After completing the humongous two-part roundup of new songs and videos that I posted earlier today I nearly gave up on the idea of making this regular Sunday column. Just not much gas left in the tank, and the first Seahawks football game of the season is already under way. But I know some people come here on Sundays for this column, and I don’t want to completely disappoint.
So, I did here what I did with those previous roundups — skimping on the artwork and links, and abbreviating my own commentary, in the hope that mainly tossing out the music is better than nothing at all. And so, with apologies to the bands and to people who actually enjoy the usual format, here we go… presented alphabetically by band name.
DIABLATION (France)
This first song is a frightening yet entrancing one. It reveals eerie, preternatural keyboards that seem to ring from fracturing heavens, and combines those with viscerally powerful rhythms, terrorizing vocal battalions, and racing storms of searing riffage and rampantly hurtling bass and drums. The effect is nightmarish yet intoxicating, menacingly magisterial and marauding.
“Aigle du mal, Aigle de sang” is from Diablation‘s new album Allégeance, which will be released by Antiq Records on December 6th.
https://antiqofficial.bandcamp.com/album/diablation-all-geance
https://www.facebook.com/Diablation
DUSK CULT (Australia)
This sub-three-minute track takes about 5 seconds to stick a big swaggering hook in your brain and just jams it deeper and deeper as it goes, while the vocalist shrieks bloody murder in your face. As icing on the cake, the band both turn the song into a grand march and take a detour that’s haunting and steeped in misery.
Fittingly, the song is called “Night March“. It’s a stand-alone single but will be included in Dusk Cult‘s forthcoming debut album Embrace the Lunar Age (release date TBA).
https://duskcult.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Dusk-Cult-103900308423379
EOS (Canada)
The word that best sums up the next track is MADNESS. It’s a writhing and roiling spasm of shrill, glittering dissonance that cranks the tension dial into the red zone, driven even further into blood-red derangement by maniacal drumming, magma-like bass notes, weirdly wailing guitar leads, and the howls of rabid, enraged beasts. For more than four minutes there’s no relent in the mind-broiling intensity. When the berserk pacing then slows, the hallucinations begin. Take some very quick breaths if you can, because the seizures soon resume.
Eos will present their debut full-length Les corps s’entrechoquent on October 8th — on digital / DLP by Mystískaos, and on CD by Iron Bonehead Productions.
https://eosquebec.bandcamp.com/album/les-corps-sentrechoquent
https://www.facebook.com/eosmetalnoir/
HEGEMON (France)
Next is another new track from Hegemon‘s album Sidereus Nuncius. Prepare for a scathing storm of sweeping savagery and tumultuous upheaval, coupled with sensations of withering gloom and terrible grandeur. Sidereus Nuncius will be released by Les Acteurs de L’Ombre Productions on October 8th.
https://ladlo.bandcamp.com/album/sidereus-nuncius
https://www.facebook.com/Hegemon.official/
LANGENNEET (Finland)
Next up, two songs from this Finnish band’s new album Aionin soihtu, which comes out September 29th. Both are pure devilry — displays of thrilling madness from hellish and hallucinatory realms. The first has a more dangerously ecstatic feel, the second one more haughty, arcane, and poisonous, though it becomes crazed in time. The album is set for release on September 29th.
https://langenneet.bandcamp.com/
LIGHT OF THE MORNING STAR (UK)
I can’t resist including yet another new track off this band’s Charnel Noir album, which Debemur Morti Productions will release on October 1st. The least vicious of all the tracks in today’s collection, it’s nevertheless transfixing — a Gothic experience of menace and mesmerization, of unsettling dreams and hallowed infernal ceremony, complete with varying vocals that raise goosebumps on the flesh.
https://lightofthemorningstar.bandcamp.com/album/charnel-noir
https://www.facebook.com/lightofthemorningstar
NON SERVIAM (France)
I’ve sung the praises about this astonishingly distinctive, genre-irreverent, French band before (here), and will do so again now.
Prepare to have your pulse taken over by the enormous low-frequency beats and the demented, dancing flows in this next song (which jitter and glide), and to have your sleep ruined by the truly horrific vocal expulsions. The song thrums and clacks, seethes and scissors, surfs and subsides, claws with abrasion and glimmers like marine phosphorescence. A woman soberly speaks, people sing in fervent and fiery updrafts, a trance might be created, but what the necromancers will have you do is likely to be frightening.
The EP (though it’s much longer than a typical EP) is Il Pleut Partout Derrière, and it will be released on November 12th.
https://non-serviam.bandcamp.com/album/il-pleut-partout-derri-re-ep
https://www.facebook.com/NonServiamCircle/
VELKA (Spain)
The next song is called “Freezing Hell“, but this fresh hell has not frozen over, but is blazing-hot. A brazen (and hook-filled) demonic riot, it’s definitely vicious but also ecstatic, though it becomes a channel of haunting despair when it’s not given over to adrenaline-fueled surges of thrashing mayhem.
Velka‘s new album will be released in October by Base Record Production and Necromance Records.
https://www.facebook.com/velkaband
WITHERING SOUL (U.S.)
And to conclude I’ve chosen a new official video for an intense (and intensely sinister) assault that races and lurches, slithers and seethes, squirms and scythes, soars and sweeps. The dynamic pacing, morphing riffage, and unexpected starts and stops will keep you on your toes.
The song is from this Chicago band’s fourth album Last Contact, which has a release date of September 24 via Mortal Music.
https://witheringsoul.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/witheringsoulband