Until the Reverb Takes Us
As the band celebrates the 20th anniversary of this album with a 30-day tour and the release of a remastered version, coupled with the roll we have going on here with related posts, it is high time we discussed one of the foundational deathcore releases, and undoubtedly one of the best. I don't think I'm mistaken, but All Shall Perish 's live shows around 2005–2006 were among the first instances…
I remember very distinctly hearing "Crewcabanger" from Chelsea Grin 's self titled EP in 2008, and the excitement surrounding the announcement of their debut full-length, Desolation of Eden , in 2010. Between those releases, there was a lot of discussion when that album would finally arrive and what shape it would take, as fans had little more than a short EP to obsess over. The band's reputation…
Both Oceano and deathcore had entered a transitional phase around the time Ascendants was released, one that, for the band at least, was necessary after the release of the weaker Incisions in 2013. As increasingly polished production and cinematic orchestration was slowly entering the genre, the Chicago outfit has always tried to stand behind the same formula of testo-chug: lay down a set of…
One of my earliest and shortest posts on here in October 2012, was about Annotations of an Autopsy and their second full-length album, II: The Reign of Darkness . A more death metal-related record compared to the band's discography, it was the next step after a straight-up brutal deathcore / hardcore debut titled Before the Throne of Infection , in 2008. Driven by the charming youthful excess of…
If you're a regular visitor of this blog or have somehow landed here of your own accord, there's a good chance you are already familiar with the Swiss artist Tobias Möckl (a.k.a. Wintherr) and his involvement in the prolific projects Paysage d'Hiver and Darkspace . I've spent some time reviewing a couple of releases from both projects, even though a deeper dive is borderline mandatory and would be…
I discovered Sallow Moth through last year's Mossbane Lantern , a truly captivating exercise in tech and prog death metal whose complex songwriting set it apart from the genre's overcrowded landscape. It also somehow marked a rebirth for the project, which had limited its activity between 2022 and 2024, but since then Garry Brents has been quite active. Hydrophilous Brood arrives less than a year…
Believe it or not, one of the defining moments in my relationship with black metal came the first time I heard Nargaroth 's Jahreszeiten , and specifically the repetitive riffing on the last track, "Winter". This was my introduction to this band, before I knew of their earlier, more notorious records, as well as before many of the genre's foundational names. This kind of monotonous melodic…
We're no strangers to the glory of the Icelandic black scene, which has always aimed for production of music with ever-present ferocity, and continental significance. Most of the bands active during the previous decade dominated my playlists of favorites, some of which I still consider recordings or such magnitude that elevates the whole genre. One could argue that one of the perpetrators of the…
This act has caused significant turbulence within the scene since its formation only a few years ago, yet in that short span it has already assembled a quite formidable catalogue of full-length albums. Saidan 's frenetic brand of black metal, amplified by overwhelming melodicism and blended with the dismal aura of Japanese horror, has grown a large audience through the effectiveness of its riffing…
After a seven-year void, Texas pioneers of brutal death metal, Devourment , have returned with a surprise new 12-minute EP that emphatically proves they haven't diminished an ounce of their purpose: absolute heaviness. The '10s saw the band releasing two albums with fairly different responses from the audience, yet I fully enjoyed both Conceived In Sewage (2013) and Obscene Majesty (2019) , the…
I've known Washington D.C.'s Goetia for a while now and have enjoyed their series of highly regarded EPs from 2023 to 2025, bursting into the underground scene with a sort of boosted ferocity considering a band that barely existed a few years prior. Debut full-length album Mortuary Cult takes advantage of the momentum and embraces a straightforward yet highly volatile take on death metal,…
If you had dealings Haemoth 's second full-length album, Of Vice, Suffering and Destruction in 2004, you're certainly one of the bookworms of this scene. The band's run of demos and few records since the late '90s is of a semi-legendary status, yet I've always felt they never got the recognition they deserved due to numerous French black metal bands operating at the time. When they signed up with…
