APTORIAN DEMON have announced the details of their sophomore full-length Liv tar slutt (‘Life Ends’), which will be released on November 15, 2024.
The underground Norwegian black metal act from Trondheim also unleashes a first advance track taken from Liv tar slutt. The single ‘Når livet tar slutt’ (‘When Life Ends’) is available here:
AA
PTORIAN DEMON hail from Trondheim, Norway. They were founded by vocalist, guitarist and sole member Storhetsvanviddets Mester, who has also been known as Ghâsh.
APTORIAN DEMON embody black metal in its original bleak and raw form. Their mastermind is neither apologetic about this, nor about the hateful, misanthropic, and satanic content. This is what black metal is about. Storhetsvanviddets Mester is a lone wolf, who does not want to be associated with previous bands or the Nidrosian scene.
APTORIAN DEMON have previously released the EP Angst, jammer og fortvilelse in 2005 and the debut album Libertus (2012), which gained the band a dedicated following in the underground. Naturally, there are no social media outlets.
APTORIAN DEMON have deigned the time to be right for their sophomore full-length. Entitled Liv tar slutt (‘Life Ends’), this album keeps every ‘promise’ of a strong black metal statement made by the previous releases and will delight dark souls with its cold, harsh, and razor-edged songs. This is Norwegian black metal! Take it or leave it!
For those unfamiliar with ShitNoise, their bio describes them as ‘a noise punk band hailing from Monte-Carlo (Monaco). Formed in February 2022, the band has undergone several lineup changes. Currently, it consists of Aleksejs Macions on vocals and guitar, Vova Dictor on guitar, and Paul Albouy on drums.’ What’s more, they reckon their third album, I Cocked My Gun And Shot My Best Friend, ‘showcases their most energetic and mature work to date… Departing from their previous noise-centric style, the band blends grungy guitar riffs, metal-influenced double-kick drums, and a more polished production. The album explores themes of confronting the harsh realities of society and the lasting psychological impact of traumatic events. Through gritty soundscapes and stream-of-consciousness lyrics, it paints a raw portrait of present-day existence and the enduring human spirit in the face of adversity.’
I’m often wary of bands and artists who claim to have matured: all too often it means they’ve gone boring, that they’ve lost their fire and whatever rawness, naivete, edge, that made them stand out, drove them to make music in the first place. But these things are relative, and ShitNoise isn’t just a gimmicky moniker, but a fair summary of what they do. Here, they’ve stepped up from no-fi racket to lo-fi racket and evolved from the trashy punk din with dancey and electronic elements that at times sounded like a Girls Against Boys rehearsal recorded on a Dictaphone, toward a more wide-ranging and experimental approach to noisemaking. As for the album’s title… well. Was the act an accident, one of stupidity, gross negligence, or intentional? Either way, as the adage goes, with friends like these… ShitNoise are certainly not the friend of sensitive sensibilities, or eardrums.
So sure, they’ve ‘matured’ inasmuch as they’ve broadened their palette, but in doing so, they’ve discovered new ways of creating sonic torture.
‘Ho-Ho! (No More)’ launches the album with shards of shrill feedback and distortion: it’s two and a quarter minutes of nails-down-a-blackboard tinnitus-inducing frequencies and deranged yelping that’s somewhat reminiscent of early Whitehouse, minus the S&M / serial killer shit. Not that I have a fucking clue what they are on about, and the noise is so mangled it’s impossible to differentiate any of the sound sources from one another – guitars sound like screaming synths, and there’s so much dirty mess in the mix everything sounds so broken you begin to wonder if your speakers are knackered.
Proving just how much they’ve ‘matured’, ‘Brown Morning’ barrels into churning noise driven by thunderous beats as the backdrop to a rappy / spoken word piece, after which the arrival of the fairly straightforward punk tune ‘Gum Opera’ feels like not only light relief, but somewhat incongruous. But then, in the world of ShitNoise, anything goes, as long as it’s noisy shit. And keeping on with the noisy shit, there’s the gnarly Jesus Lizard meets Melvins gone rockabilly slugging sludgepunkfest of the oxymoronic ‘Pleasant Guff’ to go at, and it’s abundantly clear that they’re absolutely revelling in following their curiosity in every direction when it comes to exploring any and all avenues of racketmongering. I Cocked My Gun is wild, and wildly divergent, stupid, chaotic, and fun.
