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 »

STARLIT PYRE: “VEINS OF SULFUR”

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Aug 132025
 

(We present DGR‘s review of Veins of Sulfur, a debut EP by the French band Starlit Pyre that was released last month.)

Observing the changes and outside perspectives people bring to melodeath has often been as interesting as the permutations people make of the music itself. It’s a long-been-known quantity, and as we’ve witnessed cycles upon cycles of retrograde nostalgia and the ‘influenced by the influenced by’ crowd slowly becoming crowd-becoming forces of their own, so too does the genre change. Not necessarily evolving, but new strains are born or echo outwards into the wider metalsphere.

Given melodeath’s already pretty blatant mass-market trappings, the chosen aesthetic for some groups to approach the genre’s two-step-heavy guitar leads and thrashier rhythms to make it appear ‘refined’ qualifies for a certain amount of sense. We have grown older, so too does the genre. We’re past the days of snot-nosed kids sticking the middle finger up at a bunch of old folks in favor of an ambitious wildness and an ear for the catchy.

The calling cards that we’re following down that path are pretty recognizable as well, one being an ever-present keyboard layer in the band’s music… and the other? Well, sometimes that other one is uniforms, and French melodeath group Starlit Pyre seem to have both in spades with their July EP Veins Of Sulfur, a solid seventeen-minute block of melodeath that goes on a whirlwind tour through the genre before quietly sneaking out of the back of the room. Continue reading »

CTHULUMINATI: “TENTACULA”

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Jul 312025
 

(In March of this year the Dutch avant-garde metal band Cthuluminati released Tentacula, a Faustian concept album about Thomas, an illusionist who was granted his power through a most nefarious deal with the ancient deity Tentacula, and Thomas’ subsequent (and unsuccessful) efforts to expose the truth and make amends. Our writer DGR developed a “weird fascination” for the record, and he attempts to explain why in the following review.)

Waste Of Space Orchestra‘s one full-length album Syntheosis came out six years ago, yet I think about it constantly. Syntheosis is an album that I think serves as a prime personal example of being fascinating while at the same time it is so far either ahead of me or just off the beaten path of my musical sphere that I just don’t fully get it. It challenges me on a listening level but at the same time I’m not sure after listening to it that I’ve ever enjoyed myself – yet I am happy that it exists as a reflection of heavy metal’s ambition as well as its mark on the overall art of the genre.

For every painting of recognizable pop art and soup cans, we need our avant-garde weirdos whose ambition far outstrips either the listener’s abilities or the musicians’ own. With no one willing to poke and prod at musical boundaries we’re left with nothing but an already well-laid-out playground and recognizable throughways. Eventually, everything becomes musical suburbia with the same nuclear family and picket fence, with nothing left for us to discuss other than who is fucking who.

The Netherlands gifted us an album of a similar vein a few months back in the form of Cthuluminati and their newest release Tentacula. While far less meditative, psychedelics-obsessed, and psychosis-inducing than the aforementioned art-project (though not by much), I have found that I am weirdly fascinated with Tentacula for much the same reasons. Continue reading »

COFFIN FEEDER: “BIG TROUBLE”

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Jul 232025
 

(We present DGR‘s review of the debut album from the Belgian death-dealers Coffin Feeder.)

We’ve joked about it over the years but there does exist something in the vocalist world that we’ve referred to as the “Sven effect”, wherein any band that has a feature from vocalist Sven de Caluwé is going to inevitably sound like one of his projects. Him being one of the more consistent and prolific guest vocalists out there certainly doesn’t help matters either; the guy is just so recognizable that he could almost never commit a crime because someone would be able to pick him out of a lineup while in another country.

The recipe is simple too: if you take Sven and put him over some sort of grinding death metal or deathcore riff, inevitably it is going to sound like it has emerged from his wide-reaching works within the infrastructure of his biggest project, Aborted.

You have to work very, very hard in order to avoid this, though a handful of bands have managed to do so over the years. Most recently and impressively, the progressive death metal group Eternal Storm featured him on their song “A Dim Illusion” and it actually played out more like the band bent him to their will rather than the other way around.

But does this same effect exist when it comes to Sven‘s own projects and the works he has brought into his orbit over the years? Is one person’s taste for rapid-fire blast and grinding guitar enough that all of them become one amorphous mass or is there enough on offer that part of the interest will come from hearing how a particular sculpture might’ve been crafted in spite of one guy’s spotlight being so suffocatingly bright that even when it’s not his choice, any similarities to his career are going to fall into his lap?

It has to be vexing at times, but by that same token perhaps it is worth it to just throw caution to the wind. Continue reading »

GRAND CADAVER: “THE ROT BENEATH”

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Jul 222025
 

(Today we present DGR‘s review of Grand Cadaver‘s new EP The Rot Beneath, which will be out on August 15th via Majestic Mountain Records.)

When you’re spread among many projects in the way Dark Tranquillity‘s Mikael Stanne has been over the past few years, there is a chance of one of them going consistently underrated in the face of all the other material being put out. The throwback riffwork of swede-death project Grand Cadaver has flown under the radar among many in metal fandom, and it has reached a point where you can’t help but wonder if people are unintentionally robbing themselves of an awesome time by just breezing past the group and chalking them up as another band pining for older days.

Grand Cadaver have proven to be a rock-solid foundation of music since their founding in 2020; the five years since have seen the group chalking up an array of singles, EPs, and two full albums to their name, all of which, yes, look backward in order to progress forward, and have either been stealthily melodic or pushed at the boundaries of floor-stomping death metal enough to keep the events interesting. Continue reading »

EMBERTHRONE: “CURSIVE”

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Jul 112025
 

(Sacramento-based DGR reviews a very recently released EP by Sacramento-based Emberthrone, and comes away happy.)

