HANGING GARDEN: “ISLE OF BLISS”

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May 082026
 

(We present DGR’s review of the ninth album from Hanging Garden, released on March 20th by Agonia Records.)

I have struggled with how I wanted to start writing up Finland’s Hanging Garden and their newest album Isle Of Bliss. They’ve been “blessed” enough to join the club of groups whose opening review paragraphs have seen more rewrites each year than your standard superhero movie. It’s not any fault of their own either; the blame lies entirely at my feet.

I think a large part of the difficulty comes from the fact that although Hanging Garden have been active for the better part of two decades and have been very consistent in releasing albums or EPs (they seem to thrive on album-EP- album cycle with little breath in between), I haven’t been one to yell from the rooftops about them,  in spite of how much I’ve enjoyed everything they’ve done. So, in a roundabout way, it feels like any time I want to write about Hanging Garden I need to begin with an apology of sorts for not using my pulpit to preach their gospel to the masses.

Hanging Garden are one of the best out there in a saturated genre of melancholy-infused doom and goth-rock groups. Even when the band have been experimental – which surprisingly is where they first caught my attention with the very Paradise Lost-leaning Blackout/Whiteout in 2015 – before fully adopting a very melodramatic death and doom persona, their releases have been some of the most steady-footed, good-to-great collections you can find. There are athletes who would kill for Hanging Garden’s sort of batting average.

The even better part of all of this, now that the guilt of not being as loud about them as I could’ve been has been waylaid somewhat until their next release, is that the group’s newest album Isle Of Bliss – which saw release in late March via Agonia Records – is absolutely stunning and only reinforces the fact that the Hanging Garden collective are stealthily one of the best out there at this particular style. Continue reading »

GADGET: “COERCED”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
May 062026
 

(The Swedish grindcore veterans Gadget are returning with a new EP set for release on May 8th (on vinyl via De:Nihil Records), and what we have below are DGR’s enthusiastic thoughts about it.)

While it isn’t that long in terms of grindcore bands, given their “jump in and jump out just as quick” nature and the way so many grind projects are ephemeral blasts of sound that seem to appear and burn to the ground just as quickly, five years is a good-sized gap for new music from a project. Sweden’s Gadget haven’t had it easy either.

A period of lineup changes saw the group without a full-time vocalist for a bit and their first release post-2016’s The Great Destroyer was a split with Retaliation that saw Gadget contributing four songs, each with a different vocalist. The fire was still there and each song punched in at sub one-minute-and-thirty seconds. That was five years ago, though.

One of the highlight songs that did emerge from 2021’s Gadget/Retaliation split was “Intenso”, which featured vocalist Emilia Henriksson stepping behind the microphone for fifty-seven seconds of manic and relentless energy that was everything you might’ve wanted out of the blastbeat-driven firestorm style of grind that is composed entirely on the high-end, high-tempo side of things with little room for groove or chest-thumping low-end.

Emilia would eventually take over the vocals segment of the band in 2023 and be joined by Kristofer Jankarls on guitars as well as vocals for a double-headed attack, cementing Gadget in stable form for the three years since. 2026 marks the newest release for this lineup in recorded form, an eight-song and thirteen-and-a-half-minute blast of music known as Coerced. Continue reading »

COGNIZANCE: “IN LIGHT, NO SHAPE”

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May 012026
 

(Today Willowtip Records is releasing a new album by the UK band Cognizance, and that means it’s time for our tech-death-addicted scribbler DGR to hold forth on its abundant merits.)

A two-year turnaround on a Cognizance album is exciting news. The UK-based group have been one of tech-death’s semi-unsung heroes since they started releasing full albums in 2019 after having existed prior on a string of EPs. They play a style of tech-death so tightly wound and with such precision that – as has been a constant worry – one would think that even the slightest change would be the equivalent of a butterfly landing on a car aiming to set a landspeed record, even the slightest weight sending the thing toppling end over end and into fiery collision. Sometimes, one can listen to a Cognizance song, hear how surgically precise they are, and think that such a thing might even happen within the boundaries of the same song.

Which is why it is impressive that on a first pass with Cognizance’s newest album In Light, No Shape – soon to be released by Willowtip Records – you would never guess that the band were now operating as a four-piece with long-tenured vocalist Henry Pryce having stepped down, because on In Light, No Shape, Cognizance sound just as fierce and knife-sharp as they’ve ever sounded for 10 songs and thirty-seven-and-a-half minutes of deft guitar work, head-twisting drums, and ground-cracking bass, all punctuated by an equally surgical vocal attack on top of it. Somehow, the machine that is Cognizance remains as tightly wound as ever. Continue reading »

SERPENT ICON: “TOMBSTONE STORIES”

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Apr 292026
 

(DGR has a new discovery he wants to share with you from the still-growing realm of melodic death metal, a German trio whose debut EP was released in March of this year.)

