BEFORE THE DAWN: “COLD FLARE ETERNAL”

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Sep 222025
 

(Before the Dawn released their new studio album Cold Flare Eternal on September 5th via Reaper Entertainment, and today we present our DGR‘s extensive take on the record.)

I worry sometimes that I might not be fully over the initial excitement of Before The Dawn actually coming back after its extended inactive period. To me, they were a perfect gateway band and guide for people into the more extreme realms of heavy metal. At times they could be immensely heavy, groovy, and sharp, and with a luxurious clean singing voice to help reinforce the music alongside some brutal growls.

Before The Dawn were a great way to ease people into extreme music. The good-cop/bad-cop vocal stylings have only spread further, and while it became the calling card of many a metalcore band proper, the Finnish journeymen that made the band up always hewed more toward a melodeath style of things. Continue reading »

DAWN OF ASHES: “INFECTING THE SCARS”

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Sep 192025
 

(DGR finally surrendered to his impulses and wrote the following review of an album released in June by Metropolis Records, the newest nightmare from L.A.-based Dawn of Ashes.)

Many, many moons ago when the planet was young and the amino acids that would eventually become the building blocks of life were still bubbling within the primordial soup – such as, last year – in a fit of inspired pique and otherwise wholesale madness just to torpedo any crumb of legitimacy that might be granted to the name tag of yours truly, I reviewed Gothminister‘s eighth studio album Pandemonium II: The Battle of the Underworlds.

The costume-wearing kitsch and otherwise designed to be blatantly infectious goth-rock and metal rhythms charmed me, fully aware that a band this late in their career had mostly evolved into spectacle rather than musical artform. At the time they were a group I had a surprising amount of history with, having followed them since 2004’s Gothic Electronic Anthems, and the idea of having them drift through the hallowed halls of this site was – at the time – far too amusing to pass up.

I have also never heard the end of it to this day, and to hear it told, have also opened the gates to some of the more wild premieres we’ve hosted in the year since with the reasoning being that we had already covered a Gothminister album so why the hell not? Continue reading »

NOVEMBERS DOOM: “MAJOR ARCANA”

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Sep 182025
 

(What follows is DGR‘s extensive review of Major Arcana, a new album from Novembers Doom that’s set for release on September 19th by Prophecy Productions, with videos for all three pre-release singles at the end)

The sadness of September continues unabated with all of your favorite titans of melancholy seeming to have chosen this month as the time to unleash their latest creative opus upon the world. Chicago’s November’s Doom have long earned their right to stand among the mightiest in this arena, with a career of well over thirty years and – now – twelve albums to their name.

Their newest one Major Arcana sails into port after a six-year journey for the Novembers Doom crew since their previous release Nephilim Grove in 2019. Major Arcana delivers unto its listeners ten songs and about fifty-six minutes worth of music. Continue reading »

PARADISE LOST: “ASCENSION”

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Sep 172025
 

(This is DGR‘s review of the new album from Paradise Lost, which is set for release on September 19th by Nuclear Blast.)

Ascension, the new album from Paradise Lost, marks the group’s first release of new material in five years since the heady days of 2020’s Obsidian. Paradise Lost have kept busy in that time since, with its members launching a bevy of other projects and working their way into music production and management, and the group themselves have even eased themselves into a bit of the nostalgia cycle with full-album performances of releases celebrating their thirtieth anniversaries.

Paradise Lost have seen and been through multiple eras, to the point where by both longevity and mark of quality the band have become a cultural pillar of the death and doom scene. In recent years, Paradise Lost have settled neatly into a sound that combined multiple eras for the band, letting Nick Holmes both sing and growl his way through crushingly heavy music, but even after doing so it had seemed like Paradise Lost were starting to stretch as far as they could with the style they had adopt on 2015’s The Plague Within.

Which may be why the five-year gap between releases might have worked in their favor because Ascension makes one hell of a lasting impression – even after many listens. Continue reading »

IN MOURNING: “THE IMMORTAL”

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Sep 092025
 

(Below you’ll find DGR‘s extensive review of the eagerly awaited new album from the Swedish band In Mourning, released at the end of August by Supreme Chaos Records and Dalapop.)

Over the course of a two-decade-plus career and seven full-length albums, Sweden’s In Mourning have had eras to their overall sound. Considering how varied their overall discography has been, you can still – albeit with stretching that would make your average fitness class jealous – somewhat neatly gather together their releases into historical periods of the band.

The core of their overall progressive death metal sound over the years has been augmented time and time again, resulting in a forlorn and poetic melodeath era of the group that saw full expansion in The Shrouded Divine and Monolith as well as a conceptual, more doom- and post-metal oriented mid-era of their career comprised of albums like The Weight Of Oceans, Afterglow, and Garden Of Storms.

A band having specific historical epochs like this is often reflective of landmark albums and seismic changes to a band’s overall sound – which often follows with releases that run in a similar vein as a band discovers a new path to travel down, either to diminishing returns over time or with a sound that becomes so ingrained with their identity that they’re near inseparable. Continue reading »

DIVERGENCE: “IN CYCLED AEONS”

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Aug 292025
 

(Here is DGR‘s review of the latest EP from New York-based Divergence, released last month.)

Following the paths charted by heavy metal’s history has long been a hobby around here, with others having taken up the travelling pack and walking stick and played musical cartographer as the genre became less one defining sound and more of a filter that conventional music was squashed through, only to have it emerge as its own ‘heavy metal’ counterpart. One of the things that is quickly revealed by such travels, though, is that heavy metal has a lot of divergences – four at least, if you trust the ole metal archives these days – and a person could easily lead a life in which many of those are ignored in favor of specializing in one or two breaks from the path.

