Posts Tagged ‘Doom’

Watch: ‘Only Frozen Reality’ by Dark Komet

Posted: 1 May 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Helsinki’s death/doom/industrial metal unit DARK KOMET is proud to announce that their new EP Ghost Of Silver Light has been released today, May 1st.

The second single from the release, “Only Frozen Reality,” is launched alongside the EP with a music video, which you can watch here:

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The EP draws its themes from cosmic nihilism: time, meaninglessness, and life as a phenomenon without purpose on a universal scale. Ghost Of Silver Light builds a cold and alienating soundscape where crushing riffs and industrial beats merge into a hypnotic whole. DARK KOMET offers no comfort – only a glimpse into a reality where meaning is an illusion and existence itself is a contradiction.

It’s dark and as heavy as hell, and quite the hybrid, with snarling vocals and grinding bass cutting through a maelstrom of noise and swirling electronica. Get your lugs  round it here.

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Dark Komet

Codex Serafini / Amon Acid / Sunbreather – Santiago’s Bar, Leeds, 26th April 2026

Posted: 27 April 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Situated in a retail arcade in Leeds city centre, Santiago’s is a hip but alternative bar (in that it’s £6+ a pint of keg, and they play Nirvana and have band posters on the walls – although they also include rather less obvious bands like OFF! and Cerebral Ballzy) downstairs, and somewhat contrastingly, a poky dive with a capacity of maybe 80, accessed via a rickety staircase and with a stage that’s barely six inches high, upstairs. Said upstairs room affords an unusual view of the streets outside through a large arched window which occupies the entire wall beside the stage. Seeing people and traffic moving around on the street below while the bands perform seems a strange juxtaposition, and with the limited lighting inside the venue, the interior starts unusually bright and grows progressively darker as the night progresses.

Sunbreather’s name may suggest something a bit hippyish, and in some respects, it’s not unrepresentative. They play doom heavily influenced by what in the 70s was heavy metal: that is to say, big Sabbath- style riffs. They play them with a certain swing, too, which is refreshing, and it’s nicely done. They close their four-song set with a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’, stripped back and heavy. The coda is played with the classic bassline at half-pace, with all the weight, and the wild guitar solo replaced by thunderous chords until the very end. It’s an inspired interpretation that works well, and isn’t out of place with the rest of the set.

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Sunbreather

Amon Acid are all about the flares and hair and lace and shades, and if the name sounds like something of a giveaway, then you’d be close enough: their thing is epic stoner doom with the deep infusion of psychedelia. The vocals are low in the mix, bathed in galactic-scale reverb and delay for good measure. The two guitars melt into one another, and while they may not be masters of innovation, they clearly know what they’re doing – and thankfully, the sound engineer has a handle on it, too. Winding up with a mammoth space rock groove, which skims out for an eternity, brings the set to a searing finale. And the longer they play, the hotter it gets. By the end of their set, we’ve all liquefied, and I find myself deliberating whether I need another £6.70 pint of am ok with the prospect of dehydrating.

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Amon Acid

While I’m deliberating, they put the fans on around the room. Meanwhile, some pissed-up cokehead cunt in an orange t-shirt who seemingly thinks he’s at a rave is going off his nut and trying to get onstage while Codex Serafini are setting up, and five minutes before they’re due on I get a sinking feeling and am hoping he’ll be leaving very soon. Mercifully, I realise around a third of the way through the set that he’d fucked off, hopefully his exuberance overtaken by a melted brain.

Codex Serafini are indeed brain-melting, after all. They’re a band I’ve been waiting to see for some time, and given the enormity of their music, the intimate nature of the venue is something of a surprise on some respects. But jazz-infused doom with a punk edge is pretty niche, and an act with albums released on Riot Season are never going to be playing anywhere huge. But this is precisely why we need small venues, and labels like Riot Season. And for all that, they definitely deserve a wider audience: when novelty acts like Angine de Poitrine are racking up millions of views, it’s apparent that the public aren’t averse to stuff that’s different or weird – in fact, they’re drawn to it. Especially when there are outfits and masks involved, as the popularity of Slipknot, Ghost, and Sleep Token (who aren’t nearly as weird as their presentation would suggest) – which means that it mostly comes down to PR. The fact of the matter is that ‘viral’ is almost never ‘organic’. And so here we have Codex Serafini, in red robes and tasselled face-masks, wrapped in Saturnian lore, merging metal, jazz, and post-punk, and this is what the music world needs right now, if only people would realise.