It isn’t too often that we get to arrive right at the ground floor of a group’s releases. The number of times we have pulled it off is, frankly, stunning, because we’re in a special circumstance built for discovery and even then… who has the time? The organic act of coming across a project on their first EP feels like one of those mathematical possibilities whose scale is so large that the mind fails to be boggled because it can’t comprehend the numbers to begin with. Yet, it seems like by sheer chance we’ve come across German melodeath group Serpent Icon and their debut EP Tombstone Stories, which saw release at the beginning of March.

This early third of 2026 as a whole has proven to be oddly fruitful when it comes to bands under the melodeath tent; perhaps the planets and nostalgia cycle have aligned just right that we’ve reached a critical mass of sorts, and the dam was bound to break at some point. That same chance at play seems to have made it so that quite a few of these bands hail from Germany, as if there was some sort of conference held and every musician in that region declared that they too could do well in the world of high-tempo thrash riffs combined with scene-stealing guitar lead and folk melodies.

Melodeath’s blueprint has been passed down through so many generations at this point that where we land feels less like ‘influenced by, influenced by’ and more like groups seeking to construct a monolith of their own, each band contributing one more stone to the still-growing colossus known as melodic death metal. Continue reading »

ARCHSPIRE: “TOO FAST TO DIE”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Apr 162026
 

(This is our DGR’s review of Archspire’s new album, which was self-released on April 10th.)

While 2026 still finds itself on shaky ground overall, the opening few months have proven to be an interesting rollercoaster of releases in the heavy metal world. While we’ve had some decent gaps available for discovery, the still-young year has produced a fair share of surprises and a steady drip-feed of known names unleashing their latest monstrosities upon the world.

The most recent wave in particular has been among the more tech-death minded of the metal scene, with a small handful landing at near the exact same time, all with the general philosophy of keeping their foot planted firmly on the accelerator. The guiding light of “all X-games big ramp, all the time” is undeniable when it comes to the viewpoint of some of these bands, and no group has proven to be chief among them more than Canada’s Archspire, who released their newest album Too Fast To Die last week – their newest venture as an independent artist without a label. Continue reading »

CLAD IN SHADOWS: “MONUMENTS IN RUIN”

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Apr 152026
 

(The Texas-based melodic death metal band Clad In Shadows released their debut album in late February, DGR managed to come across it, and now he’s turned in the following appreciative review.)

You can use your band name for many things in heavy metal, such as head-turning shock value or as a mission statement. You can even make it dual-purpose, as is the case of New York’s Clad In Shadows. They took their name from an early In Flames song that was a live staple of theirs for a bit, thereby not only making their mission statement clear but also laying out their influences and providing a good basis point for anyone with bare knowledge of metal music’s subgenres as to what they might sound like without hearing a note.

Let’s play a game then, because many of you will have guessed both by the band’s name and who is writing this here writeup what exactly Clad In Shadows sound like on their first album Monuments In Ruin. You have twenty seconds to think, and then come check back in and tell us how closely you landed with the rest of this introduction.

Did you guess that this was going to be blindingly faithful melodeath worship with enthusiasm that shines so brightly it could scour your shadow into the wall? Yes? Perfect. Because that is what Clad In Shadows are doing, and although the album isn’t breaking down any boundaries, it is doing a fantastic job in adding to the overall genre’s collective archive and blueprint. Continue reading »

DIE LIKE GENTLEMEN: “DIE LIKE GENTLEMEN”

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Apr 092026
 

(This is DGR’s review of the swan-song release by Die Like Gentlemen from Portland, Oregon. The eye-catching cover artwork is a painting circa 1910 called “The Drinker” by German artist Erich Plontke.)

Many, many moons ago, in an era before space and time, when the world was just an idea in the eyes of the gods, we published an interview with Portland, Oregon’s Die Like Gentlemen.

That’s it, just wanted to check in and point people to an interesting interview we did about five years ago as we have some new readers on the site and sometimes it is nice to highlight the fact that we’ve been publishing stuff for a while at this point and there are plenty of rabbit holes to fall down. You can go about your day from here.

Actually, here’s the thing. While diving around the underground world and exploring music I saw the name and cover art for Die LIke Gentlemen’s recent self-titled – and apparently final – album go floating by and it must’ve re-lit some incredibly old neurons in my brain because it is one of the few times where I found myself doing the CSI detective thing of tapping the desk and going “why do I know this, why do I recognize this, why is this familiar?” over and over until I would soon discover that the primary suspect was well… us.

