Diocletian: Amongst the Flames of a Bvrning God (2019) After releasing one of the best extreme metal albums of the last decade, 2014’s ‘Gesundrian’, it looks like New Zealand’s Diocletian have been through some changes in personnel and outlook since that time. Following this masterwork up would be an intimidating prospect for any artist. But... Continue Reading →

Punk distils many of contemporary music’s virtues down to their most fundamental elements. This makes it a perfect lens by which to trace the developments in music over the passage of time. This riotous world, filled with anger, chaos, and vitriol, may seem like an odd setting for an academic study. But the crucible of... Continue Reading →

Tristwood: Blackcrowned Majesty (29th May 2020) The vast majority of extreme metal that leans into the industrial or cyber aesthetic tends to get things horribly backwards. The foundation of the music is usually built on nothing more than the superficial qualities shared by some forms of industrial and some forms of black metal. Any attempt... Continue Reading →

For those wishing to truly understand death metal – by now a vast and complex body of music – it's sometimes helpful to return to the primordial soup from whence this music was birthed. This can be done by journeying back to the genre’s earliest origins, but it is also instructive to look at those... Continue Reading →

Khand – The Sage of Witherthorn (2020) The tag ‘dungeon synth’ has never sat well with me. Applied retrospectively to the subgenre that essentially grew out the intros and interludes that became increasingly elaborate on black metal albums, it smacks of irony. There’s a new trend of ‘dad cool’ that gets applied to the act... Continue Reading →

Does doom exist in pure form? Does it always have to be prefixed with a qualifier: funeral, death, stoner, epic, gothic? Are the differences between Electric Wizard and Esoteric as dramatic as they are between a Panopticon and a Teitanblood? The importance of this question stretches beyond a source of quibbling debate on metal forums.... Continue Reading →

Cryptic Shifts: Visitations from Enceladus (2020) Progressive death metal's rising stars Cryptic Shift have just released their debut LP, which is not so much a consolidation of their material to date as it is a quantum leap into new levels of epic, technical metal. Their approach fits very much within the lexicon of progressive death... Continue Reading →

If Europe is the laboratory of death metal, where readymade specimens are taken in for testing, improvement, or unfortunate mutation, then the U.S. is definitely the engine room. Sure, both have had their successes and failures over the years, their consistent but unremarkable work horses, and their outriders who buck the trends. But album for... Continue Reading →

Thecodontion: Supercontinent (out 26th June 2020 on Voidhanger Records CD and Repose Records LP) Do you ever raise your eyebrows when reading an interview with a band talking about their latest release? When they reveal that it’s going to be an incredibly complex and specific high-concept album that apparently involved a postgrad degree’s worth of... Continue Reading →

I was thinking this would be a piece about why metal is so poorly treated in mainstream music journalism. Why, after all these years, after all that we've been through, does it still only get the most superficial of readings in the mainstream press? Particularly when other subcultures receive nuanced and detailed treatments from bigger... Continue Reading →