Australian death-metal quintet The Plague have just shared a music video for a crushing new song off their second album "Erosion of Gods", which is set to be released on October 27th on vinyl, cd and digital via Brilliant Emperor Records.
Titled ‘Hacked and Butchered’, this new video is now playing here:
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Vocalist Mike says: “I think the title pretty much speaks for itself, I was watching a lot of documentaries and reading articles about cannibalism at the time and thought a song in that vein would be very fitting for the album. I enjoy stories about horror and the macabre so I wrote some words to provoke thoughts about that subject. The song is about hacking and butchering a human being and eating them, an unpleasant occurrence but it happens nonetheless.”
Erosion of Gods follows-up the band’s critically lauded 2021 debut album Within Death, and once again sees The Plague churning out a raw, unadulterated death-metal sound inspired by the forefathers of Swedish death metal such as Dismember and Entombed. This chainsaw-fueled masterpiece features ten brand-new tracks that will leave even the most hardened death metal fanatic reeling in awe. Brace yourselves for an onslaught of biblical proportions.
Oakland, California-based post-hardcore quartet Ex Everything – formed by current and former members of Kowloon Walled City, Early Graves, Mercy Ties, Blowupnihilist, Less Art, and more – present a video for “Detonation In The Public Sphere”. The song is the second single from the band’s debut album, Slow Change Will Pull Us Apart, which will be released 10th November via Neurot Recordings.
About the video the band says, “We selected ‘Detonation In The Public Sphere’ as our second single off Slow Change Will Pull Us Apart because it’s a fucking banger. Clocking in at ninety-three seconds, the song is a 203bpm sprint from start to finish. The video shoot was a grind for the band (thirty-five full song takes!), but we felt very confident with Bay Area cinematographer Ryan Castaneda behind the camera. With all that great footage, Wendy Leuthold and Andre Sanabria’s edit highlights the band’s explosiveness both live and on the record.
They continue, “’Detonation In The Public Sphere’ is written from the perspective of a person who HAS recognised their place in the machine of capitalist imperialism and the actions needed to change conditions for the better of humanity. We hope this song will move listeners to think about their place in that machine and then hit repeat to play it again.”
The video for ‘Detonation In The Public Sphere’ was directed by Ryan Castaneda with additional filming and DIT by Katie Grubbs, gaffer Tehan Davis, editor/colorist Wendy Leuthold, and editor/producer Andre Sanabria.
After the announcement of their new album ‘Black Mirror’ set for a November 3rd release on Peaceville Records, Mortuary Drape have unveiled the dark and sinister ‘Rattle Breath’.
The video, created by Matthew Vickerstaff pays homage to classic occult imagery seen through a video nasties filter. Musically the song showcases the guitar acrobatics that are a key element to Black Mirror with soaring licks and sweeps that introduce us to the main riff of the song. Flanked with a clanging bass lines as we move throughout the depths of Heavy Metal, the track is the perfect example of what fans will be expecting from the new Mortuary Drape release.
Watch the video here:
Black Mirror is Mortuary Drape’s sixth full-length studio album set for a November 3rd release, and presents a spellbinding, occult-draped journey featuring haunting passages and dark yet melodic vintage metal mastery, bringing to mind acts such as Mercyful Fate with their eerie, classic metal-rooted compositions and atmospherics, expertly crafted and delivered with the band’s own distinguishable injection of wicked intent.
Lyrically the album centers on themes of magical rites, real events and spells that are in a parallel world that bind us to our past lives. We enter into this world of the parallel through the medium of Deja Vu. The phenomenon where images and actions that we seem to have already experienced resurface in our mind. The real mystery is to find out if they really belong to past lives or are, in fact, premonitions of what will happen next…
The album was recorded and mixed and mastered by Federico Pennazzato at TMH Studios in Alessandria, Italy with engineering coming from Pennazzato, DC, and Wildness Perversion and the artwork comes courtesy of Misanthropic Art (www.misanthropic-art.com)
Berlin based CARNAL TOMB detonate the massive title track of their forthcoming new album Embalmed in Decay into the death metal hungry ears on this planet. The third full-length of the German old school death dealers is slated for release on November 3, 2023.
