NYTT LAND unveil the video clip ‘Totem’ as the first single taken from their forthcoming new album Aba Khan. The tenth full-length, including self-released titles, of the Siberian ritual folk band from Kalachinsk has been prepared for release on February 20, 2025.
NYTT LAND comment: “In all truth, ‘Totem’ is a spell that is part of the Mansi tribe’s ritual traditions, who preserve their ancestral faith and shamanic lore in the wild forests of Western Siberia and the Ural Mountains to this day”, throat singer and multi-instrumenalist Anatoly Pakhalenko explains. “This is not just a song, it is a real and ancient ritual of worshipping the elder spirits of the forest. Prepare to become a part of it.”
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On their tenth full-length Aba Khan, NYTT LAND pick up the stylistic thread that they had previously woven with Ritual (2021). This means, the music is generally based on a foundation of current ritual dark folk to which the duo from Siberia adds elements from the native traditions of their home among other ingredients.
It is important to mention the sonic base from which NYTT LAND set out as the band also creates releases that aim to authentically preserve and reconstruct the ancient and still living shamanic traditions of Siberia as embodied by their previous album Songs of the Shaman (2025).
Although NYTT LAND return to the less strict and rather popular formula with Aba Khan, their inspiration has still come from a whole year of travelling through the vast territories of Siberia. The couple discovered new areas and got acquainted with spiritual traditions of the indigenous peoples that they met. The result of this journey is a collection of priceless treasures that has been respectfully translated into a contemporary musical language.
VRÎMUOT present the lovingly illustrated lyric video of the balladesque song ‘Vom Traum zur Pflicht’ ("From Dream to Duty") taken from the forthcoming new album Lupus Viridis ("The Green Wolf").
The German dark folk innovators’ second full-length has been chalked up for release on December 5, 2025.
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VRÎMUOT comment: “The song ‘Vom Traum zur Pflicht’ is a musical journey through the fog-shrouded realm of my own soul”, mastermind Lupus Viridis reveals. “Only those who are willing to descend into the depths of their own existence may embark on a path of knowledge and seek the light of truth. Only those who are willing to make sacrifices may overcome the glass mountain and triumph over themselves.”
“Solve et coagula”! For death is the path to reverence … and to love.
This song is dedicated to my wife and son.
“Aus den schwarzen Schleiern heraus, wurde ein weißer Stern geboren und feuerrot brennt die Seele in mir!"”
“From the black veils, a white star was born, and the soul burns fiery red within me!”
FAUNA drop an excerpt from the epic over 23-minute long song ‘Eternal Return’ as the third and final advance single taken from the forthcoming album Ochre & Ash. The Cascadian black metal duo’s fourth full-length has been slated for release on September 26, 2025.
FAUNA comment: “Journeying everward, through this nothingness comprised of all that has ever been and all that will ever be, we see”, vocalist, guitarist, and bass player Echtra writes on behalf of the duo. “World creates awareness and awareness creates world, collapsing the very self that knows in its moment of knowing. And in that gnosis becomes whole again. And thus we are born anew from nothingness. Come and become, life eats itself, womb and tomb combined. Fecund chaos, sickening soup of morass and murk, birth and rebirth; the void vomits its entrails forth, they coalesce into form, and swim off into the bog.”
Ochre & Ash is the title of the fourth full-length from Cascadian black metal shamans FAUNA. Ochre and ash are also two of the main ingredients used by ancient humans to create paintings in caves. The album cover combines these two aspects by using an image from the Cueva de las Manos ("Cave of the Hands") in Argentina, where the oldest hands stencilled onto the rock date back to about 7,300 BC.
The oldest cave paintings date back over 60,000 years, which puts them into the age of two older members of the human family tree, Neanderthals and Denisovans. When modern humans or homo sapiens emerged out of Africa, they mixed with their predecessors and continued to use ochre and ash to paint images in caves.
FAUNA are animist ministers who take listeners and participants in their live rituals back to the origins of our species, to an age of hunters and gatherers and archaic human spirituality. Ochre & Ash is conceived as a shamanic underworld journey, a process of ritual death, harrowing passage through unknown realms, and rebirth into new form.
