(written by Islander)

This isn’t the first time we’ve premiered music from the Italian death-dealers in Helslave. We did it twice in 2021 in the run-up to their second album, From the Sulphur Depths, which we predicted (pretty accurately) would “become a huge favorite for fans of massive, marauding, deliciously gruesome old school death metal”.

And now here we are, five years later — five years of unpredictable and tumultuous change in the world at large, including a global pandemic that maliciously chose to explode right about the time when Helslave’s last album dropped. It would be surprising if Helslave itself had not undergone some change of its own, and in fact it has — a very exciting change — because the band have themselves a new vocalist in the person of Enrico H. Di Lorenzo from Hideous Divinity and Eyeconoclast.

We are also very pleased to announce that Helslave have recorded a new EP that’s projected for digital release on May 8th, and we have for you today the premiere of its first single, “Burning Rebirth“. Continue reading »

If you’re like me, surrounded by new music you might know nothing about, sometimes you’ll take a chance on something based entirely on the cover art — even though there is no necessary connection between the appeal of cover art and the attractiveness of the sounds. If I hadn’t agreed to host the following premiere, this is hands-down an example of music I would have investigated anyway, based on the album cover by the great Juanjo Castellano. And that would have been a very smart decision.

In this instance the album is From the Sulphur Depths, the second full-length by the Italian death metal band Helslave. It will be released on April 23rd by Pulverised Records (with a vinyl edition coming on May 14th), and today’s premiere is for a track named “Unholy Graves” — which is bombastic chainsaw death metal of the finest kind, an electrifying, turbocharged thrill-ride that’s as crushing as a pile-driver and as ferocious as giant famished wolves on the hunt. Continue reading »