From the cold depths of Norway, Uaar emerge with their punishing debut full-length: Galger og brann (“Gallows and Fire”), a brutal, blackened slab of d-beat hardcore that pulls no punches.
Written and produced by Jon Schaug Carlsen and the band, the album is set to be released on October 17th via Fysisk Format, on vinyl and digital formats.
The band has dropped the new video for the track ‘Galgeås.
Fans of Tragedy, Skitsystem, From Ashes Rise, and Sibiir will find themselves right at home in the storm: crushing riffs, pulverizing d-beats, and an atmosphere so suffocatingly dark it feels like the world collapsing in real time. This is the soundtrack to disorder, decay, and the slow grind toward oblivion.
Three years after releasing their 2022 debut Infinite Death, an album that earned them a Spellemann nomination (Norway’s answer to the Grammys), Norwegian crossover outfit Cult Member are back from the frozen north with another hard-hitting ear-bleeder titled GORE.
A tongue-in-cheek strike at social unrest, draped in blood-soaked ’80s slasher imagery, GORE rips forward with the fastest, sharpest riffs in thrash, powered by the relentless fury of a true hardcore D-beat backbone.
Recorded by Ruben Willem, GORE is set for release on September 19 via Loyal Blood Records, and it’s blistering slab of thrash/hardcore sure to ignite fans of Cro-Mags, Power Trip, Slayer, and D.R.I.
‘Skull Smasher Psychic’ is the first single. Hear it here:
As far as I can recall, I first encountered the word ‘bruxism’ in the early 90s, through the back-print of my Therapy? ‘Teethgrinder’ T-shirt. I fucking loved Therapy?, and the shirt was one of my favourites. I regret selling it, but I needed to eat, and a stretched and faded T-shirt that would pay for a whole week’s worth of groceries was an obvious choice for bunging on eBay.
I’ve since come to realise that I, myself, am prone to extreme jaw clenching during times of anxiety, and while listening to particularly intense music. Which brings us to the eponymous debut by Bruxist. As the pitch outlines, ‘Rooted in crust punk fury and d-beat momentum, Bruxist crashes through the gates with chainsaw Stockholm-style death metal, grimy rock’n’roll swagger, and even shards of frostbitten black metal. It’s a high-speed collision of sound: filthy, feral, and dangerously alive.’
And it is. The album offer seven relentless, pummelling tracks, half of which are under – or only just over – three minutes in duration. ‘Inversion’ doesn’t so much launch the album as kick down and throw in a massive stash of Molotov cocktails before starting a riot as the building burns. It’s frenzied and filthy, the guitars are a murky blur, the drumming is frenetic and the vocals a gargling raw.
‘Six Feet Headfirst’ staggers and swaggers, brawling, snarling and rabid, before ‘Black Sheep Discipline’ slams in at a hundred and fifty miles an hour.
The album is relentless in its pace and brutality. There’s a moment in the closer, ‘Divide and Conquer’, where it breaks down to just the bass for a few bars. It’s the grungiest, gnarliest noise imaginable. Then everything piles back in and nothing short of absolute devastation ensues in that final minute.
Bruxist is done in around twenty-three minutes – and in that time the band delivers something that’s almost unspeakably savage. It’s a proper, full-throttle, furious jaw-clencher, that’s for sure.
Further In Evil is the debut full length from one-woman metal band, Marthe, which is due via Southern Lord on October 20th. An atmospheric and aggressive blend of punk, Further In Evil is a shift in gears from her musical background in the anarcho-punk scene and inspired by riot grrrl, crust and d-beat. The lyrics are full of rage and the music is full of strength; it has the power of Bathory and the sadness of Tiamat, tinged with the stench of Amebix.
Marthe is, at heart, a solo bedroom project— born out of introversion and a desire to explore new horizons and landscapes alone. “Around 2012, I started feeling the need to express myself in a heavier and more atmospheric way,” explains Marzia, the woman behind the Marthe project. “I coincidentally started hiking more and more… getting closer to lonely soundscapes: my life, feelings and moods started being more introspective and introverted.” She continues, “Marthe suddenly became my comfort zone, my therapy, my shadow of loneliness, my book of truths, my mirror, my alter ego. Locking the door and disappearing in darkness recording music alone became something so powerful… I probably never really met myself before that.”
Further In Evil was composed and demoed over the course of a year during drives or hikes and, fatefully, the first look at the album – its title track – showcases the grandeur of Marthe’s surroundings. Self-filmed and edited between Italy and Iceland, the "Further In Evil" video boasts the beauty of nature contrasted by Marthe’s devastating sounds.
