(written by Islander)
It’s a Bandcamp Friday. But you probably knew that. I failed to put it on my calendar but the engorgement of our in-box over the last 24 hours reminded me. So even though we’ve already published our usual three features for the day I decided to do this fourth one so I don’t feel quite as overwhelmed in preparing the usual Saturday roundup.
Be forewarned: you might experience whiplash as you move from song to song today (and within some of the songs too). Continue reading »
(Below is a review by a former NCS writer who now goes by the moniker Obsolete Mystic. His subject is the debut album from a Nevada-based duo who call themselves Fog Wall, an album they are independently releasing today.)
I love FromSoftware. In the realm of video games that studio have always been visionaries and avant-garde pushers of the artform. The cultural impact they’ve had ever since a little game called Demons Souls (OG Japanese importer right here) came out has permanently changed gaming and dark fantasy imagery and thematic elements in a huge way. FromSoftware games also happen to be metal as fuck and could easily inspire metal, especially in the death and black metal categories. As a result, there is in fact a whole grouping of bands that are FromSoftware worshippers.
Today’s focus is on one such band, Fog Wall, who named themselves after the signature walls of fog you traverse in FromSoftware games to begin boss battles. Like a lot of these bands, Fog Wall is a blackened death metal outfit, and they are offering up a very impressive debut in Gloomweaver. Continue reading »
(Today our Denver-based contributor Gonzo brings us high points of his conversation at the recent Fire In the Mountains festival with members of the Montana band Galvanist, intertwined with his thoughts about their new album The Silence Between Stars, released in May of this year via ATMF.)
There’s a particular kind of magic that only happens when you’re standing out on tribal land in the shadow of the mountains, dust coating your boots, cold drink in hand, talking heavy music with people who live and breathe it. Festivals like Fire in the Mountains aren’t just weekend party stops; they’re cultural touchstones where you discover something deeper about the music, the setting, and the people making the noise.
That’s precisely the headspace I was in when I sat down with Bozeman, Montana’s Galvanist to unpack one of the most cerebral, devastatingly heavy, and quietly fascinating projects brewing in Bozeman’s DIY heavy music underground. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
On this day (a Bandcamp Friday for those who pay attention to such things) the Italian band Stygian are releasing a new two-song EP named Hunt the Divine. It follows their 2025 debut album Dreadlands, which we had the pleasure of premiering and reviewing. As we wrote then, Dreadlands presented “an intersection or fusion of two worlds, a hybrid of crust punk and black metal” that proved to be “as fierce, as wounded, and as defiantly resilient as the album’s thematic insights”.
As for those thematic insights, they reflected “serious thought, scorching insight, and honest rage”. To quote the band:
Dreadlands explores the contrast between two spiritual worlds: the harmony-centered pagan traditions and the legacy of Abrahamic religions, which often channel humanity’s most violent instincts. While pagan rites served to express and contain primal forces, maintaining balance between humankind and nature, monotheistic dogmas have frequently justified war and destruction in the name of faith. This work stands as a tribute to life, to the sacred bond between people and the natural world — a bond shattered by centuries of religious conflict.
Now we return to Stygian with our premiere of the new EP on the day of its release. Here’s the description we received of the EP’s themes: Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
This trio of talents from Austria and Québec who joined together to form Détresse introduced themselves just last year through a startling debut album named Pessimismes, released by Vendetta Records. We described its music as “emotionally raw, explosively cathartic, and unrelenting in its intensity”, but also as “saturated in agony and hopelessness”, “ruined as well as raging”, and wholly “engulfing” in its varying emotional torrents.
Pessimismes was an eye-popping, heart-stirring, and soul-sinking debut, so much so that it landed Détresse at Julfest in Austria earlier this year, followed by a two-week European tour alongside Miserere Luminis in April, and will put them on stages in another tour alongside Darvaza, Merrimack, and Helleruin in December 2026, which will include appearances at Eindhoven Metal Meeting (Netherlands) and De Mortem et Diabolum (Germany).
The December touring activity is prompted in part by Vendetta Records’ forthcoming October release of a second Détresse album — Misères. The press materials for the new record offer this description:
DÉTRESSE’s second album MISÈRES deals with the misery of mankind and human hardship. It explores how oppression, deprivation, and despair shape everyday existence, blurring the boundaries between past and present. Shaped in raw, unadulterated soundscapes it provides a journey to the darkest parts of humanity.
