I do the same thing with albums and books too; albums in an equally odd circumstance because I often wind up writing about them afterward, like putting a neat little bow on a story arc and tying it off. I then walk away from the writing part of it just as tired, such that every review after a while feels like an exorcism.

The difficult part, then, is that what I should be doing is getting started on the next thing, because your writing skill is an engine that if you let rust from disuse becomes harder and harder to start up each time. Yet, keeping the machine rolling runs against my long-simmering philosophy of not just completely severing ties with any particular piece of art, because the practice of continual writing and reviewing so easily becomes more of a high score board of ‘look how much I listened to!’ It all feels surface-level at that point. Did you really listen to it if you’ve got 150 other releases on your docket for this month? Or does it count at about the same level as the music playing in your local supermarket for all of the effect it had on you? Continue reading »

CLEARING THE SLATE ISSUE TWO

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Aug 052026
 

(Our writer DGR has been playing catch-up on records released earlier this year when other distractions interfered with writing about them. In mid-July he delivered Issue One (which you can find here), and now we have Issue Two, encompassing reviews of four records released in March, May, June, and July.)

It is politics season here in California, which means that by living in proximity to the state’s capital (Sacramento) you get battered relentlessly with ads from all neck of the woods. Over thirty-five million people live within the boundaries of California, which means that this metro area consisting of a mere two-to-three million means fuck-all to anyone internationally and is barely important enough to list on a map. You have to zoom in two or three times on Google, for instance, before Sacramento is revealed unto the wider world and long after Los Angeles and San Francisco.

By virtue of growing up in the Bay Area I’ve found my wider allegiances between the two regions fairly split, such that I kind of equally care for both even though my current residence will forever suffer from a generationally-instilled case of short-man’s syndrome. It’s why politics season tends to be annoying, because you get to hear your city’s name with the same sort of thin-mouthed sneer that is usually reserved for the scum of the Earth, such that even when filling up your gas tank you get greeted with banners pointing to the price of fuel and a notice that “Sacramento policies did this”.

Which I guess is nice, because at least the rest of the country is finally acknowledging that California is the real capital of this country, and clearly, we’re the ones who decided to start bombing the Middle East again and start a new forever war. It’s a fucked up way of finding that sort of thing out, but I guess anything to mask your consistent rape of the consumer wherein your prices don’t line up at all with what you claim, and by virtue of this state having more drivers than most anywhere else, is most often used to goose your profit margins so that we end up paying way more than “Sacramento policies” might’ve caused. Continue reading »

CLEARING THE SLATE ISSUE ONE

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jul 162026
 

(DGR is playing the game of review catch-up. Is today’s four-album installment the first inning of nine, or the first half of two? We shall see.)

I say this every time I’ve done it in its twice-yearly fashion, but smaller review collections like this are not ones that I feel good about doing. It doesn’t feel fair to the bands not paying the imagined debt I have with them, that I’ve done something so criminal as enjoy their music and yet not find the time within myself to dedicate toward the usual essay-long dissection and exploration of their newest release.

Yet, it is festival season now in Europe which means that metal’s biological clock is seeing fit to give birth to a ton of new releases. You may have noticed during the last month or so there has been a steady drip of reviews coming from my corner of the world, but truth be told, all of those were done just prior to our unwitting heavy metal May that we’ve created. The assumption being that they would run once a day so the site would always have something to post while we were out and about witnessing music or drinking ourselves into apocalyptic stupor.

You’ll note, that’s not how it happened, and instead the collective of releases that I had fished up from the world’s murky musical depths ran well into June. That doesn’t mean the exploration and listening stopped, either. Just as many were caught up in the nets or came out while we were on that aforementioned vacation, and we now find ourselves at the doorstep of a collection of music spanning months that needs to be caught up on.

You, dedicated reader of the site that you are, know next what is coming. It has traveled by many names: review roundup, things you may have missed, clearing the slate, material befitting the ethereal, music by swedes for long-haired plebes, a million other names that all translate to one basic idea – we need to catch up on stuff so we can maintain some semblance of being current yet refuse to leave these albums sitting in the dust. Continue reading »

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