Khost: Buried Steel (2020) Brummie industrial noise doomsters Khost offer up another rendering of deadbeat urban horror in the form of 2020’s ‘Buried Steel’. Replete with their trademark jagged drone, disjointed and disorientating, Khost frontload the more driving drumbeats and bounce into this mix than on their previous effort ‘Governance’ (2017). The opener ‘We Will... Continue Reading →

As the underground was forged throughout the 1980s, an explosion wrought in the crucible of punk, it took a special discipline to go against that grain. It may have gathered a larger following of tourists in the 2000s, but back then it was doom metal was decidedly not cool. The impact this had on traditional... Continue Reading →

One curious feature of black metal’s evolution throughout the 1990s was the fact that most European scenes outside of Norway were actually peddling something relatively accessible, even to untrained ears. Throughout southern and central Europe, old school heavy metal, ghoulish melodrama, and ambitious narrative structures were being married to surprisingly catchy riffs. One comes to... Continue Reading →

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 →