The first half of their ten-song set consists of material from their most recent album, Mother, Give Your Children Sanity, released last November. ‘Cause and Effect’ is an early standout for its deft, vaguely disco-hued drumming and almost funk-tinged groove. Matt McCartney’s bass doubles as rhythm guitar, the incidental melodies and atmosphere brought by the sax. And all the while, the percussion is cataclysmic and the vocals nothing short of other-worldly.

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Codex Serafini

‘Cronus’, ‘Janus’, and ‘Fountains of Enceladus’ are performed back-to-back in the sequence they appeared on Serpents of Enceladus, and Landing as the penultimate song of the set, ‘I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust’ is the sole representation of previous album The Imprecation Of Anima (2023).

At around fifty minutes in duration, their set is intense and sonically immense, filling the space with cathedrals of sound. It’s the last night of the tour in support of Mother, Give Your Children Sanity, and the Leeds reception sees it end on a high. And on a personal level, they were more than worth the wait. Would see again. Many times.

Picking / Gnarled Fingers – Picking / Gnarled Fingers

Posted: 25 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 27th March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

This one’s been out for a bit, but was too good to let go without comment. Some will likely thank me for this: others may be less grateful as they sit, hands over their ears, wondering why they should ever pay heed to a word I write. It’s niche and it’s noisy – as the notes which accompany the release on Bandcamp make clear from the outset:

Gnarled Fingers and Picking are two artists drawn together by a shared love of bleak, crushing, low-end oblivion.

Picking is a new raw doom / noise / drone project from Charlie Butler inspired by lifelong incessant excessive picking of nails.

Gnarled Fingers is an experimental, ambient drone project, relentless wall of fuzz and atmosphere, no escape, created after growing up in Somerset Levels with stories of witchcraft and pagan superstition.

The Picking track, ‘Toenail’ sits in the droney doom bracket dominated by Sunn O))), but there’s something magnificently lo-fi about this, which adds a layer of filthy muck and treble distortion that conveys a performance which is of a volume just beyond the capacity of the equipment used to record it. It’s fourteen minutes of raw, howling guitar noise, and because of the way in which they seem to be struggling to contain the feedback while ploughing relentlessly at a loose semblance of a riff, the result is something along the lines of Earth 2 crossed with Metal Machine Music. ‘Uncompromising’ is a word that music journalists and bands alike chuck about, but this is the absolute epitome – although something about this recording is possessed of a primitivism that suggests they don’t know how to do it any other way. Is it uncompromising if that’s the case? Feel free to make that question a topic for debate next time you’re down the pub with your coolly opinionated music-loving mates, but whatever side of the fence you find yourself on, Picking make a gnarly noise, and if your toenails ever bear visual comparison to this, I would strongly recommend consulting a podiatrist, and sooner rather than later, before your entire foot rots off the end of your leg.

Gnarled Fingers showcase a more polished form and a sound which sits closer to the Sunn O))) template of ribcage-rattling density, whereby a chord struck every twenty seconds conjures an atomic detonation that hangs heavy in the air. Downtuned and distorted to the max, their track ‘Echoes from Futures Past’ is a wall of crushing devastation. Sixteen and a half minutes of guitar noise so weighty it feels like how one might imagine being trapped under rubble after a nuclear bomb. Feedback scrapes so abrasively that it strips the skin, and all the while you’re slowly suffocating. It’s brutal.

While some split releases benefit from contrast, this is one where similarity is strength. This type of music is most effective when subjected to prolonged periods of exposure, ideally at high, even extreme volume. The desired effect is complete immersion, to reach the point where your body feels detached, as if its floating. This is some heavy-duty drone shit, and it sure hits the spot.

