Old SorceryRealms of Magickal Sorrow A very wide bridge links black metal to dungeon synth. Sure, each territory boasts many distant realms that would not dream of crossing this bridge, from blackened thrash and raw black metal at one pole, to dino synth and comfy synth at the other. But toward the interior of each... Continue Reading →

Nigrum: Elevenfold TailOut 16th December on Into Endless Chaos Records Offering a tight iteration of cutting, riff laden black metal, the debut album from Nigrum succeeds in spite of – or rather because of – its notably modest packaging. Sharp interweaving guitar lines flow across these tracks with sophisticated grace, but the presentation is one... Continue Reading →

The lads chat Morbid Angel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZM_-87kt5M

Rigor Sardonicous: Praeparet BellumOut 23rd January on Memento Mori The latest album from veteran death doomsters Rigor Sardonicous showcases their dirge ridden brand of industrial death doom in ever increasing iterations of entropic decay brilliantly. Hailing from Long Island, this outfit have been crafting their own form of minimalist, ruminant death metal for many years... Continue Reading →

Thy Darkened Shade: Liber Lvcifer II: MahapralayaOut 10th January on W.T.C. Productions Part ‘Anthems…’ era Emperor, part modernistic dissonance thrills, and part Hellenic quirk, the latest album from Thy Darkened Shade is not lacking for talking points. The album pulses between mid-paced tempos and brief but intense bursts of speed, with the melodic character of... Continue Reading →

Garden GnomeG.S.S.R. (Gnomewegian Soviet Socialist Republics) Trust an outfit like Garden Gnome to take dungeon synth – a micro-genre already straining at fanatical irony's leash – and shove completely up its own arse. This project started out as a relatively measured take on dungeon synth back in 2021, despite its obvious tongue-in-cheek attitude to the... Continue Reading →

S. Craig Zahler (director of Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99, Dragged Across Concrete, etc) returns to Necropolis to discuss his new graphic novel ‘Organisms from an Ancient Cosmos’. We chat about what the creation process was like, why he prefers ‘hard’ science fiction over more fantastical takes on the genre, our disbelief in... Continue Reading →

Nocturnal Departure: Clandestine TheurgyOut 30th December on Hells Headbangers A pleasing blend of energetic, riff based black metal of the dirtiest order meets the refinement of the genre’s more cinematic aspirations on the latest album from Canada’s Nocturnal Departure. ‘Clandestine Theurgy’ is a diverse beast despite its relatively primitivist presentation. Riffs move from busy melodicism,... Continue Reading →

Hate Forest: InnermostOut 21st December on Osmose Productions Hate Forest shed their reverential grandeur and delve back to the earthy aggression of their formative years for their latest album ‘Innermost’. If ‘Hour of the Centaur’ struck a rather stirring, defiant tone, here we see Roman Saenko turning Hate Forest into an expression of wanton despair,... Continue Reading →

Absolute Key: The Third Level of DecayOut 21st December on Signal Rex ‘The Third Level of Decay’ is another one of those albums that poses as a parody of music, but here the joke is extended to the point where it looks something like sincerity. It’s as if a mysterious alien race were attempting to... Continue Reading →