If the off-kilter grunge of ‘X-Ray Phantom’, with its incidental piano tinkling along behind crunchy guitars hints at something approaching a kind of sensitivity – and a closet ability to write songs – ‘Endless Void’ demonstrates their capacity to step back from noise completely, and venture into near-ambient territories, and with remarkable dexterity.
But mostly, these deviances only serve to bolster the impact of the manic racketmaking which dominates the album, which brings us to the epic penultimate track, ‘Hashish (The Yelling Song)’ – a ball-busting seven-and-a-half-minute stoner-doom slammer that slaloms its way through some heavy drone and some explosive psychotic episodes… and we’re immensely proud to be able to present an exclusive premier of the video which accompanies this mammoth slab of sonic derangement right here:
Get it in your lugs. Let it permeate every cell. Bask in the insanity. With I Cocked My Gun And Shot My Best Friend, ShitNoise have really gone out on a limb, and while teetering on a precipice of madness, have proved that artistic fulfilment lies on the other side of mania. It’s a far more enjoyable place than the everyday in which we find ourselves of late, so why not dive on in?
Portugal’s heavy hitters, Vaneno, have returned with a vengeance, unveiling the video for ‘Necropotent,’ the first single from their highly anticipated new album, Chaos, Hostility, Murder. This track marks the band’s first release since their 2020 offering, Struggle Through Absurdity, and it’s nastier, louder, heavier, and darker than anything they’ve done before.
“‘Necropotent’ is a caustic and maddening vision of a world that intertwines with our own. We all know who you are. The real necro lords who thrive in misery, pestilence, and chaos, forever feeding the abyss with the eternal rest of the fallen.” Says the band. This powerful and unsettling message is matched by the song’s crushing riffs and relentless rhythms, delivering an intense auditory experience that will leave listeners reeling.
Watch the video here:
AA
The upcoming album, Chaos, Hostility, Murder, was mixed and mastered by Pedro Mau at SinWav Audio, who also worked on the band’s debut EP. The album is set to be released through Raging Planet Records, further solidifying Vaneno’s place as one of the most promising Portuguese metal bands of today.
Vaneno’s journey began in 2017 when three friends — Miguel Nunes (drums), Eduardo Cunha (guitar), and António Tavares (guitar) — started jamming together, laying the foundation for what would become their distinct sludge-infused sound. By late 2019, the band expanded to a five-piece with the addition of Pedro Fernandes on bass and Alexandre Fernandes on vocals, marking a turning point in their commitment to bringing their music to the masses.
Since then, the band has undergone a lineup change, with Eduardo Cunha stepping down and Felipe Peraboa taking over on guitar.
Their previous release, Struggle Through Absurdity, showcased four powerful tracks that blend sludge, stoner, and death metal influences, creating an aggressive sound full of heavy, muscular riffs and pummeling rhythms. Vaneno’s raw, unrelenting style continues to evolve, and Chaos, Hostility, Murder promises to take their music to even greater heights.
Ramping up the anticipation for their upcoming album, hot on the heels of ‘O God’, The Battery Farm slam down a second single in the form of ‘Hail Mary’. One of the physical formats happens to be a rather nifty mini-CD. I’m rather partial to these as objects – so much so that I released a double-pack of EPs on 3” CD recently. Back when CDs singles were a standard format – and more often than not as a standard and limited edition, alongside a 7”, 12”, and cassette single, back in the early 90s at the peak of releasing as many formats as was humanly conceivable in order to milk fans and maximise copies sold for chart placement – the mini CD offered a format that was both practical and novel: with a capacity of around twenty-three minutes, they provided just the right amount of playing surface and so not only seemed less wasteful than a 5” disc with its seventy-odd minutes space, but they looked dinky, too. The challenge was always how to package them, though: I have 3” singles by The Sisters of Mercy from the late 80s in 5” jewel cases, complete with plastic adaptors for those whose CD player trays didn’t have a 3” divot, although this sort of seemed to defeat the object of the object, if you get my point, while the ‘battery pack’ style limited editions of the singles from the second album by Garbage were as stupid as they were cool, inasmuch as to play the things, you had to trash the packaging – which was probably the idea as an artistic wheeze, presenting fans and collectors with the dilemma of whether to play or preserve it (or buy two).
Of course, while presentation matters, it’s ultimately the content that counts, and with ‘Hail Mary’, The Battery Farm continue the trajectory of ‘O God’, with some sparse, jittery, slightly mathy instrumentation providing a tension-building lead-in before things kick in hard with a fat, buzzing bass around the mid-point.
