The Great Old Ones – Photo by Daphnea Doto/Solweig Wood
(written by Islander)
This week I’ve done a better than average job staying abreast of new songs and videos that have surfaced since last weekend which I thought would be worth checking out. The result is that my list of things to investigate is now 40 links longer than it was on Monday morning! Anyone who thinks the rollout of heavy new music slows down near the end of the year must have just awakened from a very long slumber.
Fortunately, I had some time this morning (which I usually don’t have on the weekdays) to make a small dent in that list and pull a few things together to get a head-start on my usual Saturday and Sunday roundups at our site. I confess that today I erred on the side of bands who I think of as “proven commodities,” just to make the winnowing process a bit easier — though I did decide to include one I’d never heard before.
THE GREAT OLD ONES (France)
Lovers of Lovecraftian metal can rejoice again because The Great Old Ones are bringing us a new album named Kadath in January. The latest extract from the album is “In the Mouth of Madness“, described this way:
“In the Mouth of Madness” swallows Randolph Carter into an abyss. Amidst this descent into darkness, he glimpses the stoned visage of the Gods on Mount Ngranek, only to be caught in the relentless grasp of the nightgaunts.
In line with their inspirations, The Great Old Ones have specialized in music that evokes an atmosphere of unearthly dread and horror, and they do so again here – but they also capture the intriguing mysteries that so often induced HP’s protagonists into their downfalls.
Here the music rings and swirls with vibrant splendor, and seems to beckon, but then explodes in a maelstrom of boiling and blasting violence. The unhinged vocals are horrors unto themselves, even though there’s reverent singing in the mix too.
As TGOO have often done before, they create a twisting and turning path, continually morphing the music, creating elaborate, multi-layered textures (most of them expansive in scale) that spawn visions of frightening madness, desperate fear, and daunting grandeur.
The video for “In the Mouth of Madness” was directed by Sébastien Ravizé. It was illustrated by Jakub Rebelka and scripted by Romauld Giulivo. The imagery was inspired by “Death of a Gentleman: The Last Days of Howard Phillips Lovecraft”.
Kadath will be released by Season of Mist on January 24th.
https://orcd.co/tgookadath
https://www.thegreatoldonesband.com/
https://thegreatoldones.bandcamp.com/
http://www.facebook.com/thegreatoldones
OBSCURA (Germany)
Yesterday brought the announcement that in February Nuclear Blast will release A Sonication, a new Obscura album that’s the second in their conceptual trilogy. The video below is for the first single and opening track, “Silver Linings“.
As you may know, mainman Steffen Kummerer reconstituted the Obscura lineup since the last album, and is now accompanied by Robin Zielhorst (bass), James Stewart (drums), and Kevin Olasz (guitars).
This new song wastes no time proving that the new lineup is quite capable of creating high-speed headspinners, in keeping with Obscura‘s reputation. The song is also laced with elements that create a futuristic atmosphere (underscored by some of the video’s imagery), but this is mainly a racing instrumental spectacle — which gentles and glitters only at the end.
https://obscura.bfan.link/slsg
https://obscura.bfan.link/aslp
https://www.facebook.com/RealmOfObscura/
YOVEL (Greece)
Not surprisingly, the Greek band Yovel don’t have a very receptive reaction to certain predominate hallmarks of current social behaviors, witness the name of their extensive new single “Scroll. Post. Like. Die“. To elaborate on the song’s theme, they’ve written:
There is something wrong with the lives we are living.
The nightmares we are tolerating.
Our dreams, forgotten along the way.
As we stand & watch, scroll, like, despair. Exhausted.
Doomscrolling until – our literal – doom.
You can see the song’s extensive lyrics in the accompanying professionally made video and at Bandcamp. They, and the other imagery in the gripping video, amplify and underscore the condemnations of the critique.
The music, which spans about 10 minutes, is multi-faceted, genre-spanning, and ever-changing, as are the vocals, but the moods are almost relentlessly dark, expressing feelings of confusion, dismay, angst, disgust, and fury (as I hear it). The convolutions are remarkably elaborate, the performances remarkably impressive — and thankfully we get to see Yovel rage in the midst of a crowd near the end. No scrolling, no posting, no liking there, just vigorous head-banging.
https://yovel.bandcamp.com/track/scroll-post-like-die-single-video-clip-2024
https://www.facebook.com/yovelband/
CONCRETE AGE (Russia->UK)
This next video is just as much fun to watch as it is to hear, so much fun that I couldn’t resist including it today even though it’s been out for a couple of months. Here’s the band’s introduction of it at YouTube:
We are Concrete Age, a band driven by the fusion of metal’s intensity with the rich, soulful sounds of ethnic music from around the world. In our latest piece, frontman Ilia Morozov seamlessly blends the mesmerizing tones of the Indian Sarod and Arabic Oud with the raw energy of metal, crafting a sound that is both powerful and transcendent.
The name of the piece at YouTube is “INDIAN SAROD DEATH METAL“. The appearance of the instruments alone is remarkable, and so is Morozov‘s performance — and so is the thrilling interplay of disparate musical traditions that this piece achieves. Even the electric guitar sounds like an amplified ancient instrument, helping propel the music into a wild, whirling dance of dervishes.
(Thanks to our old friend TheMadIsraeli for linking me to this.)
https://concreteage.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/concreteage/
SPERE (Germany)
And now here’s the band I’d never heard before — for the excellent reason that the song below is the first one they’ve released for public consumption. I speared it (see what I did there?) from my enormous list because of the people involved in this new project: Niklas (guitars, vocals) from Horn, and Tempestas (drums) from Halphas. I was also intrigued by this description in a press release for their debut album:
The debut album Eight – led to the beam revolves around the narrative of eight fictional characters who became obsolete and met their end. Each song explores the stories of these characters, figures of will, faith, energy, or even those with despicable natures, who overstayed their welcome in this world. The band embraces an archaic visual style, centered around bronze hues, oil lamps, candlelight, and metallic artifacts, reflecting the themes of the album.
This particular song, “Kevalier“, is a hard-rocking pulse-pounder, even though the tone of the riffing, which slashes and swarms, is abrasive and its moods quite dark. The vocals are also ravaging, whether snarling or extravagantly soaring in song (in a way which gives the music a folkloric aspect). The intensity boils over at the end, in an outburst of lead-weighted hammering and torrential fire, but it’s pretty intense all the way through.
The album will be released on December 6th by Northern Silence Productions.
https://spere-northernsilence.bandcamp.com/album/eight-led-to-the-beam
https://www.instagram.com/spere_metal
https://hornlichterlischt.bandcamp.com/