CARACH ANGREN: “THE CULT OF KARIBA”

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Sep 262025
 

(NCS writer DGR has long-established his bona fides as a Carach Angren fan, and so it’s no surprise that he would focus on this Dutch group’s evil new EP The Cult of Kariba that will be released on October 17th by Season of Mist. He seems very happy with what he found there.)

Five years is a mighty long walk between an album and an EP for an active band but such is the case for the black metal storytellers of Carach Angren and their newest EP The Cult Of Kariba.

The distance between the group’s newest EP and their album Frankensteina Strataemontanus has been pretty sizeable. Granted, some of this was due to the pandemic years in which many bands saw the brakes effectively slammed on any sort of performance or touring plans, and for those who had literally just released an album and weren’t planning on being at home so soon, you can see in many different group timelines how it might’ve affected them.

For some, the need to create was immediate and you saw periods of intense activity while bands would hammer out singles and covers for lack of anything else to do. Others, probably a quiet sort of frustration. No two approaches could be deemed correct and creativity certainly doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s not a switch to be thrown on and off, and seeking inspiration so soon after you’ve just put out an opus to a ghoulish take on the Frankenstein story could freeze anyone’s mind for a while. That and an ever-fluid drummer situation not helping much either, having now reduced Carach Angren down to two core members, effectively transforming them into two studio-dwelling ghosts haunting the boards when they get the chance. Continue reading »

SYNESTIA: “PREMONITIONS”

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Sep 242025
 

(This is DGR‘s lavish review of a new EP released earlier this month by Minneapolis-based Synestia.)

Symphonic deathcore group Synestia have had an interesting arc to their career. Existing by pure force of technology with members initially spread far and wide around the world, the group have been generally consistent with their release timeframes.

However, despite being something of an undercurrent on their own in the particular branch of the immensely spastic, adhd-inflected branch of the deathcore tree, the band themselves are just as known for multiple collaborations with musician/producer Blake Mullens who performs under the name Disembodied Tyrant.

This in itself means the band are part of a much larger orbit of surgical and synthetic-feeling and symphonics-reliant deathcore groups that all seem to both appear, contribute, and feature on one another’s works. It has to be difficult to break out on your own in such a way, when your logos all seem to be blurring together into one old script and sharpened stylized mass of words, and so a new EP from the group with a now more localized lineup and mostly them on their own is an interesting proposition. Continue reading »

DISSOCIA: “TO LIFT THE VEIL”

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Sep 242025
 

(We present DGR‘s review of the debut album by the Spanish band Dissocia, released last spring by Willowtip Records.)

Dissocia’s To Lift The Veil is a release that has been hanging around the NCS collective office for a while. To Lift The Veil was released in March of this year and we’re only just now getting around to a full-album deep dive.

Yes, this is one of those that we refuse to let go of for a few reasons. The compulsion to have something to say even though it’s been out for a while often wins over our feeble minds in that case, and as you can see here, we are once again battered and bruised by our own brain chemicals.

Not that we haven’t had anything to say in regard to this project before though; we were lucky enough to run a premiere of the song “Samsara” back in February when 2025’s overall musical arc was still a nebulous ball of chaos that had yet to take shape. But in order to understand all of this we need to run backward even further than just this introductory bit because it is likely that some of you may not be aware of what Dissocia and their debut album are just yet. Continue reading »

LUNAR BLOOD: “ANOR” & “ITHIL”

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Sep 232025
 

(In this article DGR vividly reviews the two EPs released this year (so far) by the New Jersey extremists Lunar Blood.)

The initial plan for tackling New Jersey-based Lunar Blood’s newest EP Anor was to do so soon after I had returned from the May festival run. Anor was released on May 2nd, 2025 and was swept up in the great content maw that is my dragnet, but the opportunity to tackle its three songs wouldn’t present itself until after I returned home closer to the end of the month.

However, like many reviews, best laid plans are often laid to waste instead, and so Anor – alongside a few other victims that I keep swearing up and down that I’ll get to goddamnit – found itself backburnered up until Thursday, September 11th, when I finally found the time post-work – as nothing else important had happened that day other than me taking my team out for breakfast for clearing 1,000 days safe at work – to dive headfirst into its three songs and really come to grips with what the Lunar Blood crew were attempting to create here… only to discover that they had released a follow-up four song EP that same day entitled Ithil. Continue reading »

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”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
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 »

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