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Froglord / Space Pistol / Troll Mother – The Fulford Arms, York, 21st April 2026

Posted: 22 April 2026 in Live, Reviews
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Christopher Nosnibor

Suspicious Liquid had originally been down to open this evening’s dark proceedings, but they’ve been replaced by Troll Mother. While not getting to see Suspicious Liquid again is disappointing, southern power sludge duo Troll Mother are everything their name suggests… or are they? They’re more Mötörhead than Melvins, with a hardcore punk edge in places. They also boast an absolutely fucking MASSIVE drum kit, meaning that when the drummer takes on vocal duties – something they share – it’s not always immediately obvious because he’s largely obscured by a huge bank of toms and a swathe of cymbals. They make a cracking racket, too, with next to no pauses for the full duration of their half-hour set.

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Troll Mother

Space Pistol bring the riffs, and they do evoke Melvins, as well as Faith No More, and Hawk Eyes, among others. The three are decked out in matching orange boiler suits and the bassist, who has a board with about 36 pedals plays with his face. He also leaps and bounds – and yes, positively cavorts – about the stage with a flamboyance that’s uncommon to a bad that are this big on hefty riffs. There are false endings galore, and at one point they lock statue-like positions and maintain silence for maybe a good twenty seconds, during which time you could hear a pin drop. They absolutely love this, to the extent that it seems that this moment is a career high point for them. Since they’ve come all the way from Milton Keynes for this, we’re pleased that York is a memorable show for them, and I’m pretty sure they’d be welcome back up here any time.

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Space Pistol

Froglord, meanwhile, are making a return visit after just eleven months. The concept is pretty ludicrous, the stage show even more so: a stoner / doom band all about amphibians, kitted out in masks and arranging their sets as some form of swamp-centric ritual. The fact that they’ve eked this out across six albums now is nothing short of remarkable. But the fact that every show is an event, shaped by that sense of occasion and ritual is part of the appeal – that and the fact the performances are entertaining and they really know how to riff.

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Froglord

But there is a certain serious element to the band (not that heavyweight sludgy riffs in themselves aren’t serious), in that they’re genuinely eco-conscious, and their frog fixation isn’t all just japes, with 100% of the proceeds from digital sales of their new album, Lower & Slower Vol 1, released in March, are being donated to the Waterfowl & Wetland Trust (WWT) – the wetland charity, as well as 50% of all physical media and merch profits. Or, as they put it, ‘At it’s [sic] core, Froglord have always been an environmentally [sic]-driven band. Through their fundraising and tale of an amphibious deity, reeking vengenace [sic] on humanity for the environmental destruction they caused.’ Personally, I like them even more for this. Once could reasonably argue that just a handful of the world’s billionaires could eradicate poverty and save the planet and not even notice a reduction in lifestyle and that Froglord’s sales aren’t even a drop in a puddle in comparison, but that’s not the point: the point is that these guys actually care, and are using their platform for good.

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Froglord

They also put on a great show. It’s no huge development on the last time around: their website positions it as follows: ‘Returning with brand new masks, costumes, and a 6th studio album, Froglord deliver another massive offering of amphibious swamp doom. Recorded live in the studio in a single take, Lower & Slower briefly pauses the band’s concept storytelling of the Tale of The Froglord saga, instead revisiting six previously released tracks from across their discography’. And the fact is, it works: tonight’s performance feels very much like a consolidation, and they seem particularly focused, the set’s structure absolutely honed to perfection in every way. They drop a powerful cover of ‘Iron Man’ early in the second half of the set, and in many ways, this speaks for itself. The bassist plays wearing a frog glove puppet for a while, and after the ritual circulating of the giant rubber toad later in the set, said toad is then used to bash bass strings before eventually tucked in the crook of an elbow in a more friendly fashion for a time.

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Froglord

Admirably, they never break character for a moment: this is outstanding theatre. It’s also outstanding, riff-driven fun. All hail the Froglord!

Zero Swann – Ones Who Love

Posted: 12 April 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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8th April 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Six months on from Benefactor, and Washington D.C. improvisational psychedelic outfit Zero Swann are back again with Ones Who Love. This marks quite a step up in output following a two-year gap after 2023’s Amon Zonaris.

Once again, it’s a set built around theatrical, gothic vocals, drones and cacophonous percussion, feedback, and more drones, all wrapped in layer upon layer upon layer upon layer of reverb.

