Throughout its history, one arm of metal or another has been engaged in some form of trench warfare with perceived threats, both internal and external. When I entered the scene in the mid-2000s, protracted wars with old enemies on the Christian right and the forces of commercialisation had all but burned themselves out. Demoralised by... Continue Reading →

Crux SimplexOut 22nd September on Season of Mist If ever a course correction were required for the good ship Profanatica it would be now. The project helmed by Paul Ledney is perhaps the most visible from a crop of first wave USBM artists – along with VON, Demoncy, Black Funeral, and Grand Belial’s Key –... Continue Reading →

Bergrizen: OrathaniaOut 22nd September on Purity Through Fire Concocts disparate but well thought out textural passages somewhere between the arcane naturalism of Ildjarn and the floating space ambient of Midnight Odyssey. Whilst neither comparison may be all that welcome, crafting ambient in program vignette form based on cultural or geographical source material is a sure... Continue Reading →

Vortize: Desde Bajo TierraOut 15th September on Selvajaria Records Irrepressibly bouncy speed metal prepares the ground for rich melodic integration articulated via a classicist NWOBHM attack meshed to folk flourishes. Impassioned metal crooning served on the high end below falsetto, anthemic hooks, Spanish guitar solos, galloping percussive attacks of bracing thunder. All would be entirely... Continue Reading →

Dis Pater, the prolific creative force behind Midnight Odyssey, joins us for a conversation about his upcoming album "Biolume Part 3 - A Fullmoon Madness" (available on November 24th via I, Voidhanger Records), the recent European tour by Midnight Odyssey, the intricacies of his projects, and various elements that shape his distinctive perspective. Preorder the... Continue Reading →

Having finally completed Midnight Tides, the fifth instalment in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, it feels like a good time to scrutinise the deranged culture surrounding this fantasy series. Erikson is most appropriately positioned as a competent writer of pop fiction. He can string together a well paced beach read. His stories take... Continue Reading →

Nous sommes d’HierOut 6th October on Debemur Morti Productions The more metal succumbs to anti-traditionalism, the more a rigid compositional discipline begins to look like an act of defiance. Many times metal has attempted to extract itself from the burden of melodic construction (I here mean melodic in the broadest possible sense, covering atonal and... Continue Reading →

BeowulfOut 8th September, self-released Whilst few would be thrilled at the idea of yet another metal prefix, the number and specificity of descriptors churning around the aether are useful insofar as they boast explanatory power, and I believe “barbaric metal” is one such. It should also be noted that barbaric metal as I’m proposing it... Continue Reading →

Tideless: Eye of WaterOut 15th September on Chaos Records For all my love of black metal, there's no denying the many negatives it brought to metal's evolution. One of which was creating an avenue for cross pollinating with shoegaze, a genre that exists in stark contrast to metal, being largely concerned with the manipulation of... Continue Reading →

Black Grail: Misticismo RegresivoOut 31st August on Virupi (originally released in 2015) Concocts an accord between the eccentric operatic croak metal of early Root with the aggressive surrealism of Sigh, midwifed by tastefully restrained dissonance, entropic riff shapes, and cacophonous violence. The album presents a unique murk distinctive of non-Nordic ritualistic black metal. This refocuses... Continue Reading →