AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HÆNESY — “ESENTIA”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 232026
 

(written by Islander)

At the end of this week, just two days from now, the Hungarian band Hænesy will have their third album released in cooperation with Fractions of Life Records. Its name is Esentia, and we have lots of thoughts about it, but most important we have a full stream of all the music to share with you.

“Atmospheric black metal” is one descriptor of what you’ll hear, but it’s not an entirely satisfactory one, in part because Hænesy’s music owes as much to post-rock as it does to black metal (with other influences also playing roles) and in part because it doesn’t tell you anything about the nature of the atmospheres the band create. We’ll make an attempt to do that below. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): RORCAL – MAHRE

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 232026
 

(Andy Synn presents an exclusive premiere of one of the darkest, harshest albums of 2026)

Success, or so they like to say, can be a double-edged sword.

And the music business in particular is full of bands who have reached the heighest of heights – whether critical, commercial, artistic, or some combination of all three – only to then have to live in the shadow of their success for the rest of their careers.

For Swiss Black/Sludge/Doom coven Rorcal this sonic apotheosis came in the form of 2019’s demonically intense Muladona (based on the novel of the same name), whose visceral, soul-scarring assault on the senses deserves – in my opinion, at least – be held up right alongside the nastiest, gnarliest works of Dragged Into Sunlight, Primitive Man, and This Gift Is A Curse at their very best.

That’s not to say that the band’s previous output – from the colossal Drone-Doom of Heliogabalus to the grinding attack of Világvége to the asphyxiating, Post-Metallic atmospherics of Κρέων – were in any way lacking (indeed, the latter is, quite rightly, considered to be something of an underground gem), but Muladona raised the bar so much, creatively and conceptually, that both 2021’s Witch Coven collaboration and 2023’s more Blackened Hardcore-leaning Silence still felt somewhat eclipsed by their progidigious predecessor.

This Friday, however, will see the release of the band’s nightmarish new album, Mahre, which doesn’t so much seek to escape the shadow of Muladona as it does dive even deeper into it, pursuing a darker, more disturbing path, and today we have distinct (mis)fortune of presenting the album in its entirety via the medium of a fascinating, and disturbing, full-length video accompaniment for the record, created by the band’s frequent collaborator (and friend of the site) Eeli Helin.

Continue reading »

MAUNAH – HJARTA

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  No Responses »
Sep 222026
 

(Andy Synn delivers another justified “exception to the rule” courtesy of Denmark’s Maunah)

I was today years old (well, actually, by the time you’re reading this that won’t actually be true any more, but just go with it) when I discovered that NCS has an honest-to-god Wikipedia entry.

Which I guess means we’re finally “a big deal” and will need to start charging you all for our services.

That’s how this works, right?

Now, in all seriousness it was legitimately interesting to see what got mentioned, and what didn’t (and suggest a few updates to the text), with regards to the site, our history, and our ethos.

In particular, the original version of the page – now updated – failed to mention the fact that the term “no clean singing” is very much an in-joke these days, rather than an iron-clad dictum, especially since we make so many “exceptions to the rule” on an almost daily basis.

And one of those exceptions we’re so happy to make these days is the debut album from Danish progressive doom-dealers Maunah.

Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BLOEDMAAN — “HAUNTING CALL OF THE WANING MOON”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Sep 222026
 

(written by Islander)

2026 will be an eventful year for the Flemish black metal band Bloedmaan. On October 30th they will have their third album Circle of the Moon released by Immortal Frost Productions, and the day before that — on October 29th — Void Wanderer Productions will release an album-length split by Bloedmaan and the Belgian duo Crypts of Dusk. The name of the split is Curse Of The Emerald Knight, and as you can see, its cover art (created by Bloedmaan mastermind Rönarg) is a fine representation of the title.

Bloedmaan’s side of the split includes four songs, and today we’re premiering an engrossing video for the first of those, “Haunting Call of the Waning Moon“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BOKKERIJDERS — “CALCINATION PYRE”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 222026
 

(written by Islander)

The prime curator of Personal Records continues to prove the depth and quality of his tastes by joining forces with the Belgian black metal band Bokkerijders for the release of their debut album Crush Kill Destroy on October 23rd.

The album’s name points the way to the nature of Bokkerijders‘ concoctions, but not the entirety of their nature. Even the simple label of “black metal” doesn’t tell the whole story, because the band have clearly imbibed other elixirs from the casks of heavy and extreme music while creating their own intoxicating brews.

You’ll see what we mean when you hear the album track we’re premiering today — “Calcination Pyre“. But before we get to that, we should ponder the band’s name, shouldn’t we? Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: TORTURERAMA

 Interviews  No Responses »
Sep 222026
 

(Today we happily present Zoltar’s interview of the Belgian death metal band Torturerama, whose pleasingly foul and ripping second full-length was released this past July by Memento Mori Records.)

