Photo Credit: Chantik Photography
I’m so far behind in pulling together roundups of new songs and videos for NCS that I can’t even think of an appropriate metaphor. Maybe like a marathon runner who takes an arrow to the knee just as the starting gun goes off and is still writhing on the ground when the last runner crosses the finish line — but I’m even more behind than that.
Another metaphor comes to mind, the one about a journey of a thousand miles beginning with a single step. This is a journey I won’t finish, if finishing means catching up, but here’s a single step (actually 7 steps, to be less metaphorical and more precise).
P.S. I decided to lean pretty hard into black, death, and blackened death metal on the especially incinerating and obliterating end of the spectrum, with something dark and hallucinatory more or less in the middle.
GAEREA (Portugal)
Season of Mist has announced a new album by the increasingly wizard-like and meteorically rising Portuguese band Gaerea, and paired that with an extravagant video directed by Dariusz Szermanowicz for a new Gaerea song. “Welcome to the urban abyss”, the band’s unnamed vocalist has pronounced. “Where dreams turn to rust”.
“Hope Shatters” is the name of the new song, and it does sound like that. Something like hope appears in the ringing notes that open the song, but it already sounds like a fading hope — soon shattered by thunderous drums, blazing and warping riffage, and scorching howls.
As the music sweeps high, despair ignites in the music and burns with dramatic intensity above plundering bass lines and hammering percussion, broken only by a brief and gentle interlude before a towering and vibrantly glittering finale.
“Hope Shatters” is the second single off Gaerea‘s fourth album, Coma. It will be released by Season of Mist on October 25th. Gaerea will be touring North America in November and Decmeber with Zeal & Ardor and Zetra.
https://orcd.co/gaereacoma
https://www.facebook.com/gaerea
HAR (Israel)
Two songs are now available for listening from the debut album of this Germany-based Israeli band. The name of the first one, “Submerged In Cacophony“, foreshadows what comes.
What comes is a breathtaking assault of blistering blasts, tumultuous bass-lines, roiling and writhing fretwork-derangement tuned to napalm tones, and monstrously imperious roars. The drumming is terrific, as sharply executed and dynamic as the guitars are violently berserk.
The band inject some vibrantly jolting and deliriously whining guitar convulsions, as well as a guitar solo that’s even more crazed than everything which precedes it. Strangely, some of the maniacal guitar motifs turn out to be catchy. Take deep breaths before you listen to this one.
That submergence in cacophony is immediately followed on the album by “Invoking Evil Spirit“, and it will also suck the wind from your lungs. Also berserk, also violent, also strangely mesmerizing as well as deranged, and also featuring another lights-out drum performance and even more rabid vocal monstrosity, the song will likely send your already escalated pulse-rate further into overdrive.
Har‘s debut album is entitled Cursed Creation. It will be released by Dark Descent on August 23rd.
https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/cursed-creation
https://www.facebook.com/harblackmetal/
HAMMERFILOSOFI (Norway/Italy)
The next song creates a dramatic segue from what has preceded it in today’s musical roundup so far. It begins with the reverberating tones of a ghostly piano (backed by theremin-like quivering tones), which is rendering the famous third movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No.2, the “Marche funebre”.
That creates a skin-shivering spell, but Hammerfilosofi begin building toward something more monstrous… and then explode in a typhoon of obliterating drums, boiling yet dismal riffage, and howls of utmost agony. From there, they twist the music into more otherworldly and frightening shapes in between renewed outbursts of conflagration and torment.
The vocals twist too, but are never less than terrifying in the extremity of their fury and misery — except when the band bring in distorted spoken words. In a penultimate phase, when the drums snap like a metronome, the music pulls us into mind-freezing nightmare, only then to smash the frozen mind into shards — but with something softer and more dismal at the end.
The song is “Hunt or be Hunted“. It’s from a new Hammerfilosofi EP named Solus, which moves forward from their 2023 debut album The Desolate One. It will be released by ATMF on September 13th.
https://atmfsssdtp.bandcamp.com/album/solus
https://www.facebook.com/hammerfilosofi/
LAGO (U.S.)
We’ve waited a long time for Arizona-based Lago to follow up their 2018 album Sea of Duress (favorably reviewed here by our Andy Synn), but Lago have recently ended the wait with a new single, and by my lights it represents a strong step forward from what they’ve done before.
Andy described the music on Sea of Duress as a “brutally morbid style of groaning, riff-heavy Death Metal”, splattered with “the DNA of Incantation, Immolation, and Autopsy“. The new single, “Millenia of Scourge“, is itself a hulking, brutish, rabidly eviscerating, and mentally deranged musical monster, but it gets more instrumentally adventurous (and unhinged) as it goes. In fact, I’d have to call it “prog death” by the end.