Sacramento’s Emberthrone are one we’ve kept a curious eye on for a little bit now. Part of a small-town-sized wave of deathcore-leaning projects that sprang up in the lockdown years wherein a lot of people suddenly had a bunch of free time out of nowhere for some reason, Emberthrone seemed like a solid union with a lot of potential just based off of its lineup alone at the time. Uniting some of the scene’s workhorses for vocals and drums in the form of Monte Bernard and Gabe Seeber, the group’s complete portrait included bassist Quentin Garcia and guitarist Martin Bianchini.

Their group’s four-song debut Godless Wonder found them a home on Seek & Strike, a label that has slowly developed an arc for being the home of boutique ass-kickers in prefix-core heavy form. Godless Wonder was a reliably solid brick of music that fell perfectly in line with a lot of the bruisers that’ve emerged from California’s filing cabinet over the years. In the three years hence, though, the lineup for Emberthrone has remained fairly solid save for what seems to be a new face behind the kit, translating into an interesting round two for the band.

Now more matured and gelled together as a band, Emberthrone returned in early-July with a second EP bearing the name Cursive that seems to be forged by experience and a stronger vision of what sort of project they want to be, while also much more determined to throw its heft around than they did before. Continue reading »

DEFILED SERENITY: “WITHIN THE SLUMBER OF THE MIND”

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Jul 082025
 

(NCS writer DGR pays a debt today, finally reviewing a debut album released five months ago by Finland’s Defiled Serenity that he’s been enjoying since then.)

Just in time to be late enough for the bus tracks from the public transit we missed to not only fade away but also be paved over again as the street is resurfaced!

Just before we set off on our jet-setting lifestyles that had a block of this website traveling coast to coast in May to take in only the finest vintages of heavy metal on stage, yours truly set out with a machine to absorb an equally large block of the heavy metal that had been released throughout the year in order to queue up the website to always have something to chat about while we were off wandering venue to venue.

The result was a wide snapshot of the world of underground heavy metal as it had existed so far in 2025, a disorganized ball of chaos that didn’t really have much of a throughline existing in it so far. Some years become reflective of society at large, others take after more recent events, but 2025 has been as odd as your more avant-garde wings of an art museum — somewhat unnerving and almost surrealistic horror-movie in that sort of way. Whatever themes may be developing to define this year musically — not socially, we’ve already landed on “hell” there — they just haven’t congealed yet and are almost refusing to do so.

We have, however, landed within a realm of a few amusing statistical blobs for those who love themselves some numbers nerd-ery, such as how it seems a contingent of Finland decided that all of their projects should see a release in some form or another within the first half of this year. Granted, it’s a wide net to be casting but it’s a pattern I’ve been joking about for months now. Continue reading »

PATRISTIC: “CATECHESIS”

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Jul 072025
 

(What follows is DGR‘s review of the stunning debut album from the Italian band Patristic, out now on Willowtip Records.)

The evolution of black metal as a genre remains as constant as ever. Its grasp is one that artists cannot seem to escape; there is an unholy draw to the offerings of the dramaticism, high-end shrieking, and outwardly reactionary and purposeful abrasiveness of the style. Each person approaches it as if they have something different to lay at its altar (offerings small or large) and thus the genre continues to find itself in a steady yet chaotic rate of high-speed metamorphosis. New ideas are interjected, rejected, stitched onto, and forced into place at times, but all creates this whirling sphere of metal that could eclipse galaxies in utter darkness.

Not every group is original or looking to change the book on things, which is how we’ve wound up with generational views of a genre that is also now well-aged. We’ve codified and crystalized certain styles — hell you could argue some have even ossified to the point of near parody. But the infernal harvest does remain forever fruitful, and whenever an artist you’ve been following for a while decides to take a crack at it, you can’t help but be intrigued.

How does a genre emerge once it is filtered through that particular creature’s viewpoint? Are there changes? Do they seek to just replicate and add to the pile of skulls already creating the throne or are they looking to adapt and bend it to their own ways? Is there a statement to be made in any regard that black metal becomes the only screen through which they push their own music? Continue reading »

UPON STONE: “END TIME LIGHTNING”

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Jul 042025
 

(Here we have DGR‘s review of a new EP by California’s Upon Stone, which saw release in June of this year via Century Media.)

Southern California’s Upon Stone continue to remain an interesting proposition in the world of melodeath. A newer upstart project in a world in which melodeath is starting to see acts of varying throwback styles – it seems right now we have groups specializing in particular ‘eras’ of the genre as a whole – Upon Stone could’ve easily gone the route of being a complete influence-worship act.

Considering that the band’s first full-length arrived early last year by way of Century Media after a single EP in 2021, you could’ve imagined the Upon Stone crew arriving with a gloss and sheen that might’ve blinded people from space. Instead, the band hewed pretty close to the late ’90s, early ’00s melodeath roots and combined it with a lot of gravel and grit that would’ve otherwise been associated with more thrash and trad-metal leaning counter parts. The result was a surprisingly fiery if not equally straight-shooting full-length in Dead Mother Moon and one whose bloody-knuckled scrappiness at least could not be denied.

Upon Stone still had some gas left in the tank though, as late June saw the arrival of a new three-song EP from the band entitled End Time Lightning. Armed with two new songs and a cover of the Manowar song “Outlaw”, it would seem as if Upon Stone felt they needed to resume right where they left off last time, just with a little bit more focus on the double-bass roll because you don’t get to entitle your new EP End Time Lightning without at least one of the songs sounding as if you were riding into a world-ending battle. Continue reading »

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