CARNAL TOMB comment: “I wrote the title track of our new album, Embalmed in Decay, shortly after our first album Rotten Remains was released", guitarist and singer Cryptic Tormentor lets on and continues; "It is a classic death metal song in the sense that it was heavily inspired by old bands that we all know and love. The track comes with fast and furious heavy riffing and a catchy melody in the chorus. The lyrics were inspired by the movie Tombs of the Blind Dead, which was also the main influence for the cover artwork. It took us some time to decide which track should become the title of the new album. We finally settled for ‘Embalmed in Decay’ because it features everything that should be in an old school death metal song: It is a straight forward and hard hitting song which to me are the very qualities that the eponymous song of an album should have.”
Glasgow-based duo HANGING FREUD join hands with the Belgian label Spleen+ (division of Alfa Matrix) for the release of Worship, their most personal and emotive full length ever.
On this 7th studio album, Paula Borges and Jonathan Skinner continue refining their unique sound identity that nobody managed so far to narrow down to one specific music style, often evoking influences and elements of post punk, ethereal, synthgaze, cold wave, ambient pop or yet experimental electronica.
With the heartbeat of a drum machine as metronome, Paula’s vocals are dark, haunting, almost glacial, her enunciation is both plaintive and full of echoing fragile grace. While the cinematic music warps them all in a melancholic ethereal cocoon made of mechanical funeral melodies, icy minimal sequences and suffocating synth atmospheres. The overall ambience is dense, lingering, almost claustrophobic, but so poignant and uplifting that it takes you by the throat and touches you at the deepest end of your soul.
The 10 songs featured on this album literally come from a place of contradiction hanging somewhere between courageous vulnerability and fearful resilience, and deal with themes such as collective distress and loss, finding beauty in tragedy or yet questioning about what makes us human in the symbolic contrasts of life and death. It’s no surprise to hear that this “less is more” introspective ode to melancholia was written in particular claustrophobic circumstances during the pandemic lockdown. “Because of what was going on, we were essentially stuck in temporary accommodation in Scotland, away from our studio and forced into a period unexperienced before. The songs that came out therefore come from a different place. Everything was done within a laptop and is proudly 100% digital. It was recorded and mixed while literally sitting on the side of a bed in a mouse infested apartment…” explains Paula Borges.
Strong from their somewhat nomadic past with multicultural backgrounds of coming from Sao Paulo (Brazil) and London (UK), HANGING FREUD sign here a timeless chef d’oeuvre full of beautifully dark simplicity, an emotional body of work that is uncompromising and genre defying at the same time. If you missed HANGING FREUD so far, the moment has come to fall under their freezing spell and addictively hit the play-button again and again.
As a taster of the album, out in December, they’ve unveiled a video for ‘A Hand to Hold the Gun’, which you can see here:
Cirkeln, the black-metal project of the Stockholm-based underground musician known as Våndarr recently unveiled another from track his third album The Primitive Covenant, which is set to be released on November 3rd via True Cult Records.
“Writing this song was probably the most fun I’ve ever had writing for Cirkeln”, says Våndarr. “Usually, the process is quite laborious and takes a long time. There´s rarely a spark of inspiration that then flow naturally into the recording process. But, with the Witch Bell I knew I wanted to take a rawer approach to writing and recording. At that point I knew the mission of the record was to strip away and get down to the basics. I set up the recording as close to a live scenario as I possibly could in my living room-based studio. This meant that the drums were laid down first and then I tracked all the guitars and all the bass in one take for each instrument. There was no editing or refining of the recordings after the fact. There were rarely even second takes. I think this gives the song a sense of unapologetic ugliness and momentum. There was no click track, so the pace of the instruments is entirely dictated by listening to the drums. It’s not the tightest Cirkeln track – but to me it’s the one that sounds the most alive. I also wanted to experiment with incorporating a different vocal technique and style on this album – and the Witch Bell is one of the best examples of this. To me, this is the point where Cirkeln doesn´t allow itself to be confined by one idea of what Black Metal is. There’s more than one shade to darkness.”
On the follow-up to his critically second album A Song To Sorrow, Våndarr is once paying homage to the forefathers of black-metal, yet this time The Primitive Covenant sees the Swedish musician incorporating more elements of old-school thrash-metal, primeval death-metal and even punk.
LASTER celebrate today’s release on Friday, October 13 of the their new album Andermans Mijne with a video clip for the title track. The stunning new full-length from the Dutch avant-garde metal trio is now also streaming in full on all relevant platforms.