On first hearing the album’s first song, ‘Chrisom’, I had to hit the pause button a few times to check there wasn’t some other music playing on one of my open browsers. There wasn’t. One might reasonably draw parallels to Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, which to my ear (an ear which has been exposed to one hell of a lot of strange experimental shit) sounds like people playing different tunes in different rooms of the house, with the doors all open while you’re standing in the hallway. But the experience is truly more akin to MySpace circa 2007, when every post and profile would be playing music and you’d spend an age trying to figure what you needed to mute while slowly going mad. The drums don’t seem to be in time with themselves, let alone the abstract instrumentation, and the vocals float around in that sea of reverb as if in another dimension entirely. It’s not only disorientating, but quite quease-inducing.

This is – as anyone familiar with Zero Swann will know – the template for the album. The hectic, multi-layered percussion on ‘White Lips’ splashes around in a swirl of treble, reverb, and phase or flange, while amidst a stuttering bass throb and chaotic mess of noise. This is lo-fi to the max: black metal production values applied to Batcave-era goth with a heavily experimental edge.

It’s all going on with ‘Shrine Slavery’: drum ‘n’ bass beats put through the mangle and a thousand effects are paired with haunting, howling layers of shoegaze guitars, while Jeremy Moore comes on like Michael Gira in his messianic mode circa Children of God, calling the end of days while all burns around him. The title track is a towering, hypnotic monster of sound on sound, and it feels huge, not to mention apocalyptic and terrifying.

The derangement continues on the murky ‘Pig Scalder’ with echo-soaked guitars to the fore – the quintessential US ‘death rock’ sound (something that very much separates the UK and US interpretation of ‘goth’) – but with swirling chaos behind it all. With so much going on, and in all directions all at once, it’s virtually impossible to concentrate on or otherwise pick out the lyrical content, and while this may be detrimental in some respects, the fact of the matter is that this is Zero Swann’s sound – messy, multiplicitous, discontiguous. And it’s best approached by simply letting it all happen, immersing oneself in the mayhem. It’s impossible to pick apart the separate elements – and equally impossible to piece them together.

‘Tidal Skull’ again brings a dingy, doomy, gloomy gothy morass which is hard to penetrate and even harder to decipher and unravel, and ‘Storage Organ’ is a riot of sludgy, sepulchral darkness. Ones Who Love is hard going. And I actually dig it – but it’s one seriously challenging listening experience. The last song, ‘What You Never Wanted’ lurches and lumbers its way through five and a half minutes of sludge that stands practically waist-deep, and you slosh and crawl and trudge your way to the end. There are no short cuts, no easy routes, no alternative directions.

Whichever way you look at it, there’s no other act around which sounds like Zero Swann. On Ones Who Love, Moore goes deep and goes dark. Spectral structures emerge from thick fogs of noise and reverb, very like ruins looming through gloom. Gloom and ruins essentially summarise what Ones Who Love gives us. As was the case with its predecessor, Ones Who Love is not an easy or accessible album – to the extent that it often feels like a test, a challenge: enjoyment and appreciation are not the same thing.

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Teleost – Teleost

Posted: 25 March 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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22nd March 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

After an eon evolving their sound with comparatively little to show in terms of releases, Teleost have really picked up the pace of late: Three Originals was released in January 2025, followed by ATAVISM in December of last year, and here we are barely three months on faced with a new eponymous EP. Clearly, they concentrate their mental energy into the music rather than the naming of their EPs – and rightly so. The title is inconsequential: the music is what this is all about. moreover, what this, and what Teleost are all about, is exploring those dark tones and the ways in which frequencies resonate against one another, particularly at volume.

Live shows – particularly of late – have more than attested to the necessity for volume for Teleost, in the same was as is true for Earth, and Sunn O))). The simple fact is that some sounds, some frequencies, some resonant interplays, simply cannot occur at low volumes. Anyone who suggests that these bands – and Swans and A Place to Bury Strangers, among others – exploit volume gratuitously simply doesn’t understand the way in which vibrations change things. Teleost, however, very much do. And with their ultra-slow doom-drone, this is a band who really go into microcosmic detail when it comes to tonal shifts and reverberations within their great wall of sound.

