ROTTEN SOUND: “MASS EXTINCTION”

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Nov 272025
 

(Rotten Sound’s new EP Mass Extinction comes out December 12th on Season of Mist, and in a rare attempt to get ahead of the game, DGR sent in the following review.)

Rotten Sound’s cycle of album and then EP continues unabated for the third time running with the upcoming release of their eight-song auditory assault known as Mass Extinction.

In classic Rotten Sound fashion, they waste absolutely no time in getting going and also have little care for making a song that even bothers clearing the two-minute mark. Sub-ten minutes of fiery grind are on offer here, split off from the grander chaos of the group’s 2023 Apocalypse sessions and made whole as part of a package that songwriting-wise is a little more scattershot, but manages to hit just as hard as the album that preceded it.

It goes without saying that Rotten Sound have continued to be one of the more straight-shooting pillars of the grind scene over the years and any excuse to sit down with one of their bona-fide blastbeat batterings is a good one. Apocalypse stuck pretty close to the tried-and-true for the Rotten Sound crew and it will come as no surprise, then, that Mass Extinction continues that march into oblivion, just with a slight bit more taste for the two-step now that it is a little more free to stretch its wings than Apocalypse’s unrelenting assault would’ve allowed. Continue reading »

UNALIGNED: “A FORM BEYOND”

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Nov 212025
 

(Given our DGR’s proclivities in musical taste it was just a matter of time before he got around to reviewing the debut album from Unaligned, which was released by Transcending Obscurity Records in September. And now’s the time.)

Fireworks are pretty much illegal in the glorious nation of California. Something about the state being a massive tinderbox in the spring and summertime thanks to our brand new, shiny, and totally not climate change related weather pattern of atmospheric river into complete and utter drought means that even the slightest butterfly fart has the risk of igniting Santa Monica and reducing it to ash. That’s not to deny that the appeal isn’t there, and a brightly colored explosion is immensely and undeniably fucking cool, to say the least.

But, if we cannot have our yearly culling of hands and other extremities by some of the less bright among the shedful of lightbulbs that is our populace, we can seek other ways to chase after that high. What about musically then? Perhaps that is why even though it has long ossified into its own form of genre, tech-death seems to hold on out here. From any source, all across the nation, we will more than happily absorb that wall of notes and pyrotechnic instrumentation. We are the one of the homes of the big ramp of the X Games after all, and what is tech-death if not the musical idea of lining up a whole bunch of fireworks all in a row, setting them off at the same time, and then launching yourself across a forty-foot gap while attempting to land some sort of trick?

Tech-death is the very existence of “why can’t it just be the big ramp all the time”. With subtlety now strapped to a rocket and launched into space, tech-death itself has been a vibrant home to foster all sorts of wild musical showmanship, and surprisingly, it still shows no sign of slowing down. The latest evidence of that comes to us from all the way across the country in Florida’s Unaligned and their September-released album A Form Beyond. Continue reading »

CENTINEX: “WITH GUTS AND GLORY”

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Nov 192025
 

(We present DGR’s lively review of the 12th album by the Swedish death metal band Centinex, recently released by Black Lion Records.)

If the smoking rubble of the American public school system and, by some extent given how intertwined they are nowadays, Google A.I., are to be believed, then a famous playwright once wrote that “brevity is the soul of wit”. But, a curious idea arises in reading the quote as literally as possible, and a new quest alights as the result:

Is there wit to be found in something that exists solely for being brief? Are the attempted jokes and madcap hilarity of many-a-plug-and-play grind bands secretly the funniest things metal has to offer? Is there something of wit to be found in an album that has shown itself to be surprisingly and unexpectedly short? Is there wit to be found in that unexpectedly short romp in what might feasibly be some of the purposefully dumbest music put to record?

The Swede-death stomp, writ large, has been the proprietor of hundreds of markedly stupid circle pits, a lowbrow artistic effort of high reward in the unleashing of rotational energy, and the revivalism of the last decade of “old school death metal” has seen the dead walk anew; bands returning from long trips to farms upstate or groups who’ve been in the game for a while yet playing a different subgenre of metal’s increasingly fractalized musical tree declaring to the world “we can make that bullshit too!” and succeeding for the most part. Continue reading »

GALUNDO TENVULANCE: “INSOMNIS SOMNIA”

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Nov 172025
 

(The Japanese melodic death metal band Galundo Tenvulance released a new album on the Spiritual Beast label in September of this year. What you’ll find below is our DGR’s enthusiastic review.)

The universe has its constants – such as the existence of a universal constant concept; in the grand cosmic chaos that many a metal band have drawn from for inspiration, there have been a few things we’ve been able to use as sign posts along the way. Whether it be the classic ‘death and taxes’ or the equally reliable refrain that ‘things can always get worse’, the reliability of them is undeniable.

We would actually propose another, which we’ve covered before here, and that is the idea that you just never, ever, ever forget a band name like Galundo Tenvulance after it goes sailing across your desk even one time. Continue reading »

THE HALO EFFECT: “WE ARE SHADOWS”

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Nov 142025
 

(On November 21st Nuclear Blast will release a new EP from the Swedish metal band The Halo Effect, an EP named We Are Shadows that includes five cover songs, featuring one track picked by each band member. Our writer DGR has been a fan of the band, spent some time with this new EP, and wrote the following review.)