This is how you have people who could easily name every sludge band to ever emerge from the muck of musical misery but would fail in separating a single song between bands like Sonata Arctica and Blind Guardian. It’s how you could lead a life in which you may never cross paths with a single band bearing the name of Divergence, even though there have been a few throughout the years with a concentration of them based on the East Coast.

This current Divergence then, hails from New York and plays a very technically infused style of death metal, with regional bleedover for taste when it comes to heavy, chugging riffs and a monstrous groove bordering on the overwhelming. Continue reading »

SCALP: “NOT WORTHY OF HUMAN COMPASSION”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 262025
 

(Scalp‘s new album Not Worthy of Human Compassion detonated last month with help from Closed Casket Activities. We’re detonating DGR‘s review of it now.)

One of the most consistently difficult challenges in heavy metal writing is to listen to an album like Scalp’s newest release Not Worthy Of Human Compassion and then try to avoid using the word ‘abrasive’ to describe the experience within your first few sentences. Acknowledging this doesn’t make it any easier nor does it absolve one of committing said sin.

Scalp hail from a charged grindcore and powerviolence scene, one whose music was given a turbo-boost in both increasing extremity and publicity during the ‘locked in our houses with just our thoughts’ COVID-era of music. From 2020 on we saw – and this is putting it politely – a lot of projects whose main goal was to reflect the ugliness of humanity at that particular point in its history while also serving as an outlet for an expulsion of emotion that, plainly, had nowhere to go. Many groups that had already been toiling in these mines – which included a lot of crossover with the more nihilistic black metal side of things as well – suddenly had themselves launched into a semi-cultural zeitgeist and used it to full effect.

Needless to say, recent years have become a stellar nursery for albums that are outright caustic, confrontational, overwhelmingly aggressive, and nuclear-hot on the intensity front while often clocking in under the twenty-minute mark. More traditional songwriting would barely be in the fourth song by the time many of these albums have left themselves a smouldering heap on the ground. Not Worthy Of Human Compassion is the newest addition to that particular pile. Continue reading »

SOUL DEMISE: “AGAINST THE ABYSS”

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Aug 212025
 

(DGR finally caught up with the German melodic death metal band Soul Demise via their latest album released this past March by Apostasy Records, and what follows here is his extensive review of that newest record.)

Much of what we do around these here parts is taking bands at first blush. Such is the nature of discovery; we cannot be experts in absolutely everything and were we to trot out the mighty statistics of just how many bands exist across this pale blue dot of ours it would be more of a sermon about being crushed under the weight of inevitability than anything valuable. There is a mammoth amount of music out there, and as self-cast spelunkers we are just as likely to cross a band when they are wee bairns in the musical world as we are to come across a group who are deep in their career.

When such a case does arise, we do try to make an attempt to look backward for context but that can only take one as far as one can be thrown, and the flesh is so spongy and weak these days. Instead, you get that aforementioned first glance at a group – a current-eye snapshot of a band who have enough releases to their name and a lengthy enough career that there are going to justifiably be fans of a group who are mind-boggled that we’re just getting around to them now.

And so we encounter Germany’s Soul Demise, who have existed in their Soul Demise form since 1998 and, barring some lengthy gaps in their recent two releases, were on a pretty consistent clip of music up until 2010. The group’s newest album Against The Abyss is also the first time yours truly has ever crossed paths with them. Continue reading »

AVERSIONS CROWN: “A VOICE FROM THE OUTER DARK”

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Aug 192025
 

(On August 5th Nuclear Blast released a new three-song EP by Aversions Crown, and below you’ll find DGR‘s review of the beast.)

The story of Australian deathcore group Aversions Crown‘s career is going to be a fascinating one to dive into when they call it a day. They may eventually find a modicum of stability before things wrap up just yet, but for now Aversions Crown are a band who have four full-lengths and a smattering of EPs to their name, and ever since the release of their album Tyrant, have had a different vocalist in each one.

Whether it is by virtue of the frontman shuffle that tends to happen to many a deathcore group or the recruitment of one into a more popular group, Aversions Crown have had a different talent behind the microphone for the requisite nigh-unintelligible sounds nearly every time. Continue reading »

CASTRATOR: “CORONATION OF THE GROTESQUE”

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Aug 152025
 

(Today is the day when Dark Descent Records releases the second album by the death metal band Castrator, and to help spotlight the event we present DGR‘s review and a full stream of the album.)

Sometimes, you just have an extrasensory idea that an album is going to be one you’re going to enjoy. It’s not enough to launch your own late night hotline to allow people to speak to dead relatives but wow, does it feel close to it. The combination of artwork, genre, musicianship involved if you’re extra nerdy like us around here, and sometimes even the cover song in the tracklisting manage to align the planets just right and you just know that this is one you’ll like.

Listening to such an album then becomes an exercise in watching a detonation cord burn. The lead up to the final explosion is exciting but it’s a tense exercise watching it burn down when you’re waiting ever so intently for that moment when the album catches fire for you and becomes one that you lock in with. In the case of Castrator and their new album Coronation Of The Grotesque, thankfully that wait is not tremendously long. In fact, a rough estimate would place that initial explosion around song two, and if not then, by song four, and if not then there’s a pretty good one at song six and if not… well you can guess how this is going to go. Continue reading »

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