AN NCS PREMIERE: ALL ARE TO RETURN — “THAT WHICH LISTENS”

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Feb 032025
 

(written by Islander)

The Dutch two-man formation All Are To Return describe their creations as “extreme, experimental music with an urgent sense of dread.” They began with a self-titled EP in 2020 and have followed that with three more releases, most recently a 2024 album named AATR III on Tartarus Records. Simply reading the eloquent but harrowing thematic descriptions of these records at Bandcamp demonstrates the duo’s extremely grim, indeed nihilistic, perspectives on humanity’s degraded past and hopeless future.

The music has been in line with those perspectives. It has often generated massive and caustic assaults on the senses, hostile and brutalizing, furious and doomed, sometimes cinematic in its sweep, but also deeply chilling and relentlessly unsettling.

For their most recent effort AATR have created a new audio/visual work named Limen. It consists of four pieces of music, each of them with a video, that present an interconnected narrative. Limen is also intensely disturbing, but represents a variation that makes greater use of haunting and harsh ambient sensations, though the band haven’t abandoned their industrial proclivities. It also again vividly displays the duo’s talent for crafting harrowing poetry.

Late last month the first chapter of the new EP was revealed, and today we’re revealing the fourth one. Continue reading »

ACT OF IMPALEMENT: “PIERCING THE HEAVENS”

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Jan 312025
 

(written by Islander)

The musical trajectory of Nashville’s Act of Impalement has been intriguing (and scary) to observe. Their 2018 debut album Perdition Cult (released by Unspeakable Axe) quickly proved they could pull off a whole lot of monstrous magic acts, veering from one parcel of extreme influences to another without losing their footing.

Their second album Infernal Ordinance (their first one on Caligari Records), was more focused, less likely than their debut to throw listeners off-balance but still packed with thrilling and chilling variations. As one writer put it, that album was “akin to a morbid melting pot of Cianide, Bolt Thrower, Prophecy of Doom, and Archgoat.”

And now we have Act of Impalement‘s third album Profane Alter on the way, again to be ushered toward us by Caligari Records. It’s introduced on behalf of the label with these reference points:

Though still drawing from the likes of Autopsy, Incantation, and of course Cianide, Act of Impalement‘s third album is a filthy & finely honed assault of bestial death metal, drawing more inspiration from the likes of Belgium’s Possession, Finland’s Belial, and ever more Archgoat.

What we have for you today is the second song to be disgorged from Profane Altar, the vividly and accurately named “Piercing the Heavens“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: EXORDIUM MORS — “OATH”

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Jan 302025
 

(written by Islander)

“After more than two decades of relentless chaos, the blackened legions of Exordium Mors return once again, forging their path with maniacal speed, blistering melody, reckless vitriol, and sheer violent brutality. Their sound is hammered with an iron fist, delivering ruthless, in-your-face hostility.”

That is how PR materials we’ve received begin to introduce Sworn To Heresy, a new EP by New Zealand’s Exordium Mors that will be loosed upon the world by Praetorian Sword Records on March 1st. The words are in line with this band’s dominant reputation, a reputation for discharging sounds of frenzy and ferocity. But that is only part of the Exordium Mors story, albeit a significant part.

To quote ourselves this time, from our premiere of the band’s last album As Legends Fade and Gods Die (2022), their music “moves at a dizzying, high-octane pace,” generating “storms of vitriol and volatility,” but it also interweaves “mood-changing melodies that are sinister and gloomy but also exotic and brazenly imperious,” as well as incorporating “wild soloing that reaches epic heights.” And it has proven to be multi-faceted (“every song is a kaleidoscopic adventure”) and executed with surgical precision.

To return to the PR materials for the new EP, they promise “a bold evolution” in the band’s sound as Exordium Mors enter their third decade. What does this mean… and is it cause for concern? Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SCARE — “CROWNED IN YELLOW”

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Jan 292025
 

(written by Islander)

The Québec City-based quartet who named themselves Scare pose a question in the title of their new album that seems quite relevant at an anxious time when humankind seems bent on devouring itself and the world through selfishness, greed, delusional paranoia, ignorance, and hatred: In The End, Was It Worth It?

It follows their debut LP from 2019, Not Dead Yet, Probably…, another title that also seems quite fitting for where we found ourselves then, and now, and their 2021 EP Congratulations On Your Death.

The band’s music has become increasingly interesting over time. It has a backbone of lead-weighted metallic hardcore, with the kind of sludgy punch that loosens teeth and vocals that can cause intracranial bleeding, but they’ve also revealed a talent for creating gripping, mood-changing, and even atmospheric melodies that get under the skin and stay there.

You’ll understand this for yourselves when you hear “Crowned In Yellow,” the immediately addictive song we’re premiering today, a song that’s at once supernatural, physically compulsive, and rabidly deranged — and yet also sounds like an anthem. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ETHEREAL DARKNESS — “ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF”

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Jan 292025
 

(written by Islander)

Almost six years have passed since the Belgian band Ethereal Darkness released their debut album, Smoke and Shadows. Through a rendering of atmospheric melodic death metal with black and doom metal influences, it presented a great combination of heavy, head-moving power, sublime melancholy moods, wide-screen sweep, and heart-rupturing emotional explosiveness.