Last month we had the pleasure of premiering a song from the new album named “Verrottet“, and today we premiere another one — “Les Nuits Jaunes” — which features vocals and lyrics by a notable guest. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
The Northern California metal band Amarok have demonstrated towering, far-seeing ambitions since their inception more than 15 years ago. With their self-titled debut EP in 2010 they began identifying their songs with Roman numerals. That EP was also more than 45 minutes long, spread across three songs. After a trio of splits, their 2018 debut album Devoured continued with the Roman numeral designations (which had continued on the splits), counting forward from VI through IX in a double LP that nearly reached ten minutes above an hour. And then in 2024 they released their second album Resilience, another double LP (X through XIII) that again exceeded an hour of music.
Over the course of those extensive releases Amarok has moved from funeral doom into a hybrid of doom and black metal, while also continuing to narrate evolving reflections on the natural world, the dangers created by human folly and oppression, the suffering caused by great loss, and a search for transcendence and hope through determined perseverance.
Over the course of those monumental releases Amarok have also made a lot of talented friends and admirers (in addition to amassing a devoted following of fans), the evidence of which will be revealed in a follow-up to Resilience named Overcome.
Overcome is yet another double-album, and is perhaps best considered as a companion to Resilience. Set for release on September 25 by Toronto’s Hypaethral Records, it includes ten remixed and reimagined interpretations of the five songs on Resilience by notable artists from across the experimental and extreme metal spectrum — two different versions of each of those five songs (which is how you get from five to ten tracks). Those ten artists include Ethan Lee McCarthy (Primitive Man), Leila Abdul-Rauf (Vastum), and Andrew Black (Mizmor/Hell live), as well as Sinuous Void, Only Now, Collapse, Gridfailure, DJ Eons One, Mirroriddian, and Auto Seer.
One song from Overcome has already been revealed, and today we premiere a second one — a reimagining of Amarok’s “Legacy” by the afore-mentioned Andrew Black. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn has some grim delights to share with us today, from an album set for release tomorrow)
The weather here in the UK has recently taken a turn for the worse, shrouding us in a grey cloud of damp and humidity that somehow manages to combine Meditteranean swelter with Scandinavian chill at the same time.
What this signals, of course, is that our glorious (read: parched) days of Summer are now over, and we’re staring right down the barrel of another wet and wild Autumn/Winter.
And what better way to prepare for this than with the latest sepulchral slab of oppressive blackened Doom from the one and only Exitium Sui (AKA Chris Gebauer).
(written by Islander)
In February of this year we helped introduce listeners to Wince and Frisson, a “dissoblack and death metal” duo consisting of Triumvir Kaleido from North Carolina and Steve Wiener from New Jersey. In February we premiered a striking animated video created by Triumvir (who’s responsible for all of the band’s artwork) for the song “Kärrhäxan” from Wince and Frisson’s then-forthcoming debut album Tumult. What we’ve got for you today is a premiere stream of that album in its entirety in advance of its September 4 official release..
Wince and Frisson introduce the album with these words:
Tumult – a virulent cocktail of extreme metal genres. Seven tracks, all blackened and swathed in dissonance. It gets to the point immediately and offers no rest to the listener until its conclusion. All the while, guitarist, bassist, and vocalist Triumvir Kaleido maniacally spews warped interpretations of his experiences with religious and psychological abuse, and struggles with mental health.
But of course we have our introduction to what you’re about to hear. Continue reading »
(We present a review by Professor D. Grover the XIIIth of a new album the French metal band Gorod which was released last Friday.)
Greetings and salutations, friends. As you may have picked up on in recent years, I’m a big fan of modern technical death metal (not that I mind the classic old-school stylings of Death, Cynic, Pestilence, and Atheist). In recent times over on Bluesky I ranked my top twenty modern tech-death albums (read: post-Necrophagist), one album per artist, and my number one with a number belonged to Gorod’s Process Of A New Decline. It was probably the album that truly made me love tech-death and it’s an incredibly influential album for me even to this day. I’ve loved everything Gorod have released, both before and since, but there’s been a definite evolution in their style over the years, a creeping prog influence that has culminated in The Ember Gone. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn caps off another busy month here at NCS with four more albums you may have overlooked)
Like I said last week, for the most part we prefer to focus our attention on bands who we think deserve more exposure or who simply aren’t as big as we think they should be, rather than expending our time and energy on artists who have been thoroughly covered elsewhere.
For example, I’m probably not going to be crafting a full Mastodon review this time (it’s a good album… occasionally a very good album, but occasionally held back by a few dud moments and an excessive length) or writing about the new Sigh (which, so far at least, I’m really not a fan of), as both those bands have already received more than enough coverage, so a few extra words from us – positive or negative – is unlikely to have much of an impact.
The four artists I’ve chosen to feature today, however, have never been written about here at NoCleanSinging before, which should make for some fun discoveries for all of us.