The year in heavy metal is going to have peaks and valleys. Previously, we could’ve viewed years in heavy metal as one seemingly unending torrential flood or the polar opposite in a semi-peaceful consistency, a steady flow of new albums, discoveries, and distractions in equal measure. The past handful of years, however, have been so brain-fried and birdshot when it comes to any form of a consistent release schedule that you could never tell what was going to arrive and – part of this due to getting older and being blissfully unaware of the world surrounding us – more often than not now it feels like we’re constantly getting blindsided by something just off in the distance arriving at the front door with all the aplomb and grandeur one might afford to a distant cousin deciding to bike across the country and wanting to crash at your house for the day. Not to say that there’s any personal experience in the matter, but come the fuck on dude, we’ve spoken one time in nearly forty years?

2024 could have been kindly described as a year of fits and starts at best, were it not for the feeling of burning the candle at both ends – as well as just immolating the whole fucking thing after dousing it in kerosene with the amount we wrote – but 2025 has been the first time in some time that things have felt… consistent. Sort of. We still seem to be drunkenly stumbling to a semblance of previous reality at times but this is more like the occasional stumble one might make when they’re just on the legal line and walking home after having cut themselves off hours ago. Continue reading »

NOVEMBRE: “WORDS OF INDIGO”

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Nov 112025
 

(Last week Peaceville released the ninth studio album by the revamped Italian band Novembre, and as our DGR is a long-term follower of the band’s music, there’s no one here better suited to review it — which he does below.)

It could never be perfect, one guesses, that the timelines of releases would line up perfectly so that the opening ‘fun with statistics’ paragraph could already be pre-written for us. Alas though, we do find ourselves cycling back around anyway with Italy’s Novembre, who’ve returned to us after another near ten-year period of inactivity as a renewed creature and full band.

It has been close to nine and a half years since the group’s previous album Ursa was let loose upon the world, to unleash its melancholy and general sadness upon unsuspecting citizens who might’ve thought they would be enjoying a beautiful spring and bright summer back in April of 2016. We’ll just gloss over the fact that yours truly actually scribbled something up about the album at that time as well, itself a victim of a long retreat from the public eye on the band’s part.

Yet even as a new creature, Novembre find themselves existing in cycles, and their newest album Words Of Indigo springs to life just as we enter the cold peace of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere yet somehow still finds itself conjuring up the spirits of blue-hued cover arts and siblings of old, as if it were the unintentional completion of a trilogy begun all the way back in 2002 with Dreams D’Azur, revitalized in 2007’s The Blue, and now 18 years later summoned once again for the aforementioned Words Of Indigo. Continue reading »

WOLFHEART: “DRACONIAN DARKNESS II”

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Oct 292025
 

(DGR continues his very long history of writing about the music of Finland’s Wolfheart at NCS with this review of their new EP Draconian Darkness II, out now via Reigning Phoenix Music.)

Wolfheart have developed many patterns for themselves over their career and we have dove headlong into them many a time with each successive album. One of the more common ones for the Wolfheart crew in recent years, since their Napalm Records and then current Reigning Phoenix signings, is to hammer together an EP or single in between albums and unleash it closer to the end of summer.

The name Wolfheart remains in constant discussion then, with releases like Skull Soldiers carving the path for the EP segment of the crowd and songs like “Iku-Turso” laying the groundwork for the occasional loose-laying single. It’s meant as a sort of comfort food for those of us who’ve taken to the band’s formulation of melodic death metal, forged in fire yet epic enough to soundtrack mountain climbing in a blizzard, something present that is consistent in quality with the album prior but still has a shiny newness to it to tide people over.

Wolfheart‘s latest gathering of material of this ilk arrived in late-September, entitled Draconian Darkness II, offering up a continuation of the group’s 2024 release Draconian Darkness and containing an oddball mixture of material to satiate the completionist in us all: Two new songs, one live track, an acoustic take on a Draconian Darkness song, and the orchestral segment of a different one of the same album. Continue reading »

MASTIFF: “FOR ALL THE DEAD DREAMS”

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Oct 082025
 

(This is DGR‘s vivid review of a new Mastiff EP that’s set for release on October 24th by Church Road Records.)

Have you ever had a band that were perfect for ruining what would otherwise be a good day? A band that could drag you down into the depths of anger, violence, and misery no matter what in the world was happening outside? You could wake up and have everything be sunshine and rainbows, birds landing on your windowsill, all the animals of the forest resting kindly on your shoulder, and your beloved waiting just out of frame – only to put on a release by said group and have the whole feeling be annihilated and the skies darken around you?

What if we pitched the idea that sometimes that actually feels good in its own right? A weird sort of audio-masochism that works inversely to how your personality actually works? That we take this ugly music and it somehow gets us through the day no matter the situation. Propelled by either the sheer force of anger or the more nebulous ‘force of dumb’. That sometimes the artistic expulsion that helps them exorcise whatever demons might be bothering them works equally for us, calming anxiety and settling nerves.

No? Have you ever listened to the UK’s Mastiff, whose brand of sludge-infused hardcore is perfect for bullrushing whatever room you’re in and declaring, “Oh you thought things were going to be good today? Well, not on my watch!” Continue reading »

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 »

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