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…
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…
It takes a lot to stand out in the world. With more people having more access to more types of entertainment than ever before, getting yourself recognized and remembered as someone or something that rises above whatever crowded field you play in can be a Herculean task. Granted there are more outlets for exposure than…
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…
Let’s face it, extreme metal is not a genre for the faint of heart. Between the ravenously hungry living dead, the slaughter of nuns, and the blazing fires of Hell, extreme metal is something that you don’t get into if you’re wired like everyone else. If you want to play it safe with music that…
The last decade or so has seen plenty of events that make the doom of mankind seem rather imminent. Between economic collapses, pandemics, wars, and environmental destruction, it can feel like the end is nigh and getting out the sandwich board and screaming it from the street corner might start making sense. It’s hard to feel optimistic about the…
History, as a subject, is one that tends to appeal to metalheads. Between the battles, struggles for power, delusions of grandeur leading to downfalls, and more death and destruction than a disaster flick, history is ripe with plenty to mine for inspiration for metal fans and bands alike. For those with a more nuanced approach to…
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…
Extreme metal desperately needs bands like Blackbraid. There are so many bands starting out or stumbling out of their infancy that all end up sounding, if not the same, pretty damn close to it. There are only so many new ways you can do brutal death metal until it gets repetitive, for instance. That’s not…