Thecodontion/Vessel of Iniquity: The Permian-Triassic Extinction EventOut 3rd September, CD release on I, Voidhanger Records, cassette release on Bad Moon Rising (Taiwan)/Dead Red Queen Records (USA) As the march of history continues apace, beyond our control or understanding, extreme metal’s quest for new sonic pastures to capture the moment can sometimes look like panic. In... Continue Reading →

Nordic folk seems to be the agreed umbrella term for the wave of artists currently putting out sonic facsimiles of pre-Christian pagan music. But genre tags aside, this style sure is getting lapped up by metalheads these days. Given metal’s affiliation with pagan spirituality and culture, along with its frequent appropriation of regional folk music... Continue Reading →

Drawn and Quartered: Congregation PestilenceOut 2nd July on Krucyator Productions Seattle based death metal veterans Drawn and Quartered return with another taut punch of drab chaos. I’ve always likened these guys to an Incantation if they were stripped of all doom elements. The meditated discordant riffs, the angular shifts in tempo, the undercurrents of dissonance,... Continue Reading →

Warmoon Lord: BattlespellsOut 25th June on Werewolf Records Here’s a novel thing: traditional Scandinavian black metal with an original sense of melody. Warmoon Lord’s latest offering ‘Battlespells’ is a tour de force of classic northern European iterations of black metal, but onto this familiar foundation is stamped a marked identity of its own. The backdrop... Continue Reading →

It’s interesting to document the geographical chronology of the second wave of black throughout the 1990s. From the earlier offerings to come out Norway, Finland, Greece, and the US, considered to be the bedrock of our understanding of black metal’s different shades to this day. Through to the mid-1990s with France, Austria, and Poland all... Continue Reading →

LUM: L’Feu e la StriaOut 24th June on Nigredo Records LUM are a brand new black metal project out of Turin. Their debut EP ‘L’Feu e la Stria’ offers a striking mix of atmospheric and raw black metal. It’s as if Ildjarn, instead of working with the melodic riffsmith that was Nidhogg, had instead taken... Continue Reading →

Deepest gratitude to El Negro Metal for allowing Hate Meditations to publish the English language version of this interview with Josiah Domico of Polemicist. You can find the original version of the interview here, along with other great articles on underground metal. Judging from the first impressions, your second album sounds quite different from the... Continue Reading →

Macabre Decay: Into OblivionOut 18th June on Grind to Death Records For all the twists and turns of the forever war between old school obsessionists and deluded experimentalists, it has led to a frustratingly paralysed landscape in 21st Century metal. The possibility of new music – I mean really new music – has been called... Continue Reading →

I’ve made much of the progressive turn that death metal took in the early 1990s. But this is usually from a cultural angle over a raw analysis of the music. What did it mean that extreme metal – a rampantly chaotic form of music with such primitive origins - fused with jazz via King Crimson,... Continue Reading →

Order of Nosferat: Arrival of the Plague Bearer Out 7th June 2021 on Purity Through Fire This is the second LP from this German/Finnish to come out in 2021. If you’re releasing more than one LP a year, alarm bells should start ringing. Mitigating circumstance aside, pushing an album out even once a year is... Continue Reading →