It’s been a Hell of a year for metal. Bands thought long dead clawed their way out of their graves, old favorites signed off after putting in years and decades of stellar work, new bands celebrated the start of what will hopefully be long and fruitful careers, and veterans of the scene put out stunning…
Trying to tackle a top ten list of songs is a lot more work than it sounds like it should be at first, but then you take into consideration the sheer number of songs that were released in 2022. Even when a parameter is set, considering we’re called Metal Plague, that it should be in…
A lot of the time the start of the journey is the most exciting part of the whole thing. The future is wide open with promise and no one really knows what the rest of the path will end up looking like once all is said and done. The untapped potential that still waits to…
The pandemic might not be over (despite what our elected officials might say, ICUs running out of beds due to COVID complications tends to make me not want to consider us out of the woods yet) but the live show hiatus certainly is. Concerts are finally back in full swing with many exciting tours out…
I have to admit, this is one of the things I’ve most been looking forward to when I started this site. I absolutely love end-of-the-year lists. There’s something about people making definitive statements about the art they loved over the past year that has always interested me. Agree or disagree with them, they always provide plenty of…
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…
Plenty of toxins have done plenty of damage to the world but, for my money, no toxin has been more damaging to the face of the Earth and the cause of humanity than the toxin of organized religion. If you’re a thinking adult, you really shouldn’t need too many examples to back this up but…