‘Get this thing the fuck away from me,’ Benjamin Corry snarls with in a thick northern accent, dripping with vitriol, his throat full of phlegm and gravel, and in no time at all, the anguished vocals are spluttering out through a whirling cacophony of noise. It hits like a punch in the guts, and every spittle-flecked syllable feels like it’s being coughed up from the furthermost recesses of Corry’s soul. And yet, amidst it all, there’s a nagging riff, thumping beat you can really get down to, and even a snippet of backing vocal adding a bit of harmony.
For The Battery Farm, B-sides represent an opportunity to explore and experiment, and ‘2 Shackwell Road’ is no exception, with a collage of vocal samples looping across a stammering drum ‘n’ bass beat which gives way to a low-end rumble and occasional blasts of industrial noise. The result is strange and disturbing.
Taken together, the two singles thus far likely give us a fair indication of what we can expect from the album, Dark Web, due in November. It threatens something stark, uncomfortable, a psychologically demanding set of songs which go deep into dark territories, and promises to be their strongest work to date.
‘The Witness’ is the first video released from Love Spells , the debut album from Death Doula, a dusky Art-Rock band hailing from Portland, Oregon. The new album was recorded at Jackpot Studios by Adam Lee (Built to Spill, Sleater-Kinney) and mixed by Bob Cheek, (Deftones, Band of Horses). It’s being released as a digital download and via streaming platforms by Death Doula Records on October 11.
Check the video here:
AA
Kerry Jones had a crush on his best friend. Kyle List didn’t mind, he asked her to come collaborate at his tiny home studio anyway. By the end of the night, they were in love and had created a demo of ‘Disembark’, which would be lead single from Love Spells. Three weeks later, he moved to Portland to live with her, with no plan beyond an intuition that the music would take them somewhere.
Fast forwarding two years later, they recruited the veteran rhythm section of Keith Vidal on bass (Marjorie Faire, Nyles Lannon) and Adam Kozie on drums (Pollens, Crystal Beth) and adopted the name Death Doula. The music they’ve created shows their shared love of artists like Can, Television, Jeff Buckley, The Cranberries, Deerhunter, Kate Bush, The Sundays and Deftones, while remaining altogether sonically new.
After having their lives dramatically reshaped during the pandemic, the members of Death Doula approach music with an intensity that can only come from having spent a lifetime wanting it. Kerry and Kyle have an 11 year age difference. Keith and Kyle have a 22 year age difference. Each member pours their lifetime of experience into performances that place emotion and groove first.
“In a world so algorithmized it’s numb,” says Kerry “we just want to make people feel something again.”
RAT LORD, the Norwegian trio known for their ferocious energy and tongue-in-cheek approach, is back with a brand-new single, ‘Now Diabetical’.
“If you dig the idea of grindcore and powerviolence while poking fun at black metal, Rat Lord is gonna be your new favorite band,” says Decibel scribe Addison Herron-Wheeler about this unorthodox Norwegian act.
Following the success of their debut album This Is Not A Record, Rat Lord returns with the brilliantly titled Blazed In The Northern Sky. The band—comprising guitarist/vocalist Yngve Andersen, drummer Sigurd Haakaas (both from Blood Command), and bassist Martine Green—continues to push boundaries with their unique blend of powerviolence and grindcore.
The full album is set to drop on August 30th via Loyal Blood Records, but you can get an early taste of the chaos with the new track ‘Now Diabetical’ here:
The band comments: “‘Now Diabetical’ is a song about eating healthy, so you don’t catch diabetes type 2, which is a big problem for some. The title may or may not be making fun of Satyricon’s ‘Now Diabolical.’”
The follow-up to the band’s 2022 debut album This Is Not A Record, sees RAT LORD churning out the same gritty and destructive powerviolence/grind sound that received strong praise from various publications along their humorous lyrical content, this time parodying some of the most famous songs and events from the Norwegian Black Metal history, the album title for instance clearly nods at Darkthrone’s A Blaze in the Northern Sky.
Bill Leeb is the Vancouver-based musician and mastermind behind electro-industrial scene mainstays Front Line Assembly and ambient-pop duo Delerium, as well as a key member of recording projects that include Noise Unit, Intermix and Cyberaktif.
