Armchair rhetoric on extreme metal
I went into shortlisting for this year expecting to barely scrape together twenty releases worth of calling out. Instead I’ve actually struggled to keep the list south of forty. 2024 has been a rare year where both the overground and underground seem to be in agreement on the uptick in quality (for entirely different reasons... Continue Reading →
Na utriniOut 27th December on Osmose Productions CMPT’s debut album ‘Krv I pepeo’ released in 2021 caught me off guard for its slick development of Burzum style black metal, dragging the form in a more expressively riff based direction whilst retaining the liminal, dreamlike atmosphere that seems so lacking in many paler imitations of Varg’s... Continue Reading →
FolkstormOut 25th December on Purity Through Fire With a release schedule as adversarial as its nature, a lot of black metal tends to come out in the latter half of December. As if to disrupt pundits keen on tying up their AOTY lists before Christmas. Gnipahålan, as a shamelessly traditional, lavish, opulent, overwhelmingly cacophonous outlier... Continue Reading →
Peccatum MortiferumOut 13th December on Void Wanderer Productions Energetic, warm occultist black metal with aspirations toward high melodicism, and subtle yet effective gestures toward epic narrative storytelling. The soft, pillow punching snare combined with a bass guitar lead and a generally strained and dramatic poise will inevitably invite comparisons to Necromantia, Mortuary Drape, or Master’s... Continue Reading →
Perdition’s Mire: Into a Dark HeartlandOut 13th December on Headkick Music At one point these impotent guitar lines were probably reasonable black metal riffs. Onto this framework is draped a tedious exercise in self-therapy. Because this band’s focus is on individualised inner struggle they have nothing useful to say beyond meaningless gestures on why life... Continue Reading →
Thunraz: Incineration DayOut 22nd November, self-released Sterile, mechanical, jagged death metal meets an undercurrent of dark gothic atmosphere on the latest album from this Estonian entity. There is a clear intent to blend the abstracted violence of death metal with a more grounded, artificial aesthetic. Despite the clear industrial current running throughout 'Incineration Day', one... Continue Reading →
The Skorian // The GreyleerOut 29th November on Profound Lore Records The existence of Mefitis within extreme metal is in many ways metatextual. They imbibe its raw materials only to churn it up into a cocktail of inuendo, subversion, duality of meaning that would go largely unnoticed by anyone not intimate with the legacy they... Continue Reading →
Iniquitous Savagery: Edifice of VicissitudesOut 22nd November on Willowtip Records The clutter of brutal death metal covers a tendency toward a simple binary of slam breakdowns and tremolo melodic blasts. But predictable is another word for reliable. Despite the somewhat limited phrasing, each theme is framed by tangents and ornamentation interesting enough to elevate this... Continue Reading →
For this video, I ask why, despite metal self-consciously embracing extremity and transgression, it goes to great lengths to conceal its politics, and why subsequent attempts to reveal or create a politics of metal have met with ideological and artistic failure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0S8aQgOFYo
In this episode we interview Condemner, their history, their latest album 'Male Patratis Sunt Atra Theatra Parata', what's in store for the future, and the health of underground metal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuyJ375AyFc
Hate Meditations 