This – their second EP, and sixth release in all – features three tracks. And once again, epic is the word. The four-and-three-quarter-minute sludgefest that is ‘Palanquin’ feels like a brief bridging piece between the megalithic ten-minute ‘Navigator’ and the eight-minute ‘Standing Stone’. And holy shit, is this heavy.

With Telost, the guitar has always been heavy, thick, grinding, the sound more akin to two guitars – or more – grinding out a speaker-shredding tsunami. But this… this takes it up several notches. It’s not just the guitar sound itself, of course: the production achieves the rare feat of capturing not just the rib-rattling, lung-shredding sound of a duo that take Melvins’ reattenuation of Black Sabbath to a skull-crushing level of pain.

With Teleost, there’s a clear sense of structure, of linear progression, too. ‘Navigator’ starts out gently, a textured hum, a buzzing drone, clean strings strummed but resonating. Low tom beats enter the mix and the build is slow, deliberate. Leo Hancil’s vocals reverberate – detached, a pagan-like incantation low in the mix. The suspense builds. Dissonance chimes, but still we traverse through deep fog and mud-thick tracks. And then at five minutes, it hits. And it hits so hard but so sweetly. The impact is immense. THAT is a riff, and how to land it. It completely knocks the air from your lungs, then proceeds to tear your limbs off, one by one, while shredding your skin with blunt but brutal claws.

How two people can create this organ-bustingly megalithic noise is unfathomable. But they do, time and again, growing ever more immense with each show, and with each recording. Yes, I say it every time, but every time, it’s true: Teleost have transcended to another echelon with this release: denser, heavier, louder, more punishing – and at the same time more immersive and transportative.

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Licorice Chamber – Remnants

Posted: 24 February 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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24th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It may only be February, but 2026 is looking like the year of the long-threatened goth renaissance. It’s been bubbling for a while, with first-wave bands like Red Lorry Yellow Lorry releasing new material for the first time in decades late last year, as well as second wave names such as Corpus Delicti making strong comebacks. And what’s noticeable is that their audiences don’t consist entirely of old bastards who’ve been adherents of the scene since the 80s: on recent ventures to see Corpus Delicti and Skeletal Family – whose current singer, it has to be said, is considerably younger than the rest of the band – I’ve witnessed first-hand a substantial proportion of the audience represented by under thirties, even under twenty-fives and teens – and they’re getting into the dressing up, the hair and makeup, too. Why? A vaguely educated guess based on observation and an A-Level in Sociology taken just over thirty years ago suggests that there are a number of factors involved here: what goes around comes around – this always happens – with an element of kids raiding their parents’ music collections or otherwise becoming nostalgic for the music they heard growing up (thanks to my parents, I have records by Barbara Dixon and Phil Collins, although I drew the trauma line at Steeleye Span and The Bee Gees) – and also the times in which we live. Depression, oppression… post-punk and the substrain that would become goth emerged from pretty bleak times – and we once again find ourselves in bleak times, bleaker, if anything. We no longer live under the shadow of the bomb as we did during the Cold War. Instead, we live in a world at war, a world where AI is taking over in a way that resembles the maddest sci-for dystopia, and where the prospects of work and home ownership for those finishing school and college are nothing short of abysmal.

It’s not all gloom and doom, though, because… no, wait. It is, but Licorice Chamber are coming through on the emerging wave of bleak bands to provide a fitting soundrack to existential mopery.

Licorice Chamber perhaps isn’t the greatest band name ever, but it’s in keeping with the latest influx of goth and goth-adjacent acts like Just Mustard (and also reminds me of Fudge Tunnel), and since band names are inherently stupid by nature if you pause and reflect on it in any depth – dissect any band name and conclude that it’s not at least vaguely stupid, is my challenge – it’s fair to let it ride. After all, it’s the music that matters.

On Remnants, Licorice Chamber serve up three brooding slices of classic contemporary goth which are thematically linked under the banner of the EP’s title, as they explain: “The EP title Remnants suggests aftermath, what survives destruction. Rather than romanticizing despair, the songs feel like they’re exploring what’s left when illusions fall away.”

‘Feign’, the first of these three cuts, is magnificently understated, a mid-tempo song that’s as much about the space between the sound of the instruments as the instruments themselves, and while there’s a heap of reverb around everything, something in the production calls to mind the quiet flatness of The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds. But the backed-off drums and fractal guitars serve to place Layla Reyna’s powerful, emotive vocals to the fore.

