The term blackened thrash warrants closer scrutiny. Today it’s considered a subgenre, and one that contemporary fans seem to have a near limitless appetite for despite the endless conveyor belt of colour-by-numbers artists that are currently flying its colours. But a strong argument could be made for this being the black metal archetype. Given the... Continue Reading →

#40 - Goths: Shelley (hatemeditations.com) takes the lead today for an outside of the box episode focusing on goth culture. Tim, aka The Blogging Goth, runs a popular goth blog https://theblogginggoth.com/ which focuses on news, commentary, and upcoming events in the UK goth scene. Whenever a major media outlet does a feature on goth culture,... Continue Reading →

Kurokuma: Born of ObsidianOut 4th February, self-released Eight years and a small collection of promising EPs later, Sheffield’s own Kurokuma have landed their debut album in 2022, entitled ‘Born of Obsidian’. Although aesthetically their take on sludge/stoner doom borrows from a wide pool of punk and metal influences, their approach has always been one of... Continue Reading →

Theandric: Flight Among the TombsOut 11th February, self-released The fact that a band like Theandric with an EP like ‘Flight Among the Tombs’ can exist in 2022 is a source of both hope and exasperation. Hope (and confusion) that there are still far flung corners of the world – Detroit no less – where this... Continue Reading →

What the left gets wrong about black metal’s latent radicalism Thus far, the left’s attempts to develop a political counterweight to black metal’s far right tendencies have misunderstood the radical potentials inherent in black metal itself. Rather than jettisoning the deeply problematic elements of black metal’s history wholesale and seeking to build on new, politically... Continue Reading →

Theomachia: The TheosophistOut 4th February on Xenoglossy This conceptually weighty EP self identifies as “gnostic black metal”. Borrowing artwork from William Blake, and drawing heavily on ancient Roman and Greek esotericism, one could be forgiven for thinking that ‘The Theosophist’ would be a confused exercise in sensory overload so common to modern extreme metal with... Continue Reading →

Silhouette: Les RetranchementsOut 28th January on Antiq The slow burn debut from this French outfit sees DSBM of a particularly melodic bent placed in a Petri dish with fragments of darkwave, post metal, and blackened doom. And if that all sounds like a clusterfuck to you then fear not, it's simultaneously much better and worse... Continue Reading →

#39 Giuseppe (Thecodontion): Giuseppe from Thecodontion (also one of the individuals behind Xenoglossy Productions) joins Necropolis to discuss the prehistoric theme surrounding Thecodontion, the ethos of Xenoglossy Productions, metal in Italy and other elements of Italian culture, and some dialogue about metal related matters such as the metal publications that we read.

Ultra Silvam: The Sanctity of DeathOut 25th February on Shadow Records / Regain Records Ultra Silvam gut the bracing melodicism of Swedish black metal, remove the regal innards, explode the restrained dignity and poise of a Dawn, Dissection, or a Sacramentum by condensing this riff laden style into dense, violently short bursts of razor-sharp metallic... Continue Reading →

Despite the unrelenting feeling of acceleration, a strong case could be made for culture moving at a much slower pace today than thirty years ago. The sheer quantity and speed at which content is produced in contemporary life leads to a static zeitgeist. Singular artefacts and symbols take time to reach a level of popularity... Continue Reading →