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 I like the beats and I like the yelling: Drawn and Quartered, Hnagash, Marras

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 I like the beats and I like the yelling: Warmoon Lord, Institution D.O.L., Tyrannus

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 Ukrainian folkways: Khors and Kroda

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 I like the beats and I like the yelling: LUM, Beyond Man, Stench Collector

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 El Negro Metal Interview Polemicist (Josiah Domico)

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 like the beats and I like the yelling: Macabre Decay, Atrium, Archaeopteris

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 The progressive turn: Cynic and Obliveon

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 I like the beats and I like the yelling: Order of Nosferat, Gorgon, Oppress

The 90s was a creative feeding frenzy for metal. Artistic endeavour prospered, despite the irresistible pull of fiscal interests staking a claim on countercultures wherever they gained traction. The white heat of activity that saw heavy guitar music reach new zeniths of creative potential left much detritus in its wake. But whether metal was a … Continue reading Metal’s retromania Part V: whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Tristwood: Dystopia et Disturbia (18th June 2021. Originally released as a digital album in 2010) The third album from this Austrian industrial-cum-grindcore project is receiving a physical release on CD in 2021. Along with previously unreleased early material from the band and the exclusive track ‘Stormcode’ comes the original album ‘Dystopia et Disturbia’. Never one … Continue reading I like the beats and I like the yelling: Tristwood, The Illusion of Dawn, Passeisme