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…
Sadly, the days of the video store are gone. Picking out a movie for the night doesn’t entail walking through row after row of VHS or DVD cases and picking out not only what appeals the most but what’s actually in stock. Now, rather than the tactile experience of wandering through aisles with other movie fans,…
Resurrection is not a rare event in the world of metal. Since the dawn of the new(ish) millennium, plenty of bands have come and gone and come back again. Everyone from Carcass to the Tygers of Pan Tang have reformed and put out killer records since their triumphant returns. Bands long thought dead and gone have…
Death metal is music by and for the underground. If you’re a fan of the style (hell, even if you’ve only heard a song or two), you understand what I mean. Screaming and growling the most disturbing, violent, and extreme lyrics that Jack Ketchum never wrote does not lend itself to mainstream appeal. Certainly some…
Death metal is, and this should be obvious, not a peaceful style of music. Hell, with death in the name itself you should know that you’re not in for a sonic experience conducive to mindful meditation. The speed, power, and rage behind the best death metal speaks to turbulence and upheaval. To put it another…