AN NCS PREMIERE: WINTERHORDE — “THE GREATEST PLAGUE ON EARTH”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Jun 162022
 

 

Although the word “epic” is unquestionably overused in describing certain variants of extreme metal, sometimes there’s no better word, and that word springs to mind over and over again in listening to the new WinterHorde single we’re premiering today. Other words also come to mind — words like “savage” and “sinister”, “dramatic” and “soul-stirring”, “fist-pumping” and “infectious”.

“The Greatest Plague On Earth” is the name of this new song, and it’s the first recorded output from this Israeli band after a six-year-long break following their 2016 full-length Maestro (reviewed in detail  here). It’s also a sign of what lies ahead on the band’s next album Neptunian, their fourth full-length in a career that began more than 20 years ago. Continue reading »

WINTERHORDE: “MAESTRO”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Jun 012016
 

Winterhorde-Maestro

 

(DGR reviews the new album by the Israeli band Winterhorde.)

In what has become a calling card, Winterhorde are a band for whom significant time has passed between the last two releases. Three years plus tends to be the point at which questions start arising about the band’s status, and when you start coming up on the front-end of six years as in the case of Winterhorde, you start to worry whether the band even still exist. The gap between the releases prior to the six-year breather was closer to four, so even by their standards the length of time between discs was reaching an extreme.

Maestro, the group’s most recent release, follows the group’s 2010 album Underwatermoon — a densely packed album that, while it had some faults in terms of running a little long in the tooth, had its fair share of interesting ideas and regional melodies that gave the whole album an air of maddening ritual. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WINTERHORDE — “WORMS OF SOUL”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
May 162016
 

Winterhorde-Maestro

 

(We are fortunate to bring you a premiere of a song from the new album Maestro by the Israeli collective known as Winterhorde, with the following introduction by our writer DGR.)

The passage of time tends to make all of us look insane, because when you consider the sheer numbers, a gap of six years between albums looks pretty tremendous. Six years lies pretty far over on the longer side of the “waiting for a new disc” listener spectrum. Yes, so much happens in metal that you almost don’t notice, save for when all of a sudden bands dramatically reappear and drop new albums on us, seemingly out of nowhere.

Winterhorde are one such band, an Israeli symphonic-black metal band whose last album Underwatermoon was released in 2010 — an album which I praised in part because it had the temerity to feature both a boat and a planet on its cover, in a year where it seemed like eighty percent of metal releases either had a boat or a planet as their art. Continue reading »