AN NCS INTERVIEW: SECOND TO SUN

 Interviews  No Responses »
Nov 202025
 

(Today we present Comrade Aleks’ wide-ranging interview of the very busy Russian musician and producer Vladimir Lehtinen, and we’ll let Aleks introduce it.)

Vladimir Lehtinen is a one-man army, as he has managed not only to rule one of the most prolific and exemplary Russian black metal bands, Second to Sun, but also stay as one of the organizers of an annual festival of extreme music known as T’ma Fest (Darkness Fest) and to keep on working as a sound engineer who has mixed and mastered dozens of metal albums.

Second to Sun remains Vladimir’s main outfit, and together with Theodor Borovski (drums) and the Sysoev brothers from cult bands Grima and Ultar, he manages to keep the balance between quality and the quantity of music he produces. The band’s most up-to-date release is the EP Thunderbolt, which you may have heard as it was out in February 2025; yet you need no special reason to make an interview with such a man, as Vladimir, being deeply involved in the underground, has a lot to tell. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): ARALLU, MORD’A’STIGMATA, LIGHTLORN, HEIDEN, VIKVANIR, SECOND TO SUN, UNFYROS

 Exceptions to the Rule, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Oct 032022
 


Arallu

As I forecast in Part 1 of this column yesterday, Part 2 takes us off in some unusual directions. Much of the time black metal is still in the mix, but in most of the songs featured here it’s more of a jumping-off point to other wide-ranging experiences than it is the rigid core of the music — or it’s not present at all, except perhaps as a sinister spirit that hovers on the edges.

This excursion will be welcomed by some of you, and some of the songs will probably disgruntle others. But there’s only one way to find out, and that’s to expose yourself to the music. I hope you’ll do that with all the tracks here, all of which are from forthcoming albums or EPs.

ARALLU (Israel)

This long-running Israeli band, whose roots are in the late ’90s, will be releasing a new album (their 8th one overall) in November. With the imposing title of Death Covenant, it follows up the excellent En Olam from three years ago. I’ve already written here about one of the new album’s advance tracks, “Desert Shadows Will Rise“, and now we have another one. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: LAERE, HORDE OF HEL, SECOND TO SUN, CYNABARE URNE, MARTWA AURA, OVER THE VOIDS…, SEVENTH

 SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Aug 022020
 

 

This morning the words from an old soap opera popped into my head: “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” One reason might be obvious: The current world is a gigantic shitshow, and we’re being brutally reminded on a daily basis how swiftly and inexorably our lives flow away.

But it might also be because yesterday I read a fascinating article (here) about soap and skin and how Procter & Gamble created that show and many others to build a market for skin care products we probably didn’t need, and in the process invented modern American advertising.

It might also be because I’m rapidly running out of NCS time today, and so will have to be brief in what I write about these songs I’ve chosen to recommend.

LAERE

“Tenebrae” is a storm-tossed sea of sound whose heaving melodies are laden with fear and desperation. The song conjures vast panoramas of dark crashing waves and lightning-scarred skies, as well as the hopelessness of abandonment and isolation. Its desolating emotional intensity is heightened by the throat-shredding wretchedness of the vocals, and the gloom of somber spoken words. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: WASTE OF SPACE ORCHESTRA, LASTER, HEBOSAGIL, HYBRID NIGHTMARES, MORO MORO LAND, LOKUST, SECOND TO SUN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Feb 202019
 

 

I probably should have dug deeper into my ever-expanding list of recent music to check out, but instead spent my latest listening time focused only on what I added to that list over the last 48 hours. With so much new stuff coming out every day, sometimes music that’s even a week old becomes a casualty, rudely shoved aside by newer interlopers. That’s what happened here.

Unfortunately, because I happen to be hurrying at the moment, I won’t have quite as much to say as I usually do about what you’ll be hearing — but you really should listen to all these tracks anyway, even without detailed impressions from me!

WASTE OF SPACE ORCHESTRA

If you haven’t heard of Waste of Space Orchestra, perhaps you’ve heard of Oranssi Pazuzu and Dark Buddha Rising. If you haven’t heard of them either, checking out their music should be on you to-do list just above “see a doctor about that gangrenous toe”. Continue reading »

QUICK HITS: THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT, TAMERLAN EMPIRE, SECOND TO SUN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Sep 172018
 

 

With a bit of spare time left to me this morning before having to turn to more mundane tasks, I picked the following four new songs from three forthcoming albums to share with you. All of them are dramatic, all have a kind of larger-than-life scale of intensity, and the first two come with lyric videos that are based on history, and slaughter. From a larger group of new tracks I heard this morning, they stuck together in my head, and so I’m sticking them together here. Because I’m hurrying, I’ll keep the words brief.

THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT

These long-running Dutch favorites of our site have a new album entitled V2 – Vergelding (“Retaliation”) scheduled for release on November 30th. It’s described as the follow-up to the band’s 2017 album Versvs and the second instalment of the V-Trilogy, dealing “with the aftermath of the events that formed the theme of the first part”. It also includes two live performances from Graspop Metal Meeting 2017. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): DEICIDE, IN PURULENCE, CREATE A KILL, INVOCATION, HESPERIAN DEATH HORSE, SECOND TO SUN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jun 282018
 

 

Completing the round-up for today that began here, I’ve made some selections of new music and videos that cross a range of genres, and therefore should appeal to a range of preferences. Four of these bands are making their first appearances at our site; one is an old favorite.

But before we get to that, I’ll begin with a late-breaking news item.

DEICIDE

On June 5th I received an e-mail from someone I don’t know pointing me to a page at Metal Kingdom listing a new Deicide album named “The Devils of Saint-Médard-en-Jalles”, and identifying the line-up as Glen Benton (Vocals, Bass), Steve Asheim (Drums), Kevin Quirion (Guitars), and Mark English (Guitars). I couldn’t find anything to corroborate what was on that page, so I didn’t write about it. But today… Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: NEW SONGS FROM HOODED MENACE, THE CROWN, USURPRESS, PORTAL, MAMMOTH GRINDER, AND MORE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Jan 082018
 

 

In an effort to catch up with new music that appeared last week (or in some cases that I only discovered last week), I’ve resorted to a two-part OVERFLOWING STREAMS post. And for those who haven’t noticed the format of these posts, they’re a form of personal surrender to the flood of new music. I enjoy writing thoughts about what I want to recommend, but in posts such as this one I just let the music speak for itself because there’s so much to recommend that I don’t have time to blurt out my own reactions.

In Part 1 (here), I collected some newly discovered splits. This one is devoted mainly to new advance tracks, some of which just premiered today, with a few full-album or EP streams in the mix. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SECOND TO SUN — “THE FIRST CHAPTER (VOCAL EDITION)”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 142017
 

 

We discovered the Russian band Second To Sun almost two years ago through their release of advance tracks that would appear on a new album named The First Chapter, and we’ve been following them ever since. Since then they’ve released another album (2016’s Blackbound) and a half dozen singles, most of which were covers of songs by such bands as Darkthrone, Behemoth, Emperor, and Immortal, and those (along with other new recordings) were included in an album named Miscellaneous Covers: Volume I released at the end of last month.

Second To Sun’s music has evolved over time. It was started by guitarist Vladimir Lehtinen after leaving his previous black metal project Utenomjordisk Hull. Although some of the band’s singles have included vocals, their music is predominantly instrumental metal — and their integration of differing stylistic elements has led to them being branded with a variety of genre labels, some of them peculiar, perhaps in part because their focus is instrumental music.

Second To Sun is now embarking on a reimagining of their own previous work. While the band will continue to record instrumental music, they now plan to also release alternate versions of their albums with vocals included, beginning with a new edition of The First Chapter that we’re presenting in a full stream today.

This new version of The First Chapter is more than simply the original instrumental recordings with vocal tracking added. They recorded additional parts, rearranged some of the song’s elements, and remixed and remastered everything, with the aim of presenting the music in a way that more clearly presents their ideas, and perhaps also as a way of escaping some of the more peculiar genre pigeonholes in which some people have put them. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: SECOND TO SUN, INGURGITATING OBLIVION, ANCIENT ASCENDANT, POSTVORTA, WHEN ICARUS FALLS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Apr 222017
 

 

I’m slow out of the blogging gate today, partly because I overindulged during the usual Friday night blow-out with my co-workers and partly because I had trouble deciding what to write about for this round-up. The problem, as usual, wasn’t too few ideas but too many.

Before moving on to the music I ultimately selected, I’ll mention a handful of news items:

First, you might remember that last August we premiered the full stream for a hell of a good debut album by Portland’s Bewitcher, accompanied by these words (among others): “Bewitcher seem to have discovered a hidden vault filled with pure riff gold. Every song on the album is packed with electrifying guitar work, blending thrash, speed metal, Motörhead-style rock, first-wave black metal, and even elements of the classic NWOBHM in a way that’s as infectious as a rampaging new plague virus without a cure.”

The news is that Graven Earth Records, a small cassette-based label out of Colorado, is releasing a limited-run (200 copies) cassette of Bewitcher’s debut on April 28th. Go here to check that out (the rest of their catalogue looks pretty cool as well). Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: AUTHOR, WITHERED, SON IN CURSE, SECOND TO SUN, TANAKH, ASAGRAUM, RIFTWORM

 SHADES OF BLACK  4 Responses »
Jan 222017
 

 

I have a large and broad array of music in this Sunday’s Shades of Black collection. In some instances I’ve stepped outside the usual boundaries of this series, mainly because I didn’t want to wait for an arguably more appropriate way to feature the music. Hopefully, this playlist will prove interesting to you, even if you came hear expecting nothing but black metal.

AUTHOR

Earlier today we premiered a song from a band on the Naturmacht label, and the first music in this collection also comes from Naturmacht. It’s a complete album released on January 8 called Lopun Alku, by the Finnish project Author. The photo that comes next shows a full live band, but on the album one man (J.V.) did almost everything — vocals, lyrics, guitars, bass, keyboards, all music — with session drums performed by J.W. Continue reading »

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