Model Kollapse marks the first solo venture by this sonic chameleon and creative trailblazer since the mid-80s days of Front Line Assembly, when Leeb began making recordings in his bedroom and released them on limited edition cassette format. Almost four decades on, his new album was recorded and produced in Vancouver, Toronto and Los Angeles with assistance from production duo Dream Bullet and long-term recording cohort Rhys Fulber, plus regular mixing engineer Greg Reely.
The song ‘Demons’ has been released today as the second single from the album, with Leeb stating that the EBM styled track is a comment on “how much darkness and evil exist in the world, some of it created via technology that is here to stay, and how we have to carefully navigate our way through it all on a day-to-day basis.”
‘Demons’ follows the introductory single ‘Terror Forms’, featuring Shannon Hemmett of the group ACTORS, who are also based in Leeb’s home city.
Los Angeles – based dark electronic band, SLEEK TEETH have just unveiled ‘Endless’ from their forthcoming EP due out in October, 2024.
‘Endless’ is a danceable, darkwave offering with an anthemic chorus. The lyrics explore the unpredictable paths we sometimes find ourselves on as well as the rewards and perils of letting go of expectations and embracing uncertainty.
Since their inception as Our Haunted Kingdom in 1995, before transitioning to Orange Goblin and releasing their debut album, Frequencies From Planet Ten in ’97, OG have established themselves as leading exponents of heavy metal thunder.
Science, Not Fiction, explores, as the press pitch puts it, ‘the world as seen through the three fundamental factors; Science, Spirituality, & Religion and how they determine and affect the human condition.’
On the one hand, this is very much hoary old-school metal, with monster riffage cranked up and driving hard with gruff vocals giving it some. But on the other, it’s hoary old-school metal that’s very much more in the Motorhead vein than, say, Iron Maiden. It’s got the heavy swagger of the best of stoner, the monstrous density of slugging, sludgy doom. Fretwanking is kept in check while ball-busting riffery is cranked up to eleven. No shit, this is how it should be done.
‘(Not) Rocket Science’ is exemplary, and brings both the riffs and the cowbell. They sling in some sampled speech on ‘Ascend the Negative’, which offers a solid sense of positivity pushed on by a pounding riff and thunderous percussion. ‘The rich inflate their egos while the poor just foot the bills’, Ben Ward growls on ‘False Hope Diet’, clearly establishing their political position. This enhances my personal appreciation of the band, for certain – but as much as anything because of their up-front engagement with issues, rather than just pumping fists about birds or relationships. That shit just gets tired and has been done to death, as has mystical bollocks for that matter. It ain’t the 70s anymore, man.
Orange Goblin by no means strive to subvert or place a spin on well-established genre tropes: if anything, quite the opposite is true: Science, Not Fiction absolutely revels in them. But, at the same time, in terms of subject matter, Science, Not Fiction is bang-on contemporary and on point.
There’s simply no arguing with this album: Science, Not Fiction is all the meat, there’s no let-up from beginning to end: nothing but riff after riff, delivered with confidence and brute force. Good shit.
Shining, the latest full-length album from the Finnish Death Doom Pioneers Swallow The Sun, will be available via Century Media Records on Oct 18th. The powerful and very heavy new track of transformation and rebirth, ‘What I Have Become’ will take you through personal hell and back. The new record is produced and mixed by Dan Lancaster (Bring Me the Horizon, Muse, Enter Shikari, etc.), mastered by Tony Lindgren (Fascination Street Studios) and recorded by Juho Räihä at SoundSpiral Audio, except vocals recorded by Dan Lancaster.
Watch the video now:
AA
Juha Raivio comments on the new song: “‘What I Have Become’ is about that moment when you look yourself deep in the eye from the mirror and your own eyes start to tell what your soul have become instead of what you always wanted it to be. The hardest thing is to forgive yourself and break that circle”.
Juha Raivio adds on Shining: “After our last album it soon became clear to me that writing another Moonflowers album will kill me. So, I made a quiet wish to myself that if there ever will be any new music then please have a little bit of mercy on yourself rather than be that infinite black hole that will suck out the rest of your remaining light and soul just for the sake of it. Musically this album shines like a glacier diamond and has that power and punch that feels like a kick in your face! While lyrically the album deals how fearing life will eventually kill you and how melancholy can become your God.
We want to thank all the support and trust from Century Media, not to mention our insanely talented producer Dan Lancaster having the balls and guts to jump straight in the deep end with this band and get us out from our comfort zone. This album truly feels like a sunrise in the night sky”.
Aural Aggravation 