Watch the video here:
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LASTER commented on the title track: “With our new single ‘Andermans Mijne’ we seek to reaffirm our love for twists and turns”, drummer Wessel explained on behalf of the trio and went on to state: “The title track sets a densely layered, hypnotic tone for what is to come. Both halves of the song teasingly object against the listener’s expectation. Expressions of cross-cultural lifestyles in late modernity, adultery, playful innuendos, and the self-other relation per se are deemed as central themes of the music’s dissonance, which become laid bare on this track.”
‘Panic’ is the new single from DC goth rockers The Neuro Farm. The song is inspired by a childhood episode of fevered delirium, and it will be featured on their next album planned for 2024.
The Neuro Farm is a darkwave gothic rock band based in Washington DC. Combining vocal harmony with soaring violin melodies, driving rhythm guitar, and ethereal sonic textures, their music has been described as hauntingly beautiful. The Neuro Farm draws on influences such as Joy Division, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sigur Ros, Chelsea Wolfe, Portishead, and Rammstein.
Atmospheric doom-metal collective The Answer Lies In The Black Void featuring members of Thy Catafalque and Celestial Season have just revealed a music video for a new song titled ‘Virgin Fire’, which is taken from the band’s forthcoming second album Thou Shalt, scheduled for release next week, October 13th via Burning World Records.
The band comments: “’The Virgin Fire’ was created using the GEN-2 AI software, modelling the dream-like surreal and occult images that visualise The Answer Lies In The Black Void’s universe. Our second album Thou Shalt is inspired by the concept of Carl Jung’s shadow and ‘Virgin Fire’ deals with the concept of the dream state according to these works of Jung : “The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul”.
Watch the video here:
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The Answer Lies In The Black Void is a collaboration between Martina Horváth from avant-garde metal project Thy Catafalque and Jason Köhnen from Celestial Season, The Lovecraft Sextet, Bong-Ra, ex-The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, the duo also work together in the transcendental music project Mansur that releases on Denovali Records. Horváth and Köhnen joined forces through their passion for all things doom, presenting their personal take on the genre with all its beautiful darkness and from all possible angles. Bringing their own mix of atmospheric laden avant-doom.
After their immensely well received debut album ‘Forlorn’, The Answer Lies In The Black Void now returns with their second album titled ‘Thou Shalt’. Inspired by Carl Jung’s ‘shadow work’ this new album is scheduled for release on October 13th via Burning World Records and will followed by the bands first ever live performances with a full line-up in a small tour throughout The Netherlands and Germany. The Answer Lies In The Black Void will be performing live as a 5 piece, with Botond Fogl (guitar), Attila Kovacs (guitar) and Mark Potkovacz (drums) being part of the full line-up. Confirmed dates are below:
22 October – A38 Hajó, Budapest. HU [Album try-out show] 23 October – Klub Močvara, Zagreb. HR [Album try-out show] 03 November – Simplon, Groningen. NL 04 November – De Helling, Utrecht. NL 05 November – Dutch Doom Days, Baroeg, Rotterdam. NL 18 November – Hammer of Doom Festival, Posthalle, Würzbürg. DE
Revelling in a blend of atmospheric textures & powerful sludge riffs… After venturing through the vast scope of heavy music and experimenting with their sound, Gozer’s vision was realised with the album An Endless Static released in 2022.
Receiving praise from the likes of Metal Hammer, Metal Injection, Invisible Oranges and more for the album’s dense sonic power, song structures and emotive depth.
GOZER are now set to release their continuation in the EP ‘THE PATH ALWAYS LEADS TO THE END’ building off the themes of mental health found throughout their first release this EP’s subject puts more focus on passing on and with it the unknown of what comes next.
"A Lot of us have our own notion of what comes after we pass, some people find comfort in the belief of some form of afterlife beyond what we could ever experience in this mortal coil, others may simply believe we return to the earth and the cycle of life continues. I’m still undecided about what happens once we breathe our last breath but I know that creating something with people means a great deal as all we truly leave once we are gone, are the people in our lives with who we shared our passions, successes, losses, joy and sadness but above all else our love.” – GOZER
The Path Always Leads To The End will be released on the 3rd of November. Recorded & mixed by Tj Fairfax and mastered by Magnus Lindberg.
‘Celestial River’ is the first single to be shared from the EP with the band adding,
"’Celestial River’ was one of the first tracks we wrote after finishing our album An Endless Static. Originally it was going to be instrumental, but Kez came with these great lyrics that summed up how life pushes you forward. There’s always obsticals but if there’s a way to embrace them we can hopefully be happier when we look back on our journey”.