Although Ochre & Ash looks like a regular album with six tracks at a superficial glance, it is in fact intended as one whole piece that is divided into three ‘songs’, which are interspersed with ambient interludes. This follows a distinct shamanic sequence: preparation for death and then the moment of death, descent to the underworld, a passage through the lands below, and the painful rebirth into a morass of Being.
The concept of Ochre & Ash reaches all the way back to the founding purpose of FAUNA. This musical entity came into being in Olympia, Washington in 2004, when a spiritual drive to explore shamanism and atavism, which means the reemergence of traits thought to be lost from human biology and culture, birthed itself in the creation of black metal fury.
FAUNA were formed as an antidote to the alienation of the modern human spirit and dedicated to cultivating lost channels of the human condition. Musically, FAUNA soon evolved into an integral and inspirational part of the sonic revolution now known as Cascadian black metal, alongside and in creative exchange with legends such as AGALLOCH and WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM.
FAUNA view their music as a collection of experience and ritual, intended to shake free the contemporary mind and bring listeners back to a more primal and free existence. They consider live rites as the true main event. These live rituals evolved into recorded echoes simply out of necessity. FAUNA desired to open their work to those who might seek it, and to share their passion for a return to primal spiritual states with people outside of the damp, vast forests of the Pacific Northwest of Cascadia. FAUNA’s debut album Rain (2006) shared the story of homo sapiens’ evolutionary path, and our struggle to survive in the modern world. 2007’s The Hunt explores another stage in that human trajectory through the lens of a mythic hunt, followed by Avifauna in 2012 – with the title paying tribute to birds and the spiritual meaning these winged cousins provide.
With Ochre & Ash, FAUNA take their listeners on a shamanic journey back deep in time into an age of early hunters and gatherers with a black metal ritual that echoes ancient humans assembling at torchlight in dark caves to spray-paint hands, animals, and tools through hollow bone pipes with ochre and ash in an act of magic onto the bare bones of the earth.
FAUNA reveal an excerpt from the over 14-minute long song entitled ‘Nature & Madness’, which is taken as the first single from the Cascadian black metal duo’s forthcoming fourth album Ochre & Ash that has been slated for release on September 26, 2025.
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FAUNA comment: “A door opens from primordial chaos: ‘Nature & Madness’ spills forth”, vocalist, guitarist, and drummer Vines states on behalf of the duo. “A fever dream of incarnation, suffering and ecstasy; the myth and the mirror of selfhood. Discordant threads emerge and gather, twisting spire-ward, pyre-ward, to assemble a monument of disparate yet interwoven strands, which comprises the whole tangled truth of existence. We scale onward unto that pinnacle, in desperation and inspiration, offering self as sacrifice against its own becoming. To travel shadowed paths toward further stages of incarnation, ascending toward the underworld, descending into celestial abyss. This segment of the greater work unraveled itself unbidden in a reverie inspired by the book of the same name by Paul Shepard, which speaks of the dissonance generated by the modern mind’s inability to reconcile two simultaneous but contradictory truths. This dissonance leapt to life in musical form, itself a contradictory truth. Winding its way through the serpentine mind as surely as water seeks its source, uniting highest peak with deepest ocean. Attuning ourselves to this dissonance, allowing it to permeate and take root within our spirits, we re-member another way of Being.”
American Dark Metal veterans NOVEMBERS DOOM have released a new video single for the song ‘Major Arcana’, the title track of their forthcoming new album. The twelfth full-length from these purveyors of dark and brooding metal is scheduled to be released on September 19, 2025.
NOVEMBERS DOOM comment: “The title track ‘Major Arcana’ represents significant growth for us, exploring new ideas and taking ourselves out of our comfort zone – both musically and thematically”, vocalist Paul Kuhr states on behalf of the band. “Yet we are still staying true to who we are and the artistic legacy that we have created for so many years now. Each of us pushed hard to challenge ourselves as performers as well as songwriters, and we could hardly be any prouder of what we have accomplished with ‘Major Arcana’, both in terms of the song itself as well as the new album as a whole.”
