(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).
NAILS (U.S.)
To kick things off we have Oxnard-based Nails to kick you in the teeth with a new two-track EP, Fear Based Life. It’s described as “a bridge to the band’s fifth full-length LP, due out Summer 2027”, which will be released by the band’s new label Closed Casket Activities.
Track One is “Dollar Bin Generation“, and you could guess from that title alone that it’s mega-pissed-off. It inflicts a raucous riot of massive (and massively distorted) riffing, galloping and blasting beats, thundering bass lines, explosive yells, and crazed screams. When it breaks down, it will also give your neck cause to pump like a piston, without the need for the gas you can’t afford.
Track Two is the EP’s title song. It seems to pick up where Track One ended, discharging a mid-paced bone-smasher punctuated by squeals of fretwork torture and further doses of those rabid, red-throated howls. The riffing gouges and churns and also poisonously slithers, and Nails back all that with brutal percussive beatings.
The EP includes cover art by Jef Whitehead (Wrest). It’s available digitally now, and Closed Casket will also release it on 7″ vinyl on October 9th.
https://nails.lnk.to/fearbasedlife
https://nailstyranny.bandcamp.com/album/fear-based-life
https://www.nailstyranny.com/
https://www.facebook.com/NAILSoxnard/
THRONEHAMMER (UK/Germany)
Prepare for your first episode of whiplash as we shift from Nails to the epic doom metal band Thronehammer and the anthemic first advance track from their new album Slay | Kill | Erase.
The opening reverb-laced riff of “Rise of Resistance” establishes the song’s central melody in tones that sound like the peals of a rusted bell. In little time at all it creates an eerie atmosphere of haunting, gloom-soaked grandeur. A piercing second guitar uses its feverish wails to harmonize the misery, and then the song becomes massively heavier thanks to HM-2-like chords just before deep, jagged-edge growls begin voicing the words.
But as you probably know if you’re familiar with Thronehammer, vocalist Kat Shevil Gillham possesses a commanding singing voice too, and uses her soaring, quavering tones to good effect beneath shivering high-end frequencies. The impact is occult and frightening… and even the elegantly rippling notes that surface after the low-end heaviness pauses add to the music’s growing atmosphere of gothic horror.
Big rumbling drums help move the song away from that beguiling interlude and back into greater heaviness — and greater musical frenzies up in the musical rafters. The growled vocals then seem even more monstrous (and wretched) than before, in contrast with the ethereal shivering frequencies. The rhythms also vibrantly throb and hammer, and the sizzling and dismally whirring riffage begins to sound desperate.
Yet the music still channels haunting grandeur, reinforced by a final phase of singing and a reprise of that elegant interlude at the very end.
Slay | Kill | Erase is set for release by Supreme Chaos Records in multiple formats on October 9th.
https://scr-thronehammer.bandcamp.com/album/slay-kill-erase
https://linktr.ee/thronehammer
https://www.facebook.com/THRONEHAMMER/
NIHILO (Switzerland)
Prepare for whiplash again as we move from Thronehammer to new music from the barbarous Swiss death metal band Nihilo. What’s coming is a song named “Primal Instinct” from their next album, Abyss.
This song inflicts furiously blasting drums and maniacally writhing riffage, as well as bursts of blaring fretwork madness and bestial vocal expulsions. There’s something about those blaring fanfares that sounds glorious, and an ensuing guitar solo heats up the frets to the melting point in fireworks of ecstasy. Indeed, the song as a whole begins to sound ecstatic, like the untamed revels of devils.
Abyss is set for release by Nihilo’s new label Xtreem Music on November 3rd. The extremely unsettling cover art is the work of Rodrigo Pereira Salvatierra (Lurker Of Chalice, Leviathan, Perversor, etc).
https://music.imusician.pro/a/ZmWul7r4
https://linktr.ee/nihilometal
https://www.facebook.com/nihilometal/
MORGUE SUPPLIER (U.S.)
Are you running low on nightmare fuel? Is the price at the pump of infernality pushing you away? Are your daydreams too hopeful for all the hell around you? You can fix all that with this next track.
What you’ll find below is a “remix and reconstruction” of a Morgue Supplier song called “The Gnashing of False Teeth” off their 2026 album Mastering the Disease. The creator of the reconstruction is none other than Justin K. Broadrick (Godflesh/Jesu).
To be sure, the original version of the song is already damned nightmarish. A brutally gnarled bass leads the way, accompanied by weirdly quivering frequencies and skull-smacking beats. The music seems to moan and scream, to ooze ichor and bleed ants, and the vocals are tyrannically monstrous. The song’s heaving momentum also transforms, as Morgue Supplier convulse in a seizure of hyper-speed drumming, screamed barks, and music that seems to both viciously boil and nauseatingly writhe.
The lead guitar also darts about in displays of dementia, but classically influenced piano chords flip the switch into a different form of lunacy. In the song’s closing phase the band reprise some of its most grisly, gruesome, and gangrenous motifs, all of which just reinforce how simultaneously bizarre and horrific the song really is.
But even though it doesn’t seem possible, Justin K. Broadrick mutates the song in ways that make it even more horrifying.
Floor-bouncing industrialized grooves and rapid rumbles make it colder and more brutish; the shrill sheen of the surrounding sounds creates unnerving sonic hallucinations; in part, the music also resembles an excavation machine gouging through pavement, and the spasms of a warning siren from some infernal dimension; the vocals, of course, are still ravenous and ghastly.
https://morguesupplier.bandcamp.com/track/the-gnashing-of-false-teeth-jk-broadrick-molar-reconstruction
https://morguesupplier.bandcamp.com/album/mastering-the-disease
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100075977500489
PLUTONIAN SHORE (U.S.)
We now find ourselves in the 11th year since Plutonian Shore released their last album, Sphere of Geburah, with only an EP, a split, and a scattering of three 2024 singles to fill that big void. Now we have one more single, once again the solo work of Zvs Gastelum.
The new song, “Venite Belial“, is a multi-faceted affair — occult black metal, of course, but with a nuanced presentation. Vocally, it includes fervent and frightening chants, wailed singing, vicious snarls, and possessed screams. Meanwhile, the rhythms urgently throb, manically patter, and vividly somersault.
Melodically, the song seems to sway like cobras, to burst open in spurts of fire, and to jubilantly spin, with strong hints of Arabian melody in the mix and aspects of orchestration that elevate the song to heights of infernal grandeur.
https://plutonianshore.bandcamp.com/track/venite-belial
http://facebook.com/plutonianshore