(written by Islander)
Helldprod Records has marked April 16th as the release date for the debut album of the Portuguese black metal band Vetus Sanguis, which is the solo work of the creator known as Perversus. The album’s name is Dimensão Horrenda, and it builds upon the music presented in the band’s 2022 demo, Sangue Velho.
As a sign (or rather a warning) of what lies within the new album, today we’re premiering the fascinating track “Trombetas Diabólicas“. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
Wyrd is the third album, by the Italian death metal band Crawling Chaos, and it’s set for imminent release by Time To Kill Records on March 28th. As the label explains, “It is an anthology inspired by the role of feminine figures in European mythology and their connection to the concepts of fate and free will.” Crawling Chaos elaborate further:
Wyrd is our third full-length assault and it is a twisted journey through fate, destiny, and everything that lies beyond free will. Inspired by the ancient Northern European concept of wyrd, this record dives headfirst into the dark side of what it means to become.
Each of the ten tracks is a chapter in a mythological fever dream. You’ll meet some of the most powerful, terrifying female figures from mythology, folklore, and history: the Norse Norns, Macbeth’s witches conjuring chaos for Hecate, the relentless Greco-Roman Furies, and those wicked Thessalian necromancers who bend the dead to their will. It’s a damn coven of destruction. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
Death Whore‘s band name is a bit of a fist in the face for people who see it. Their music is a much bigger fist, uninterested in pulling its punches. You’ll get the idea again from the name of their forthcoming debut album, Blood Washes Everything Away, and from the name of the album track we’re premiering with a video today, “Infernal Terror Machine“.
Death Whore‘s earlier releases, their 2020 self-titled EP and the Total Teutonic Torso EP two years later, were mauling and murderous hybrids of death metal, hardcore, and crust punk. Wielding punishing percussive hammers prone to jackhammer grooves and stringed instruments tuned to mangling levels of abrasion, and fronted by scraped-raw and savagely rabid vocals and gang howls, they leaned into furious metallic hardcore beatdowns fueled by adrenaline and coated in grit and filth, leavened by monstrously brutalizing stomps as bleak as a sucking chest wound.
Those EPs are well worth catching up to even now, especially if you’re interested in getting big doses of raging and ruinous catharsis that are as viscerally compulsive as they are bone-smashing and corrosive. They build very high expectations for this debut album that we’re about to preview. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
Let’s address the elephant in the room right quick: Rahvira are NOT a Nazi band, despite the conclusion you might leap to based upon the title of the song we’re premiering. The word aryan has a history and meaning far more ancient than the grotesque appropriation of it that the Nazis made.
The Holocaust was also not the first genocide of the 20th century. That horrid distinction goes to the Ottoman Empire’s near-complete liquidation of the Armenian people during World War I, an event that’s the subject of Rahvira‘s new album and that even the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. devotes attention to. Here is part of what you can find in that Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia:
Sometimes called the first genocide of the twentieth century, the Armenian genocide refers to the physical annihilation of Armenian Christian people living in the Ottoman Empire from spring 1915 through autumn 1916. There were approximately 1.5 million Armenians living in the multiethnic Ottoman Empire in 1915. At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million died during the genocide, either in massacres and individual killings, or from systematic ill treatment, exposure, and starvation. Indeed, the origin of the term genocide and its codification in international law have their roots in the mass murder of Armenians in 1915–16.
Additional horrific details are available in this article at Wikipedia. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
Today, on the eve of its release, we present a full stream of a new album by the one-person German band Galvornhathol, whose name (we are told) “is derived from Tolkien’s Sindarin script and can probably translated to ‘(dark) metal axe'”. That is intended to draw a contrast between the man-made world of iron and axe and the band’s lyrical themes, which connect to spiritualism (non-religious) and nature.
With respect to those themes, we’ll begin by sharing Galvornhathol‘s description of the new album:
“III” concludes the trilogy that started with the conveniently titled “I“. A journey from the earth, to below the clouds and now to the stellar realm of stars and galaxies. Tinged with metaphors for the facets of human life, encased in an interstellar poem of the matter, dark and light, all round us, that we call “nature”. Providing an uneducated guess of what our future might hold; providing we keep living our present, the listener might come to the conclusion that, while we are able to observe objects that are millions of lightyears away, we refrain from looking ahead into our own time to come. Whatever the future might hold; onwards. Ad Astra. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
On March 21st Fiadh Productions and Snow Wolf Records will co-release Four Sorrows, a four-way split among bands around the world who deserve your close attention. Those bands, who are carving their own path through the realms of black metal, are Starer (USA), Myrvandrer (Norway), Ambergaze (Mexico), and Mistral (Poland). As an explanation of how the split came to be, we’ve seen this statement by the person behind Starer (and Snow Wolf):
I have been a huge fan of Mistral since both our debut albums released together on Folkvangr Records back in January 2021. Janek has become a good friend and I’m thrilled to be working together. All credit to him for introducing me to two amazing bands Ambergaze and Myrvandrer and convincing them to share their incredible music with us.