Heavy by name and heavy by nature, the second song packs a far greater density, a cinematic rock workout, which builds to a climactic finale and finds Layla floating majestic through a sonic maelstrom.

The final cut, ‘Never the Same’, is the longest of the three, and is a slow-burner rendered more kinetic by some busy drumming moments, and with its picked guitar and dark atmospherics, it finds Licorice Chamber inching into the kind of territory occupied by doom / goth acts like Cold in Berlin and Cwfen – and that’s not simply a case of lumping heavy bands with female vocalists into a bracket together: there’s positive commonality here.

Remnants is dark, but bold, and in its own way, uplifting.

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Listen: ‘Butch’s Guns’ by sunn O)))

Posted: 19 February 2026 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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SUNN O))) share the new track ‘Butch’s Guns,’ another standout from the band’s forthcoming eponymous album. The new song is available today on all streaming services.

Also today, SUNN O))) is announcing new summer headlining shows in the EU and UK beginning Tuesday, June 23rd in Zurich, CH at Rote Fabrik and currently running through Monday, July 6th + Tuesday, July 7th in Berlin, DE for a two-night stand at Silent Green Betonhalle. The tour will include stops in Belgium (Antwerp), the Netherlands (Amsterdam), Germany (Köln), and the UK (Bristol, Brighton, Liverpool, Leeds, Birmingham, and London). Additional live dates to be announced soon.

Tickets for the majority of these June and July shows go on sale Friday, February 20th at 10 am CET. Please find a current list of dates below.

SUNN O))) recently added shows to the band’s upcoming 2026 North American headline tour in support of the album. The tour will now include stops in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, Denver, Boise, Seattle, and Portland (OR). Tickets for the North American shows below are on sale now.

North America, March/April 2026

Mon. Mar. 30 – San Francisco, CA – Regency Ballroom
Tue. Mar. 31 – Los Angeles, CA – The United Theater on Broadway 
Wed. Apr. 01 – Phoenix, AZ – The Van Buren
Fri. Apr. 03 – Dallas, TX – Trees Lounge
Sat. Apr. 04 – Austin, TX – Emo’s
Sun. Apr. 05 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall
Mon. Apr. 06 -  New Orleans, LA – Civic Theatre
Tue. Apr. 07  – Atlanta, GA – The Goat Farm
Thu. Apr. 09 -  Columbus, OH – The Bluestone
Fri. Apr. 10 – Washington, DC – The Lincoln Theatre
Sat.  Apr. 11 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer
Sun. Apr. 12 – New York, NY – The Town Hall
Mon. Apr. 13 – Montreal, QC – Le National
Tue. Apr. 14 – Toronto, ON – 131 McCormack
Thu. Apr. 16 – Chicago, IL – Salt Shed
Sat. Apr. 18 -  Iowa City, IA – Englert Theatre
Sun. Apr. 19 – Omaha, NE – The Waiting Room
Mon. Apr. 20 – Denver, CO – Ogden Theatre
Wed. Apr. 22 – Boise, ID – Shrine Social Club
Fri. Apr. 24 – Seattle, WA – Showbox (So Do)
Sat. Apr. 25 – Portland, OR – Roseland

UK/EU, June/July 2026 – Just Announced

Tue. Jun. 23 – Zurich, CH – Rote Fabrik
Wed. Jun. 24 – Antwerp, BE – Trix
Thu. Jun. 25 – Amsterdam, NL – Paradiso
Fri. Jun. 26 – Koln, DE – Essigfabrik 
Sun. Jun. 28 – Bristol, UK – Prospect Building 
Mon. Jun.  29 – Brighton, UK – Corn Exchange 
Tue. Jun. 30 – Liverpool, UK – The Dome
Wed. Jul. 01 – Leeds, UK -  Project House
Thu. Jul. 02 – Birmingham, UK – 02 Institute
Fri. Jul. 03 – London, UK – Troxy
Mon. Jul. 06 – Berlin, DE – Silent Green Betonhalle
Tue. Jul. 07 – Berlin, DE – Silent Green Betonhalle