Even at the beginning, warping and dissonant notes and an eerily quivering guitar solo signal that something more is planned than the cracking of skulls and the disemboweling of guts. The dismally whirring riffage and battering drums are indeed ruthlessly ravenous, and the guttural bellowing holds no mercy, but by the midpoint the notes begin jubilantly darting, dancing, squirming, and whining, as if demonic sprites have found a way into the affair, and things stay vividly strange from there on.
The bass begins to stand out more, lending its own nimble and mercurial maneuvers to the escapade, and the next guitar solo sounds jazzy in its own jubilation. By the end it’s hard not to think of the song as exultant, even though it’s still gutting and jackhammering.
I really like how the song is produced too, because you can easily pick out all the many moving parts. Bravo! More like this, please!
https://lagometal.bandcamp.com/track/millenia-of-scourge
http://www.facebook.com/lagometal
CAGED BASTARD (Tunisia)
I decided this would be a good point to include music that’s less blistering and obliterating than much of what precedes it in this column. But while “Perished Prosperity” may be less fast-paced and assaulting, it’s both more experimental in its splicing of styles and more disturbing.
From the outset the guitar mysteriously rings and seems to muse above the bass’s steady throb and the drums’ steady pop. A voice utters the words in low and menacing tones. The guitar shifts as the rhythms disappear, still ringing but now also shimmering and even more mysterious, like ghosts beckoning from mists beyond midnight.
The distorted vocals seem more adamant, until they too disappear, leaving the field to those wraiths and the casting of their beckoning but dangerous spells.
The rhythms swell into sight again, getting sinews moving again while the listener’s mind is still swirling into the spell. The vocals also reappear, ragged and raking this time, leading into another phase in which the drums vividly blast away and the riffage becomes a whirlpool of frantic fevers.
But things get very strange again; the ghosts hunger for company in their lonely voidscape, grasping at us while our reptile brains are again distracted by the funky and rocking grooves.
“Perished Prosperity” is the song’s name. It’s from Caged Bastard‘s second album, Solace in Virtue’s Absence. It has a release date of August 1st. Caged Bastard will be releasing two other singles every Sunday before the official release date.
https://cagedbastard.bandcamp.com/album/solace-in-virtues-absence
https://www.facebook.com/cagedbastard
THE SPIRIT (Germany)
Now let’s return to something less hallucinatory and more ravaging and exhilarating.
As you can see, the cover art to The Spirit‘s new album is startling (I haven’t yet seen who created it, but kudos fr the horror), and so is the first single.
“Spectres of Terror” is indeed terrorizing, hard-charging in its momentum, scalding in the intensity of the vocals, and head-whipping in the contortions of the guitars. There’s a prominent and nuanced bass in the mix as well, plus a powerfully head-moving sequence of jittery and jolting riffing. And that’s not all.
A big tumbling drum sequence paves the way for a flickering and flourishing extended guitar solo that’s thoroughly enthralling and will entice you to hold your invisible oranges toward the skies. Grand heavy metal chords majestically ring out… and then its off to the races again, bound for glory, with one more dose of highly headbangable jackhammering and spine-shaking drum acrobatics yet to come.
“Spectres of Terror” is from The Spirit‘s forthcoming fourth album Songs Against Humanity. It will be released by AOP Records on October 25th.
https://save-it.cc/aop/songs-against-humanity
https://thespiritmetal.bandcamp.com/album/songs-against-humanity
https://www.facebook.com/thespiritband
ARA SUBVERSOR (U.S.)
To close, it’s time to get really vicious again.
The anonymous U.S. black metal band Ara Subversor have recently followed up their 2023 debut album Vow of Dominion with a single named “The Pall of War.”
It is indeed warlike, so much so that it feels like we’ve been teleported into a terrible battle already in progress. The music has the sweep of a vast zone of hostilities. The drums fire like a phalanx of automatic weaponry. The vocals sound like a commander who has lost his mind to blood-lust. But the music does indeed sound grim and grievous, too — no celebration of slaughter here.
As the song unfolds, it grows even more bleak and beleaguered, though the slaughter doesn’t spend itself, but instead spins up into renewed surges of breathtaking derangement and destruction, like a hurricane of madness.
“The Pall of War” is identified as the first single from an Ara Subversor Demo 2024, which will eventually be released by Death Prayer Records.
https://arasubversor.bandcamp.com/track/the-pall-of-war
https://www.facebook.com/deathprayerrecords/