The northern square-lipped rhinoceros, also known as the northern white rhinoceros, used to range over parts of Uganda, Chad, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But years of uncontrolled poaching and civil war in their home range decimated the species, and they are now considered extinct in the wild. Only two of them remain, both of them protected in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy on a 700-acre nature preserve in Kenya that’s also the largest black rhino sanctuary in east Africa. Both of the last survivors are female.

The story of the critically endangered northern white rhino is unusual subject matter for a slamming death metal band (or any extreme metal band), but the conceptual focus of the Swedish group Extinction encompasses not only that story but many other narratives of once flourishing species terminated by the actions of humankind.

Their forthcoming EP Smoldering Enfoulment, as they explain, “encapsulates a variety of disasters, degradations and extinctions of 2019 — from trees lost to sand mining and bird species loss to habitat destruction, and international conflagrations wiping out landscapes and exploited by monoliths of power”. The band further explain: Continue reading »