Southern Lord have today unveiled a video for the snarling blackened title track, and it’s a monster. Watch it here:
Another release it’s taken me four months to review, and for no reason than that I’ve been utterly swamped and a little disorganised, both in terms of my time management and my thoughts. Such is the life of an unpaid music reviewer who stumbles in from working the day-job to be greeted by around twenty emails each evening and a bundle of CDs on the doormat, all demanding attention.
Somewhat ironically, this latest offering from Italian band Humus, purveyors of nasty metal noise, is one of the shortest releases – including singles – I’ve had come my way all year, with the running time for these four tracks totalling barely a fraction over five minutes.
We’re in authentically brutal, crusty, grindy d-beat metal territory here. The guitars a dirty, murky, churning mess, the drums a frenzied thousand-mile-an-hour tempest. The bass is all but lost in the frenetic, furious low-fi treble fest, while the vocals are all about that snarling, strangulated, torn-throat demonic rage, the sound of one of Satan’s minions gargling nitric acid while dancing over hot coals en route to a purgatorial abyss.
It’s dark, the sound of burning rage, a blurring welter of relentless noise. Keeping the songs savagely short and the production mercilessly raw, it’s everything you would want from a band who trade in thrashcore crustpunk.
Southern Lord continue to excavate the underground for the gnarliest, angriest, most brutal, most frenetic metal with this, the latest album from Bay Area, CA hardcore act Lies. The CD version of Plague is bulked out by their debut release, the EP Abuse. So we’re being treated to 15 tracks in all, but given that the longest of those fifteen tracks, ‘Class War’ is a mere minute and fifty-three seconds in duration, it still amounts to a mere twenty minutes and four seconds of music. Yes, it would probably fit on a 7”, and most other bands’ EPs are longer.
But this is all about keeping it focused, keeping it tight. The short tracks condense everything into fireballs of explosive intensity. There’s no room for gratuitous solos, muso meanderings or even time to breathe. This is claustrophobically taut and relentlessly violent. That isn’t to say there’s a lack of detail or nuance: behind the blur of noise there are some brilliant guitar lines and a good variety of sounds on top of the thousand-mile-an-hour rhythm section.
Given the impenetrability of the lyrics, it’s not easy to determine their exact political leanings through song titles like ‘White Light’, ‘Paranoia’, ‘All Hail’ and ‘Human Nature’, but they’ve played a benefit gig in support of the Homeless Youth Alliance and it seems reasonable to assume their white-hot rage is directed at the system, and the injustices it propagates. They’re the good guys – they just sound nasty. Very nasty indeed.
For the uninitiated, 偏執症者 translates as ‘Paranoid’. But despite the logographic characters, 偏執症者 are, in fact, Swedish, although their brand of full-on, fiery, D-beat hardcore punk is heavily influenced by Japanese noise. Satyagraha, first released in 2015, is their first full-length album. Full-length is relative and contextual, of course: with ten tracks and a combined running time of under twenty-eight minutes, it’s shorter than the majority of individual tracks on the latest Swans album. Of course, this squally, thrashy mess of noise exists in an entirely different realm from the new Swans album, and in many ways stands at the very opposite end of the spectrum of antagonistic noise.
The impact of the album relies on its frenetic, breakneck speed, and its relentlessness. Satyagraha does not offer texture or range: it’s an all-out assault, and the album’s primary objective is to slam everything home at full tilt, optimal speed and maximum volume. It’s no bad thing, and it certainly works for them. It’s an album that begins as it continues, with the blistering wall of noise that is ‘Kaihou’. The guitar sound is so mangled, distorted, metalicised and trebled up to the max that it sounds more like power electronics than anything from the rock side of the musical spectrum. It’s an obscene, brutal assault, relentless, remorseless, unforgiving.
The vocals on ‘Bouryoku’ are hollering, screaming, blind with rage, are spewed forth into an infinite cavern of reverb, while the guitars fire so hot they could strip paint. From amidst the squalling bluster of noise, a guitar solo emerges. The shrieking feedback and dense mass of treble on ‘Shisuru Sekai, Iki Jigoku is the sound of a new kind of punishment, before the thunderous drums and bass – for the first time apparent on the album – ratchet up to demolition to the power of ten on ‘Shihaisya’. This is one to play loud.
The final track – by far the album’s longest – sounds like an entirely different band and entirely different album, the soft, analogue instrumental belonging to another world. And yet it works and curiously, it fits, revealing a very different facet of the band, and one which is not unpleasant: quite the opposite, in fact, and it serves to soothe the senses in the wake of the punishment inflicted by the nine preceding tracks. As if the brute force of those tracks weren’t already enough to separate 偏執症者 from their peers, then this truly clinches it, concluding a devastating album in intriguing style.
It’s one hell of an album, and one absolutely hellish album. Visceral and intense, even by D-beat standards, Satyagraha qualifies as an essential work.
Aural Aggravation 