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In further news, NOVEMBERS DOOM will also reissue a 20th Anniversary Edition of their cult album The Pale Haunt Departure (2005) on October 3, 2025. This collectors’ edition full-length will be released on vinyl for the first time and as a lavish artbook including 7 exclusive bonus track, rare images, and liner notes. Mailorder customers, who order both albums, will receive The Pale Haunt Departure early and together with Major Arcana on September 19.
Fascinating metal innovators DORDEDUH have unveiled a new live video for the track ‘Timpul întâilor’, which was recorded during their show at the prestigious ProgPower Europe festival at the Sjiwa in Baarlo, the Netherlands in 2023.
While the Romanians were playing, their compatriot and renowned artist Costin Chioreanu created a live painting at the venue, which was directly inspired by the music. His artistic process was projected onto the backdrop behind the band.
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DORDEDUH comment: “First I need to mention that ProgPower is a very special festival with a particularly nice vibe to it”, frontman Edmond “Hupogrammos” Karban writes. “It is very intimate but feels like a big family meeting. There were great shows and great bands, but the afterparty at that castle-like hotel that accommodates both the musicians and the audience is something else entirely. We had a really great time there. Therefore, I am especially glad that we did something special there with our amazing friend of so many years now, Costin Chioreanu. Everybody involved deserves that and we are grateful for this opportunity. This kind of memory, this kind of beautiful moment will stay in our memories. Luckily, this one memory got immortalised for all to see in this video. Hopefully, you will enjoy it, too!”
The track ‘Timpul întâilor’ is taken from the album Har.
Absence makes the hearty grow fonder, so the adage goes, and so it also goes that some acts return not only rejuvenated, but more prolific the second time around: this has certainly been true of a number of acts, ranging from Earth to The March Violets, and it seems that Austere are also finding a purple patch of creativity, with The Stillness of Dissolution being their third album in two years after a thirteen-year break – having only released two albums in their initial four-year career.
Older and wiser? Or perhaps older and feeling a greater sense of freedom in creative terms… it matters not, really. Here, the Australian duo, consisting of Mitchell Keepin (guitars, bass, keyboards, vocals), and Tim Yatras (drums, keyboards, vocals), we’re reminded that ‘their roots in early Norse black metal and its depressive Scandinavian offspring remain clearly audible’, and the album’s six lengthy tracks offer texture and detail, and darkness… much deep darkness.
Opening, ‘Dissolved Exile’ clocks in a little shy of eight minutes, and what’s striking us just how crisp the guitars sound, both the crunchy rhythm parks and the spindly lead, which takes off into an epic solo, propelled by double-pedal blasting drums. But something else stands out, too: as raspy and demonic as the vocals are, there’s a strong sense of groove to it, the chugging chords presenting a solid form and structure. ‘Redolent Foulness’, too, has an epic quality, and an almost neo-prog accessibility. There’s melody in the vocals, not to mention an abundance of dynamics and detail.
It would be easy to criticise Austere for pursuing a more commercial sound and a more ‘casual’ audience, but the simple fact is that they’ve got some crafted tunes here, and The Stillness of Dissolution showcases songwriting ability, rather than simply the ability to play fast while burying everything in muddy production. The Stillness of Dissolution is by no means a commercial album, or a pop album, but in melding genuine hooks to monster slugging riffs, Austere have forged an album that’s compelling, exciting, and yes, I’ll say it, catchy. Not in a pop sense, of course, but those juggernaut riffs just grab you: ‘Rusted Veins’ fully rocks out, and at nine and a half minutes, closer ‘Storm Within My Heart’ is a solid epic. Overused? Yeah, but have you got a better word? It begins atmospherically, before blasting in with explosive force, and with the snarling vocals buried beneath a frenzied blanket or fretwork, it’s the most overtly black metal cut on the album.
