SHADES OF BLACK: AMALEKIM, DERNIER SOUFFLE, FRYKTELIG STØY, SHEOL BLANC, KEXELÜR, AKVAN

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Mar 092025
 

I got a really good head-start on this column yesterday, so good that I thought I’d be able to post it much earlier today than usual. But of course the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.

This mouse forgot that Daylight Savings Time would go into effect overnight, springing the clock forward. And then this mouse slept for 9 1/2 hours. Put those two together, and the morning was well underway by the time I turned to finishing this. Oh well.

What you’ll find below is an alternating sequence of songs from forthcoming records and complete releases, most of them head-spinning in different ways, but with a more meditative and deeply haunting experience at the end. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): RITUALMORD — “THIS IS NOT LIFELOVER”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Mar 072025
 

(written by Islander)

Few long-gone bands from the underground still have as passionately devoted a following as the Swedish group Lifelover. Two of that band’s surviving members have worked together under the name Ritualmord to create a debut album that will be released tomorrow by Unjoy – Art & Ritualia. That pedigree alone would attract Lifelover fans to the album like iron filings to a magnet, but almost like a rebuff of an old lover, Ritualmord named their album This Is Not Lifelover.

And the album’s name is mostly true, but not entirely true. It isn’t Lifelover, but to use a cliché, there are some Lifelover nucleotides in Ritualmord‘s DNA — though indeed it’s true that the other ingredients of their musical polymer are quite different from what a Lifelover fan would expect and possibly hope for — though it may reflect where Lifelover would have gone (to more vast and mind-bending places), had it lived.

In lieu of typical PR promotional texts, the two people behind the album, ( ) (Kim Carlsson) and 1853 (Johan Gabrielson) have crafted a different kind of introduction, and we ought to begin there in presenting today’s album premiere: Continue reading »

EMPTY THRONE: “UNHOLY”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Mar 072025
 

(At the end of February Downfall Records released the debut album from a group of U.S. metal veterans who’ve taken the name Empty Throne, and today we have DGR‘s extensive and enthusiastic review of what they’ve accomplished on this first full-length.)

One of the most appreciable things about Empty Throne and their new album Unholy is that within the first minute of the opening song “Abbey Of Thelema”, you have a pretty good idea of exactly how this album is going to go and what the band sound like. It has been some time since we’ve had a release that has so clearly laid its cards on the table with an opening furnace blast of music quite like Empty Throne do up until the quiet guitar break in that opening song.

You’ll have a sense of just how much of the group’s death metal with a hint of melodicism, blackened thrash, and gnarly razor-sharp guitars you’ll want from the band right about that point. That’s not to say that Empty Throne aren’t happy to provide other things, but that opening minute lays out the core of a very ambitious band who across six songs and forty minutes have a lot to say — and as it turns out, at a very fast and teeth-shattering tempo as well. Continue reading »

SOM – LET THE LIGHT IN

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Mar 062025
 

(Andy Synn does his best to let the light in… let’s see what it reveals, shall we?)

I think it was pretty much the day I started writing here that I began chipping away at the whole “no clean singing” thing here at NCS.

Granted, it was always more of a tongue-in-cheek statement, rather than a strict edict, as the site had been featuring bands with various forms of clean singing, off and on, well before I got here.

But I’ve definitely been responsible for bringing a fair number of bands – bands with nary a hint of harsh vocals in their sound – to the site that probably wouldn’t have been covered here otherwise.

And since I was the one to first bring Doom-Pop/Dream-Gaze quartet SOM to the site’s attention – first with my review of their debut album, The Fall, followed by my write-up of their stunning second album, The Shape of Everything (which also made it into my Critical Top Ten of 2022) – it only seems fitting that I continue to make a mockery of everything we stand for by sharing my thoughts on their upcoming third album, Let The Light In (out next week on Pelagic Records).

Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): NECRAMBULANT — “UPHEAVAL OF MALIGNANT NECRAMBULANCE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Mar 062025
 

(written by Islander)

The Arizona band Necrambulant have a new album coming out tomorrow on Gore House Productions. Ever-interested in improving my vocabulary, I tried to look up the meaning of “necrambulant”, especially because a variant of the word also appears in the album title: Upheaval of Malignant Necrambulance.

Turns out it’s not in any dictionary (not yet). According to an 11-year-old interview of Necrambulant guitarist Ron Clark at Teeth of the Divine, it’s a word the band made up by combining the prefix “Necro” with “Ambulant” — “just a fancy way to say ‘Zombie.'”

At the time of that interview Necrambulant were about 9 months beyond the release of their debut album Infernal Infectious Necro-Ambulatory Pandemic. It might be time for another interview to figure out why it took the band so long to release more music, with 9 years passing by until their 2022 EP A Feast of Festering Flesh, and then 3 more years until this new second full-length, coming out a chunky dozen years after the first one. (I did find a quartet of more recent interviews, but they were all just the kind of stock questions that could be doled out to any band, and none of them delved into that question.)

