As a music fan, every Friday release is a blessing. It’s the best way to end the week. You’re getting ground down by the monotony of the 9 to 5 and just need something to boost your spirits for the next 8-10 hours to carry you into the weekend. You may get a little boost if you’ve heard of the artist and like them. The biggest boosts happen when one…
With a name like Mythic Sunship (stemming from Sun Ra’s Of Mythic Worlds and Coltrane’s Sun Ship, a psychedelic jazz pedigree if there ever was one) it’s really no surprise that the best way to describe the band is with the word “journey”. Mythic Sunship channel the kind of vibes that meld…
Brighton, UK-based Yuxa have an intuitive grasp on the ideal ebbs and flows of atmospheric sludge and doom. In a genre characterized by (sometimes overly) patient build-ups and measured, drawn-out compositions, it’s refreshing to hear a band who make getting to the point possible within the post-metal/sludge framework. The slow-burning fierceness…
Branding is a weird concept when it comes to death metal. How does a band ensure their sound is instantly recognisable in a world full of Soundalikes, all trying to blast faster, groove harder, and shred more than the rest? Fuck knows. If you really need the answer to that…
Denmark is home to a particular scene of hardcore-meets-sludge that contains heavy-hitters such as The Psyke Project (sadly no longer), Hexis, and LLNN. I was very pleased to discover that We Are Among Storms, featuring members from the first two bands as well as Église, had popped up with a four-track EP that neatly represents the appeal of the aforementioned scene: brooding sensibilities à la Cult of Luna are met with heightened aggression, though this EP is slightly gentler than what the likes of the Psyke Project and LLNN are often known for (a dense, suffocating heaviness). The opening riff of “Summit” recalls one of…
Warsaw’s Riverside return with their seventh studio album in Wasteland. Whereas 2015’s Love, Fear and the Time Machine sought to…
Given the nature of these columns, it might seem counterintuitive to include a subpar album among our selections for the…
For many, loss of old-style Opeth is one of the great tragedies of modern metal. Though entirely justifiable, the transition of one of the genre’s most outstanding progressive voices into ’70s prog rock pastiche remains widely mourned, a full seven years since its occurrence. Regardless of whatever promises are made in the interim, with each record, it seems increasingly unlikely that fans will ever see a return to the more extreme, forward-thinking style that garnered the Swedish outfit such reverence in the first place. Thankfully, there are bands like Brazil’s Piah Mater, and their brand new album The Wandering Sister,…
Every Time I Die frontman Keith Buckley has garnered a reputation as one of the best lyricists in heavy music…
People often make the mistake of assuming that legacy is a matter of size, that the narratives which are hard…
When Coheed and Cambria dropped their eighth album The Color Before The Sun in 2015, they made some pretty shocking waves among their incredibly rabid fanbase by giving their conceptual Amory Wars universe a hiatus. Frontman and primary songwriter Claudio Sanchez instead brought to the table some deeply personal tracks about love, his family, and his take on being at the helm of such a longstanding rock establishment without the pretense of hiding his thoughts and feelings behind characters and plot beats. This experiment went well enough; the record had some of the band’s most heartfelt material and provided more than a few Coheed classics, but the desire for more science fiction lore and progressive rock cheese was felt by basically everyone.
I just love album titles that act as declarations of intent, telling you all you need to know about what you’re about to hear. That’s certainly the case here; Montreal’s one-man project Allelic makes the kind of Canadian black metal that’s given us excellent bands like Thrawsunblat, steeped in the wild and foreboding nature of that northern state. The Smoke of Atavistic Fires is a perfect title for that; it conjures to mind ritual, primal forces, and mystical knowledge, all of which feature heavily on this album, whether in the form of blistering black metal crying out pain and defiance or with fully fleshed out and haunting folk passages. We’re super proud to premiere this intricate and ambitious album in full! Head on below for the whole damn thing and I’ll meet you after.
There’s a lot happening in the music world, and we here at Heavy Blog try our very best to keep…
Slow news week, so we go on a lot of tangents. There’s still some new music out there though. Green Day side project The Mermaids, Arsis, Thomas Giles, Psycroptic, The Ocean, and The Dali Thundering Concept/The Algorithm. Then we do some cool people time with Venom and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. Enjoy!