And what an album: it really is well-considered, crafted, detailed. ‘The Downfall’ borders on shoegaze and prog-metal, but there’s blistering rage in there, too. Metal tends to be underrated when it comes to texture and emotional range, but The Stillness of Dissolution brings it all by the truckload: ‘Time Awry’ bringing three songs in one, with a nagging lead guitar line that loops over a thunderous riff. This is an album which makes you feel – and its power is as immense as its stunning quality.
KAYO DOT have revealed the video single ‘Oracle by Severed Head’ taken from their forthcoming new album Every Rock, Every Half-Truth under Reason, which is scheduled for release on August 1, 2025.
Watch it here:
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KAYO DOT comment: “The song ‘Oracle by Severed Head’ is about prophecy, but not the clean, transcendent kind that we’ve been taught to expect”, mastermind Toby Driver reveals. “This is prophecy as defilement – a sacred voice ripped from the past and forced through a severed head – a voice no longer truly its own, but distorted, fragmented, bleeding into the present. It is a song that interrogates the ways in which manipulated versions of the past continue to invade the present, asserting themselves in violent ways. These voices might be real and they might speak some truths, but who, through the obscene fracture that brought them back, are we really listening to? And at what cost? Musically, ‘Oracle by Severed Head’ pulls us into that space of rupture. It is built on a large ensemble – guitars, drums, bass, strings, woodwinds, trumpet, and vocals – an orchestration that calls back to the earliest Kayo Dot works. The song is a perfect choice for a first single, as it celebrates our return to form while marking the passing of time since ‘Choirs of the Eye’. The music is expansive but controlled, allowing tension and release to breathe in real time. Its beauty is at odds with its plaintiveness, as aching melodies and delicate harmonies evoke a sense of loss and longing. The climaxes feel inevitable, yet somehow unexpected. In these moments, the music mirrors the emotional intensity of our most powerful moments, but also speaks to the underlying disquiet of the present – trapped between what was and what is yet to come.”
IMHA TARIKAT premiere the intense new video clip ‘The Day I Died (Reborn into Flames)’ as the next single taken from the forthcoming album Confessing Darkness. The fourth full-length from the German black metal band has been slated for release on June 20, 2025.
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Imha Tarikat comment: “With the song ‘The Day I Died’ I am publicly sharing my past contemplation of suicide for the first time and reflect on a dark time in my life”, mastermind Kerem Yilmaz reveals. “At the time, I was clinically depressed and saw no hope in my future. Suddenly, something ignited inside of me, and I began fighting my way back into life. Through tears, violence, grief, and anxiety, I finally found my place by rising above the voices that tried to pull me down and by focusing upon that one whisper that told me to fight. That voice grew louder and louder. Since then, I have not looked back. Reborn into the flames, I set everything ablaze with passion upon the path that I walk now.”
LUX INTERNA reveal the music video for the lush and warm track ‘No Arrow’ as the final advance single taken from the American dark folk innovators’ forthcoming new album New Wilderness Gospel, which is chalked up for release on May 2, 2025.
LUX INTERNA comment: “In ‘No Arrow’, a tangle of voices and moments meet, intertwine, and transform each other”, guitarist and singer Joshua Levi Ian explains on behalf of the band. “Here, it’s always 4:00 am. You’re stepping out of the roadside bar as the desert winds gently stipple flickering red neon with grains of sand, while the lights from the town in the valley shimmer below like ghosts in the darkness. Or perhaps you’re waking up in the Mojave heat and lighting a cigarette in the motel bed as you watch your sleeping lover bathed in shadows and the shards of electric light that creep in through the holes in the curtains. Or maybe you’re still driving, tired but full of flame, as the car’s headlights are continuously humbled by the vastness of a great nocturnal kingdom. Either way, you feel a mix of calm resolve and wildlife surging up inside you. Your body is awake, a beautiful animal of flesh and fire. It feels like everything that came before has intentionally led you to this moment. But you know that he’s out there, waiting and watching. And there’s a cold and calculating malice in his eyes. This thought used to terrify you. You would have done anything to shake him off your trail. But not anymore. Now you’re ready. You welcome the encounter. Now he’s the one that best beware.”
Aural Aggravation 