Smoke and Shadows was the solo effort of Lars, but in the years since then he has found four other talented musicians to join him, and they have completed a second, hour-long, album entitled Echoes. While they continue searching for a label to handle its release, Ethereal Darkness have decided to release a single from the album named “On the Edge of the Cliff,” and as you can see, we’re hosting its premiere today.

But before we get to that song, however, we should first talk about another album track (its first single) released last November along with a beautifully evocative lyric video: “The Cycle“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CARTILAGE — “FROTHED VOMIT SLOSH”

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Jan 282025
 

(written by Islander)

If you see people like these, your first impulse (a sensible one) would be to run first, ask questions later. And you absolutely should run, as fast as you can, but toward their music, not away from it.

Take it from me, a first-hand observer of the unhinged Cartilage performance in Seattle at the 2022 edition of Northwest Terror Fest, their live shows are about as much hell-raising fun as you could want. Their recorded music is kickass too. When we premiered their second album The Deader the Better (also in 2022), I spewed a lot of words, including these:

Cartilage discharge songs that slash like serial killers, convulse in seizures, sear like an acetylene torch, maul like bulldozers, and lurch like zombies (the slow ones, not the fast ones), and as crazed and kaleidoscopic as the songs usually are, they’re cleverly embedded with hook-y melodies and head-moving grooves.

On top of all that, Cartilage manage to make the tracks feel feral even though it quickly becomes evident that all the instrumentalists have got lots of top-shelf technical chops (enough to make prog and tech-death bands jealous) and a sense of twisted adventurousness in the way they write songs.

But don’t take my word for it. Take the word of the dependably tasteful Everlasting Spew Records, who signed Cartilage for the release of their new EP, Tales From The Entrails: A Necrology. Here’s how the label introduces this new feast of frenzy: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PRAETORIAN — “PYLON CULT”

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Jan 272025
 

(written by Islander)

At the end of this month APF Records will release Pylon Cult, the debut album by Praetorian from Hertfordshire in the UK. The label describes the album this way:

A new lesson in vile, disgusting and gruesome blackened sludge metal, mixed in a volatile cocktail of death metal, thrash and hardcore. Praetorian are here to take you on a wild ride with an album that fluctuates between hi-octane energy, colossal doomy riffs, a savage dual-vocal attack and insane tempo changes, all culminating in a violent, nightmarish thrill ride.

That provides a faithful description of the brutalizing but mind-bending sonic nihilism provided by Pylon Cult — a title that comes from contemporary British author David Southwell’s imagined county Hookland, in which a so-called cult begin to worship pylons in order to harness their energy.

But we have our own thoughts to share about this ruthless but consistently fascinating album — in addition to the main attraction, which is our premiere of a full album stream today. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: INSANITY CULT — “WHISPERING DEPTHS”

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Jan 242025
 

(written by Islander)

After a long six years or so, we at last have a chance for a reunion with the aptly named Green black metal band Insanity Cult. That’s roughly the extent of time that has elapsed since their last album, All Shall Return to Chaos, and their subsequent split (Contemplation in Discordance) with Void Omnia.

The occasion for the reunion is a new Insanity Cult album named Κάθοδος, which will be released on February 28th by the Chilean label Tragedy Productions, in collaboration with Order of Antinomianism, the circle of which Insanity Cult is a member along with such bands as Isolert, Sørgelig and Sores.

What we have for you today is the premiere of a song from the album named “Whispering Depths.” Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SHAGOR — “HERSIELINGH”

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Jan 242025
 

(written by Islander)

In 2020 the Dutch black metal band Shagor made their recording debut with an album named Sotteklugt. I was bowled over by it. As I wrote in my review: “This is one of my true favorites among all the black metal albums I’ve heard this year, and I don’t think my affection for it will fade, even a little, as time passes.”

Roughly five years later Shagor are returning with a second album named Lyksalver, which will be co-released by Vendetta Records and Swarte Yssel on February 8th. They have floored me again, and I think will floor many of you too – though the better metaphor would be more like getting hurled into the Sun. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: OOBRIS IOS — “DOSTRATIS SATOD DUVON XAGAN”

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Jan 232025
 

(written by Islander)

Many people, including people at this site (witness these six articles going back to 2015), have had many good things to say about the music of the Canadian atmospheric black metal band Wilt, and that is reason enough to pay attention to Vospat, the forthcoming debut EP of Oobris Ios, because its three-person lineup includes two members of Wilt. Those two people are vocalist Jordan Dorge and drummer Jordan Sanderson, and the third member is guitarist/bassist Ryan Forsyth (from the death metal band Dissolution, among others).

It’s fair to say that Oobris Ios represents a departure (perhaps fair to say an experimental departure) from the members’ previous bands. Among other things, the songs on Vospat represent the telling of a dire and daunting science-fictional or fantastical narrative, related to us in an ancient alien language but prefaced in English this way:

Before light, there was darkness. Almost 14 billion years ago, the entity known as the singularity was slain, and its followers scattered across what is now known as the universe. Their chants within the dark matter echo in the light, constantly trying to diminish its power. Oobris Ios is the dimensional reverberation that those in the light can hear. Bring hate. Bring the dark out of the light and extinguish it once and for all. Continue reading »

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