Although I have many things to be proud of about what we’ve accomplished at NCS in helping spread the word about worthy music, I have many regrets too, one of which is our failure to pay more attention to the immensely accomplished Swiss band Unhold. That failure is all the more shameful because Unhold are now five albums deep into their career. The most recent of those, Here Is the Blood, was released in November 2018 by Czar of Bullets, and represents the pinnacle of their significant achievements so far.

Briefly summarizing the music on that album (or really, on any of its predecessors) is a daunting challenge, as is any effort to provide a pithy genre description. References to post-metal, sludge, doom, and hardcore might be useful, but don’t really give you much guidance about how fascinatingly Unhold have combined those stylistic ingredients (and others) in ways that dynamically create such a wide range of emotionally powerful and often transportive experiences, ranging from mesmerizingly beautiful to crushingly bleak and compulsively body-shaking — and much else besides.

But while we’ve regrettably neglected Here Is the Blood since its release, we do have a chance to make partial amends today by premiering a new single entitled “Barren” which was recorded in the same sessions that produced that album. This new single is not only well worth having in its own right but also should serve as an inducement for people who haven’t heard that album to check it out immediately. Continue reading »