For some reason, be it the name, excellent choice of outfits, or the fact that I do make a valiant attempt to scroll through everything here, that previously mentioned interview for Die Like Gentlemen stuck with me enough that years later I would find myself very interested and intrigued by the group’s newest release, the self-titled Die Like Gentlemen, at four songs and nearly forty-minutes of prog-metal weird and avante-garde doom exploration at its most adventurous. Continue reading »

INFERI: “HEAVEN WEPT”

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Apr 012026
 

(The Artisan Era will release a new album by Nashville-based Inferi on April 10th, and DGR has managed to beat that deadline with an extensive review of it today.)

I ain’t no fancy law-talkin’ indivigible but I would argue that the case for what sort of band Inferi are is made within twenty or so seconds of their opening song “The Rapture Of Dead Light” from their new album Heaven Wept.

Inferi are a tech-death band of what could now be considered a classic style. Born of an early and mid-2000s collision of hyperspeed melodeath, proper death metal, and the more technically inclined stylings of groups like Necrophagist and Spawn Of Possession that overtook an entire subgenre in one fell swoop. They are part of a collective that helped crystalize what we now recognize as tech-death proper, enough so that you can mention specific record labels and have a good idea of the waterfall of guitar and drumming that will be headed your way.

Inferi were the band that took every element and just cranked the volume up to ten on everything. They would regularly release such densely packed albums that even years after a release you could go back to one and you’d be stunned by just how much general stuff you missed within each song. The prospect of an Inferi album was in some ways terrifying because you knew it meant you’d be getting hit with these gigantic, multi-suite songs that resulted in near-hour-long releases that would leave the brain scrambled by the time you were done.

Inferi are the sort of band that puts out an album and it doesn’t even occur to you that it had been five years since their previous release, mostly because you’re still not sure you’ve digested that previous one. They are a band where you’ve likely never been more thankful for an album to consist of just eight songs. which is what their newest album Heaven Wept is. Eight songs of hyper-fast, densely packed tech-death built out of the sort of overstimulation that can send lightning crackling across the grey matter in your skull. Continue reading »

THE DUSKFALL: “THE EVERLASTING SHADOWS”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Mar 302026
 

(This is DGR’s review of the first new album by The Duskfall in a dozen years. It was independently released earlier this month.)

There is no such thing as the phrase “did not have that on my bingo card for the year” when said bingo card has effectively been shot to shreds and has existed as confetti since mid-January. While loathe to make predictions for the year outside of trying to will albums into existence by virtue of bringing them up at end-of-year season, a lot of that has basically been a smoking hole in the ground and replaced with a lot of new band and genre explorations in its place.

While we aren’t unfamiliar with bands returning from hibernation at this site – we’ve had a few premieres over the years for groups taking another shot after a decade-plus away – there are times when albums you expected to happen or were even being hinted at just kind of don’t. For whatever reasons, the group will go silent, the assumption being that they’re basically done, so that upcoming album forever exists on a hard drive somewhere but otherwise won’t be seeing the light of day. Eventually the thought just leaves your recollection and a group’s standing catalogue becomes its cenotaph. This was the case with The Duskfall, who it seemed like might have quietly called it a day after five decent-to-great albums. Continue reading »

THE LUNA SEQUENCE: “RIFTS BECOME PASSAGES”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Mar 252026
 

(Here is DGR’s review of a new album by one of his old favorites.)

Having a retraceable history with a project is always fun. Holding up the hourglass of time and attempting to gaze backwards through it is a fun way to hold oneself accountable, or as has more often proven to be the gaze, to serve as a cattle prod to the memory centers to let one know how you felt about a previous few releases. It is grounding in that way, having an artist’s releases serving as particular stopping points in time that you can center yourself on and remember the many years back. The musical adventures of the decidedly non-metal electronics and heavy metal guitar instrumental work of The Luna Sequence has been one such project.

This is a musical venture that has been mentioned in some form or another for a hair over a decade since your’s truly has set up camp in the corner of the site’s vast musical catacombs. The Luna Sequence has traveled with artist Kaia Young across the country and through multiple genre influences, absorbing ideas like a sponge and slowly adapting itself around them. It has seen permutations that have been aggressively heavy, surprisingly relaxed, introverted and meditative, and more often than not some unholy combination of all of the above depending on which ideas might’ve excitedly crashed into each other to form an energetic explosion. Continue reading »

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