But really, the answer is just a matter of bystander curiosity. It’s irrelevant to whether anyone should be paying attention to the band’s new album. Whether attention should be paid, of course, is a function of the music and the tastes of the listener. You’ll get to taste the whole thing — and it will get to taste you raw, without benefit of cooking or seasoning — because we’re providing a full stream today. Continue reading »

NIHILITY ACROSS AMERICA 2025 AT THE DNA LOUNGE, SAN FRANCISCO

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
Mar 062025
 

(The Polish titans Decapitated recently finished their Nihility Across North America Tour, with support from Incantation, Darkest Hour, and Exmortus. Our friend Ben Manzella caught their February 27 show at San Francisco’s DNA Lounge and provided us with the following report and his photos of the performances.)

It is hard for me to believe that it was nineteen years ago that I started to desire to be at a concert almost any night that it was possible. For obvious reasons, this has hardly been possible but I couldn’t help but be reflective as I walked into the DNA Lounge for the Nihility Across North America tour. As I think I mentioned in my review of Decapitated’s show last year, Vogg was the first person to allow me the time to interview them in person. We haven’t been able to talk again in person since that night, but it still means a lot to me. It was great to be able to see this tour celebrating a pinnacle moment in the career of Decapitated. Continue reading »

SEPTICFLESH: “AMPHIBIANS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Mar 062025
 

(In advance of their recent North American tour with Vltimas and Ex Deo, the Greek band SepticFlesh released an EP named Amphibians, and our DGR gives it a review here.)

If you’ve been following the news around tours for the past five or so years you’ve likely noticed an increasing trend of groups surprise-releasing singles – sometimes collaborative ones, which are immense fun – or EPs just prior to the tour happening. Aborted did it for their most recent tour; Machine Head did a combo song with the vocalists of Unearth, In Flames, and Lacuna Coil making appearances; and Lamb of God combined forces with Mastodon for their full album playthrough tour not too long ago.

The genesis of these songs can often lay in the cutting room floor from previous album sessions since creativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum and are highly unpredictable, but whereas it felt like groups constantly needed to have something to get them out on the road, now it has morphed into something more akin to revitalizing the current album cycle for a few more rotations around the sun.

Just as equally though, you do get lucky and a band will find time to sneak into the studio for a few and crank out ideas that’ve been haunting them like shadows ever-present in the corner of their vision. Bearing in mind that SepticFlesh‘s newest release crashes ashore a bit over two and a half years after their album, it would be hard to guess what led to which. Continue reading »

GONZO’S HEAVY ROUNDUP, FEBRUARY 2025

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Mar 052025
 

(In this column our Denver-based friend Gonzo brings forward five albums of varied kinds of heaviness for your consideration, all of them released in February.)

Well, February came and went, and I’m still catching up on the absolute onslaught of heavy music that emerged from it – hence the noticeable delay in putting this column together.

Alas, shit happens. I’m still recovering from last night’s Cavalera show here in Denver, in which the eponymous brothers Max and Igor led their band through a crushingly heavy Schizophrenia set that was played at breakneck speed. Even the Chaos A.D. encore cranked up the BPM. And just before they were ready to call it a night, they hauled none other than Jello Biafra on stage for a downright cathartic cover of “Nazi Punks Fuck Off,” except “Punks” was replaced with “Trumps.”

In place of a politically charged tirade of my own, I’ll just lazily approve the above with a “fuck yes” stamp of approval and carry on.

Anyway, here’s some music you should listen to that came out last month. Continue reading »

SOUL TOMB: “DROWNING”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Mar 052025
 

(After a bit of a lull DGR returns to NCS with a review of a great discovery, the second EP by the Swedish one-person band Soul Tomb.)

After years of doing whatver you might refer to this as, you sort of develop a sense that the year in heavy metal has a flow to it. There are plenty of peaks and valleys and often Summer can feel like a massive deluge of releases as hardcore festival and touring season gets underway, but there is one thing that has proven to be as equally reliable as the end of the year clusterfuck season or the time set aside for the brave souls who defy the odds and attempt a December release: January is a weird month.

January comes to us at the end of a whole year’s closing, partially feeling like the recovery from a hangover rather than the opportunity to appraise things anew and appreciate the potential of upcoming opportunities. The month is not bereft of releases; in fact the reason why January tends to consistently feel strange is the opposite.

There are a ton of releases in January, but truth be told you never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes it’s by big, recognizable names but more often January gets to be a month of gambles and discoveries – which is how the year started on this end. Continue reading »

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Mar 052025
 

(Andy Synn highlights four albums from a very busy February which you may have overlooked)

I don’t mind admitting that, due to a lot of different factors – being busy at work, having to spend time prepping and then playing with the band, and then finally succumbing to this really shitty flu (to the point where I’m still not back to 100%, to be honest) – I missed a lot of stuff I originally intended to write about last month.

To exacerbate this, there’s only a limited amount of space (and time) I have here to catch up on what I/we missed, which means the likes of Grima (really good, but perhaps not quite as good as its predecessor), Havukruunu (bombastic blood and fire heroics at their best), and Mantar (a punkier, more stripped-down album than their last one, albeit with a few tracks/riffs that sound a little too familiar in places), probably aren’t going to get the full write-ups that they deserve.

But, you know, those are pretty big names – or, at least, pretty notorious in our little scene – and if there’s one thing we’re known for here at NCS it’s focussing on less (in)famous bands wherever possible, so hopefully you won’t begrudge me my choices for this month’s column!
Continue reading »

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