Armchair rhetoric on extreme metal
the pleasure machine is here: a few thoughts Big questions tend to throw us in multiple directions at once. What does it mean to live a good life? There are simply too many factors to consider. No reasonable person can be expected to provide a succinct, satisfactory answer. Thatโs why philosophers use thought experiments. The... Continue Reading →
A.H.P: Alltid Imot DegOut 21st March on Purity Through Fire Drab, pessimistic black metal lurches between torturous drone segments bolstered by little more than stumbling, slow rhythms into bursts of linear speed and open, humming guitar lines that retain a lackadaisical energy despite the blast-beat foundation. Raspy, mid-range vocals attempt to enhance the sense of... Continue Reading →
A Monument I Shall Raise in FlameOut 20th March on Werewolf Promotion Polandโs Deathlike Dawn continue the direction set by their previous album โNoc czarna czerniฤ otchลaniโ, extending their tendrils further into semi-chromatic, dissonant territory for this latest release, sacrificing the hazy atmosphere coating 2024โs โAmong the Graves of the Archetypesโ for a more stripped... Continue Reading →
Temora: DemoOut 13th March on Blood Harvest At face value this is fairly run of the mill old school death metal, delivered with a pleasing sparseness that presents as authentic as opposed to another empty pastiche. Peeling back the layers reveals a degree of pomp and playful bounce to this material. Many riffs taking on... Continue Reading →
Sette Cornici di PurificazioneOut 27th February on Masked Dead Records The third album from this Italian entity is an expansive, cinematic, and ambitious work of hyper charged melodic black metal. It manages to salvage the Cascadian style from its terminal blandness by recontextualising its open, cathartic demeanour into a more clarified, sharper expression of energised... Continue Reading →
Realms of Chaos: Torment of BelligerenceOut 14th February, self-released Precision timed, energetic death metal takes its cues from an earlier strain of brutal death metal that suppressed the hardcore influence in favour of linear, mechanistic bursts of intricately aggressive thrash. Late 90s Morbid Angel, Hate Eternal, and elements of Immolation of the same era stand... Continue Reading →
Overspace and SupertimeOut 27th February on Metal Blade Records Itโs been a slow rise for Leedsโs own Cryptic Shift. From clunky sci-fi thrash beginnings in the early 2010s to emerging as local scene darlings by the end of the decade. They were perhaps about to break into international renown by the time their debut dropped... Continue Reading →
In a recent episode of 2 Promoters, 1 Pod, co-host and Damnation Festival organiser Gavin McInally launched what some took to be an all out assault on the music press. His contentions were three fold. That the music press no longer does โrealโ journalismโ, i.e. following up on leads and breaking stories. Secondly, that its... Continue Reading →
Diabolus, Mecum Semperterne!Out 20th February on Terratur Possessions Dark, fluid, minimalist black metal creates a sense of grandeur by bolstering the near constant tremolo riffing with keyboard accompaniment. That, and the thick reverb covering the mix gives the music a degree of inertia, forcing it into rather simplistic themes that gain greater currency from the... Continue Reading →
Three Faced Trinity for a Two-Faced WorldOut 13th February on Horror Pain Gore Death Productions The obscurantist curveball that is Moonchapel continue their output apace. Following their harrowing debut โChasms of Ash and Inequityโ in 2025, they have since put out two more albums, โFamine Weaponizedโ released the same year, and now we have this... Continue Reading →
Hate Meditations 