Oct 302023
 

All trve true metalheads have only one favorite holiday, and it’s not Valentine’s Day. It’s the one bearing down on us tomorrow night. Most of us already have our own personally curated playlists of heavy music for Halloween night, but we’ve got something for you today that should lead to a revision of your list.

What we’ve got is the full streaming premiere of Utterances From Below, a new album-length split by Virginia’s Night Hag and Italy’s Burial, which will be released on November 10th by Rotted Life Records. As the label proudly previews, it is indeed “a union of death, doom, and disgust”, one that “bridges the fertile gap between quotidian horrors and supernatural dread”. Continue reading »

Feb 062023
 

(Below we present Comrade Aleks‘ new interview with the crushing Virginia-based death/doom band Night Hag.)

Night Hag‘s debut full-length album Phantasmal Scourge was released one year ago by Rotted Life Records. However the band was founded somewhere in Virginia in about 2010 and its discography is far from poor, as it contains three demos, an EP, a split release, and even live album.

Jon Ransom (drums, vocals), Joe Arida (guitars), and Sam Fox (bass, vocals) are fans of macabre and savage death-doom metal, so covers of Mortician and Necrophagia sound natural in Phantasmal Scourge. There was no big news nor a new album’s announcement since its release, but Night Hag was in my “need-to-interview” list for nearly the entire year, and here we go at last.

Joe Arida (guitars) is going to tell us about Night Hag‘s dirty deals. Continue reading »

Dec 292021
 

 

A baker’s dozen of new songs and videos is a lot to take in, but that’s what I’ve compiled here, and since we’re in the middle of Dead Week it seems entirely fitting for me to throw it your way now.

This 13-band round-up is the result of me going deep down a music-listening rabbit hole last night, a topsy-turvy underground descent in which I didn’t encounter any metal bands other than relatively obscure ones. My head was spinning by the end, and I hope yours will be too.

I did attempt to arrange the following items into “blocks”, but I make no promise that the arrangements will always make sense to you. Sometimes they barely made sense to me. I do promise you a real musical roller-coaster ride, and hope you’ll not jump out before you get to the end. And of course I had to pitch a curveball at the end.

P.S. I picked up the name “Dead Week” from this recent essay in The Atlantic, which perfectly sums up the oddities and attractions of this blank space that stretches between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

NIHIL KAOS (International)

While I think the entire journey through today’s round-up will prove to be head-spinning, I’ve chosen to lead with a trio of songs that are within themselves head-spinning. And I’ve begun with the track that for me had the most jaw-dropping, eye-popping impact of them all. Continue reading »