Like the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That old chestnut works when describing extreme metal as well as anything else. When a genre like death metal has been going strong for decades and decades, there’s not much of a reason to stray too far outside of the bounds of the style…
Ashes are usually what’s left at the end. When the fire has burnt out and everything that it’s consumed has been taken, ashes are all you’re left with. There’s a finality to something being reduced to ashes. Few things feel more like a definitive ending than everything distinctive about something being burnt away from it….
Sometimes the metal release calendar doesn’t make you wait too far into the year to have new faces rip your old face off. The ink is barely dry on the shitshow that was 2022 but we already have one of the most exciting debuts of 2023. That Repulsive Nature, the first LP from Seattle death metallers…
It doesn’t take long into Ritual of Ash, the debut longplayer from Australian death metallers Ashen, to realize that these dudes know what the Hell they are doing. If you’ve listened to enough death metal over the years, Ashen’s influences should be pretty readily apparent upon firing up their first LP. Pretty much any band that…
Heavy times call for heavy music. It’s no secret that people lean pretty mightily on whatever brand of music speaks to them when the going gets tough. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ve noticed that the going has gotten tough lately for most people. Having a great piece…
A ton of great debuts come out every year from across all subgenres of metal to the point where compiling a list of the best debuts every year can be a pretty perilous task. Last year I ended up putting together my end-of-the-year debuts list way too late and had a ton of albums to…
Finding the line between thrash and death metal can sometimes feel like trying to determine the world’s shortest tall person. There’s not a lot of difference between the heaviest of thrash and death metal sometimes, and honestly, who cares? Genre definitions can be extremely limiting and, honestly, if a band is a thrash-influenced death metal band or…
Talk to anyone deeply into extreme metal for long enough and you’ll walk away with a list of new bands to check out and a full playlist of stuff you’ve missed or haven’t gotten around to yet. Extreme metal fandom, and music fandom in general, is a mapping diagram of bands leading you to other…
If you’ve been lamenting the lack of Lamentations albums for the past six years, your ship finally came in back in November when the Singapore progressive death metal outfit put out its second album, Passion of Depression. If you dug the 2013 debut, Echoes in the Wind, then you should be pretty stoked on the band’s follow-up. Passion of…
Anyone that loves metal knows that South America does metal better than most places on the globe. Whether it’s Sarcófago, Sepultura, Mystifier, Abhorrence, Krisiun or any of a myriad of other killer bands, our friends near and south of the equator know a thing or two about making maniacal metal. Bands across the continent have spent…