Back in 2010, as in the bowels of the Swedish underground scene a new breed of newcomers were doing their best to take death metal back to its natural habit, aka somewhere dark and ominous, a seemingly new band popped out of nowhere – nowhere being Bilzen, Belgium for you – and gave everybody a lesson in pure classic SweDeath worshipping straight out of 1991, with the help of the legendary producer Tomas Skogsberg, with their debut demo/EP, Left As Remains. A few releases as filled with HM-2 filth followed, until the band went very quiet before dissolving without a fuzz in 2018.

Having returned in 2023 with a reconfigured line-up and a slightly different – yet still as Swedish-obsessed – mindset, they’ve delivered their second and even more putrid sounding second album, The Elaborate Theatre Of The Macabre, through Memento Mori this summer. And it’s collectively that they’ve agreed to answer a few of NCS’ questions, with their tongue firmly in their cheek as you can see… Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): S.C.R.A.M. — “COMA FILAMENT”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 212026
 

(written by Islander)

Pranjal Tiwari, the Oakland-based creator behind the musical project S.C.R.A.M. (which stands for Safety Control Rod Axe Man), was inspired to create S.C.R.A.M.’s new album Coma Filament by a single image — a ghost ship encountered in the outer reaches of space light years away from where any human has been before. He named the album for a galaxy thread that forms part of the Coma Wall, one of the largest known superstructures in the observable universe. And he created the music as an answer to the question, “What if Andrei Tarkovsky had directed the first Alien movie?”

If you’re a fan of science fiction, and more specifically of tales of horrors encountered in deep space, then you should be quite intrigued at this point. If you’ve actually seen Tarkovsky’s 1972 Soviet science fiction and psychological horror film Solaris, based on Stanisław Lem’s 1961 novel of the same title, then you’re even more excited. I certainly was, because in this writer’s humble opinion that’s one of the best sci-fi movies ever made, based on one of the greatest sci-fi novels ever written.

To be clear, Coma Filament isn’t a re-telling of Alien or any other single literary narrative. The idea of what might have resulted if Tarkovsky had directed Alien is more about what kind of soundtrack would best suit such a movie, and more broadly what kind of listening experience would evoke the physical and psychological pressures of a journey through deep space and the terrors we imagine might be encountered there, with Tarkovsky acting as the muse.

We have Pranjal Tiwari’s answers to these questions today through our full streaming premiere of Coma Filament in advance of its release this Wednesday, September 23rd, the Fall Equinox. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: THE CRAWLING — “A SONG TO NURSE THE SICKNESS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 212026
 

(written by Islander)

Within the dark domains of death/doom Northern Ireland’s The Crawling hold a special place for this writer and others at our nefarious site. Their music is not comfortable, because they have devoted themselves to renderings of “lonely desolation, bleak truths and never healing wounds of loss and regret” (not our words, but they speak accurately), yet their records have been so powerful on both a raw sonic level and emotionally that they stand out, and we go back to them.

We’re three years on from The Crawling’s last album of new music, All of This for Nothing, and soon we will have something more from them, a new two-song EP named What We Leave Behind (they also released a fantastic live album this past January, which you can find here).

What we have for you today is an exceptionally well-made video for the first of these two tracks, “A Song To Nurse The Sickness“, and while we will of course share our own thoughts about it, we’ll turn back to the previously quoted press materials for their own evocative introduction: Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: POLDERHAAT, BONJOUR TRISTESSE, SERPENT, ÜBERCHRIIST

 SHADES OF BLACK  4 Responses »
Sep 202026
 

(written by Islander)

This collection of recommended music will be much shorter than yesterday’s. We’ve got a visitor coming to the house any minute now, and after that I’ll be heading across Puget Sound to join friends in watching our beloved Seahawks play another team named for a bird, one that wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell if an actual osprey decided to mess with it in the avian world, but this being a football game in which a star player might get butt-hurt right away, as one of ours literally did in the first series of the Hawks’ opening game, you never know.

Now that I’ve made my excuses, on we go…. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: ARCHITECT OF SETH, CLØUDY SKIES, DUMAL, DUNGEON SERPENT, IMMORTAL DISSOLVER, MESSE DE MINUIT, OUTER HEAVEN, TEMPLE OF VOID, VELNIAS, WITCH RIPPER

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Sep 192026
 

(written by Islander)

It has been quite a while since I’ve done this, 92 days to be precise — “this” being to use the OVERFLOWING STREAMS banner for one of these Saturday roundups instead of the usual SEEN AND HEARD. I don’t have a precise dividing line between them, it’s more of a gut feel, but my gut tells me that 10 selections is an overflow.

Beyond using the different banner name for collections of this size, I also dispense with the time required to download, upload, and re-size album art, and I put the release info in lists instead of sentences. I also had delusions of trying to be a bit more concise in my comments about the songs and videos, too, but for the most part I didn’t succeed.

I also didn’t spend time trying to figure out a flow for the music, a sequencing that would generate either companionability or stark contrasts among the songs (or both), but instead put everything in alphabetical order by band name.

The objective of all this was to be more efficient with the time I’ve got this morning so I can include more instead of less. In some settings less can be more, but not today. Continue reading »

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