Grave Pilgrim have been on the rise in the American black metal underground. After releasing a remarkable self-titled debut album in 2021, the band initiated a conceptual trilogy of follow-up releases starting with 2023's The Bigotry of Purpose — a record you must listen to immediately if you haven't already. The Oregon duo's sound is rooted in black metal, but also carries traces of Americana,…
After 17 years of anticipation, the dream has finally become reality. Among the countless bands and albums of the "cavernous" death metal movement throughout the 2010s, Funebrarum 's first two albums have been endlessly cited as predecessors and essential points of reference. Their 2009 masterpiece, The Sleep of Morbid Dreams , in particular (alongside Dead Congregation 's Graves of the Archangels…
I remember anticipating Heldentod eagerly in 2021, due to the great impression I had of German outlet Grabunhold from their 2019 EP, Unter dem Banner der Toten . The debut album proved remarkable, and the band continued on a positive note with 2023's split release with Circle of Shadows , slowly drafting their own continuous landscape of Tolkien-inspired, triumphant and vigorous black metal. Half…
There ain't a more entertaining early Carcass-worshipping force in the modern underground than Tokyo-based duo Pharmacist (among the many, a lesser known but totally admirable case is Finland's Galvanizer ). The band has been around since 2020 and immediately made impact with the scene through the debut Medical Renditions of Grinding Decomposition , a true grindfest of grotesque medical imagery…
For me, absence never killed momentum. Despite being active since the late '90s, Chile's Godless released their debut full-length album in 2010, and circle back to studio action 16 years later with the second album, Adversus Parousia , having sparsely released only a handful of EPs and demos in between these three decades. My first experience with the band was on the Omega Omnipotens EP (2017) ,…
Since the earliest days, Polish black metal has maintained a firm presence in the underground scene and has notably evolved its psychological darkness over the years. What once was an obscure force of paganism and profanity later gauged interest into the avant-garde, the melodic and the theatrical, with a few names eventually landing their feet well into the mainstream. The younger generation of…
Watching Full of Hell continuously pile up on their fierce catalog has been a fascinating evolution to track. Over the last 15 years or so, the band has gone through the phases by always willingly re-structuring pieces of a large, fragmented grindcore / death metal / noise palette, as it seems they feed off the endorphins of bashing harder when the everyman would ease up. While laughing in the…
I've been really eager to listen to this album from the moment I saw this fantastic front cover: a step further than just encouraging your fans to play MTG during your live show is to adopt the aesthetics of the legendary game. The art of third full-length album N o Place of Warmth by Fort Worth, Texas mammoths Frozen Soul features a fantasy-drifting art by James Bousema, who has a stunning…
Instances of monumental awe are so rare, that they remain unforgettable. Only at a handful of cases have I had so rapid a transition from analytical to overwhelmed when first listening to an album, one of them being my introduction to Immolation and their 1996 masterpiece, Here In After . For a band of this magnitude and everyone else, time has carried with it no small measure of change. To fast…
First of all, The Funeral March is one of the best grindcore albums of its time. Secondly, I hope Gadget doesn't make it a habit to put out a major release once per decade, as The Great Destroyer came out 10 years later, and now this new EP, ten years after that. There hadn't been complete silence all this time if you think about the split release with Retaliation in 2021, but I don't mind being…
Formed back in 2005 and only sporadically active until recent years, you would prove to be a real book worm if you had Werwolf (no relation to the Finnish pseudonym of similar spelling) from Freiburg, Germany in your listening archives. The thread of releases in smaller formats the project in the current decade should have suggested an impending buildup to a full-length album, yet I still never…
At what point does organic consistency become its own form of artistic statement? Seven full-length albums in (not thinking of all the demos, splits and EPs in between) since 2009 clearly accentuate Black Cilice ’s absolute indifference to expectations of progression, a project convicted to a certain vision from day one, and having stood its ground from that very moment. I discovered this…
Devoid of Thought hail from the Lombardy region in Italy, and spent the better part of the last decade honing their powerful self-defining debut record, Outer World Graves (2021) . With that album, the band attempted - while not leaving the crater - to handle death metal’s most perplexed branches and reassemble them into something new, and as immune to passive listening as possible. I admit to…