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Photo credit: Charles Peterson

Slaughterday – Dread Emperor

Posted: 15 January 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Testimony Records – 13th February 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

When I first started Aural Aggravation – kinda by stealth, with no fanfare – back in October 2015, with a review of Philip Jecks’ Cardinal, it was with a view to using the platform to break away from more conventional and comparatively short-form reviews to indulge in more personal, reflective, essay-type analysis. But with a bursting inbox and a desire to provide coverage to as many acts as possible, sometimes it’s not always appropriate to spend hours and column inches pondering the context and the content through a framework that sits between reception theory and gonzo journalism. More to the point, there simply aren’t enough hours.

Slaughterday is an old-school death metal duo, and Dread Emperor is their sixth album. They promise ‘crushing doom-ridden ultra-heavy parts to calculated outbreaks of utter brutality,’ and cite as lyrical inspirations ‘H. P. Lovecraft and other masters of horror’. They go on to add, ‘while sinister things crawl and creep through the duo’s timeless brutality, they have always portrayed them with a sinister flair of their own. These days, the band has repurposed those monstrous creatures as metaphorical ciphers for relevant contemporary topics’.

Titles such as ‘Rapture of Rot’, ‘Necrocide’, ‘Obliteration Crusade’ and ‘Astral Carnage’ speak for themselves, and the ‘crushing’ ‘doomy’ aspects they focus on in their pitch are very much to the fore: ‘Enthroned’ lifts the curtain with some slow, heavyweight riffery, and paves the way for the rabid attack of ‘Obliteration Crusade’.

That bands which blast out frenetic guitar mayhem at a thousand miles an hour with impenetrable growls and howls by way of vocals go to lengths to sell the merits of the lyrical content is something which is a source of vague amusement – I mean, as if you could make out a single word by ear. But it’s beside the point, really: as I’ve touched on before, it’s about the conveyance of sentiment, the implication of meaning.

On Dread Emperor, Slaughterday leap and lurch from bowel-bursting heavyweight sludge-trudge to flamboyant pirouettes on the frets. As they say themselves, they ‘deliver everything that they excel in, which is also precisely what their fans want from the duo’: as such, it’s no criticism to say that Dread Emperor ticks genre boxes, because it’s mission accomplished for the band. And it’s hard to argue otherwise. Dread Emperor delivers riff after riff, drives hard, brings the heavy and snarls, growls and spits its way with gut-churning malevolence from beginning to end.

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Listen: Glory Black by sunn O)))

Posted: 13 January 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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On Friday, April 3rd, 2026, sunn O))) will release their eponymously titled first full-length album for Sub Pop.

sunn O))) was co-produced & mixed by the band and Brad Wood (Hum, Tar, Sunny Day Real Estate, Liz Phair), and was recorded at Bear Creek Studios in Woodinville, Washington, January 2025. You can now listen to the album’s closing track, ‘Glory Black.’

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Framing the album visually are two paintings by the late American artist Mark Rothko – one on the front cover and one on the back cover, with the art reversed for UK & European pressings. And, within the CD and LP package are expansive liner notes by author Robert Macfarlane, whose 2025 novel Is a River Alive? is one of many sources of inspiration for the album. And, illustrations by French artist Elodie Lesourd are also featured on the inner LP sleeves and accompanying album merch.

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sunn O)) will tour in support of the album. Tickets for the below shows will go on sale to the general public on Friday, January 16th at 10am (local).

Wed. Apr. 01 – Phoenix, AZ – The Van Buren
Sat. Apr. 04 – Austin, TX – Emo’s
Sun. Apr. 05 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall
Mon. Apr. 06 – New Orleans, LA – Civic Theatre
Tue. Apr. 07 – Atlanta, GA – The Goat Farm
Thu. Apr. 09 – Columbus, OH – The Bluestone
Sat. Apr. 11 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer
Mon. Apr. 13 – Montreal, QC – Le National
Tue. Apr. 14 – Toronto, ON – 131 McCormack
Thu. Apr. 16 – Chicago, IL – Salt Shed
Sat. Apr. 18 – Iowa City, IA – Englert Theatre
Sun. Apr. 19 – Omaha, NE – The Waiting Room

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