What we have for you today is a premiere stream of this new split, which includes one new song from each band, preceded by a bit of background about the artists and some thoughts about what you will hear. (Here’s a hint: the music is quite diverse and mostly beyond the bounds of traditional/conventional black metal.) Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
We have some previous experience with the Finnish death metal band Morbific. In considering music (which we premiered) from their second album Squirm Beyond the Mortal Realm, we described it as “undeniably raw and foul, well-calculated to channel sensations of disease, putrefaction, and madness while giving your bones a brutal beating — and creating an atmosphere of supernatural horror while they do all that.” We added that Morbific were also “ridiculously good at making their creations head-moving and ‘catchy’ as well as hideous.”
More recently our contributor Chile caught their performance at the 2024 edition of Oslo Deathfest and wrote this vivid description of what ensued:
…the crowd goes wild in a fantastic display of great chemistry between the band and audience, turning the bar area into a warfield of bodies strewn on filthy riffs stretching as far as the eye can see…. Bursting through the abdomen of the stage like some kind of extraterrestrial, Morbific are all teeth and snarl in a seemingly simple, yet very effective display of putrid brutality.
And now this rotten-to-the-core death metal band are upon us again, with a third album entitled Bloom of Abnormal Flesh set for co-release on April 21st by Memento Mori and Me Saco un Ojo (who also co-released the band’s last album), again adorned with blood-congealing cover art by Chase Slaker. And again, we have a song premiere off the album. The name says it all: “Crusading Necrotization“. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
It’s fair to say that the forward-thinking European black metal band Silver Knife have underplayed their pedigree. They don’t seem to draw attention to the fact that the four-person lineup collectively includes members of some of the most formidable Belgian, French, and Dutch bands orbiting the sphere of black metal. Though Metal-Archives will tell you what’s on their resumes if you’re curious, they don’t trumpet those achievements, preferring to let their music do the talking.
That kind of confidence is merited, given the very impressive nature of Silver Knife‘s past releases — their debut album Unyielding/Unseeing in 2020, and their follow-on EP Ring in 2022. Their self-confidence is evident again in the epic nature of the six songs on their forthcoming second album, which is simply self-titled and is timed for release by Amor Fati Productions and Extraconscious Recordings to roughly coincide with the band’s second appearance at Roadburn Festival.
What we have for you today is a premiere stream of one of those songs (the second to be revealed from the album so far), a heart-bursting experience called “Restless Blight“. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
No one tells anyone at our humble site what to write about. Everyone makes their own choices based on what appeals to them. Serendipitously, this produces a fairly wide span of musical coverage because the tastes of our writers don’t completely overlap, and sometimes diverge dramatically.
This divergence holds true among the three most senior NCS writers (Andy Synn, DGR, and myself), but there are some bands whose music all three of us whole-heartedly and enthusiastically endorse, and the Polish band Dormant Ordeal is one of those. All three of us have been loudly banging the drum for this band in our writing, going back to 2016 when they released their second album, We Had It Coming.
This year we get to renew our drum-banging because Dormant Ordeal are now set to release Tooth and Nail, their fourth album overall and their first for Willowtip Records, on April 18th. Our raucous hammering began as soon as the first single from the album was revealed, and continues today as we present a second one. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
The last time we got a chance to premiere a song from L.A.-based Insineratehymn, we began the introduction this way: “All is fire in the premiere we’re now presenting, from the very name of the band — Insineratehymn — to the conflagration consuming the demonic figures in the album’s fantastic cover art, and the blood-boiling heat of the song we’re premiering.”
The occasion that time was to help spread the word about this raging, rotten, and reaping death metal band’s second album Disembodied. The occasion today is to draw attention to their forthcoming third album Irreverence of the Divine in advance of its April co-release by Memento Mori and Rotted Life. To do that, we present the fifth track in the running order, “Sempiternal Suicide“. Continue reading »