The best thing about writing for Heavy Blog is helping musicians and people that you have followed for years. Taking a few hours out to feature the fruits of their labours is literally the least we can do when we are the ones who receive the block rocking beats. Today,…
Thanks to the spoiler-obsessed tendencies of the internet, you probably already saw that Converge are releasing a “surprise” EP today. The legendary metalcore quartet’s latest release drops less than a year after their acclaimed ninth album The Dusk In Us, which landed sixth among our Top 25 Albums of 2017. And honestly, there’s not much more to say than that; the declaration of “new Converge” will prompt fans and detractors to act accordingly, just like they always do when the band drops new material. But if you count yourself a member of the “fan” group, then Beautiful Ruin is a four-track treat of the band doing what they do best: scorching, multifaceted metalcore that’s as engaging as it is punishing.
Anyone who followed metalcore in the mid-to-late-2000s and early 2010s (e.g. me) remembers the movement of bands who declared in unison “we’ve heard some extreme metal and want to be like Converge and Entombed.” Whether their persuasion lied with the black metal, sludge or elsewhere, the key for bands who succeeded (Gaza, Trap Them, etc.)…
I’m not gonna do it. I’m not going to spiel about how midwestern hardcore doesn’t get a fair shake and that there’s tons of underappreciated bands out there who can fucking trounce the next big dumb band from the next big dumb city. It’s true, but it’s redundant and (to…
It’s perhaps a testament to the sheer volume of quality extreme music that’s been produced in 2018 that an album as outstanding as The Atlas Moth’s Coma Noir was released early this year to only mild and fleeting fanfare. Yet, here we are, and—while there are certainly worse reasons for…
It has always been a bit strange how something so fast, coarse and outright blistering insists on using the moist mossy woodlands of British Columbia as imagery for their art. Their aesthetic has always been caked in soil and undergrowth amongst the ferns and trees. It’s the lands that the…
Welcome back to our “Best of” column! This isn’t the first time we’ve celebrated twenty year milestones, but this installment is a bit more meaningful for all of us here at Heavy Blog. This list comes a week after we passed 20,000 likes on Facebook, a testament to how much…
With the company I keep, I’m always inundated with music suggestions from friends far and wide. Friends of all genres, trying to get me out of the grind and noise vacuum I’ve been trapped in for a few years. Unfortunately, there’s literally not enough time in the day for me to get really into shoegaze, power pop or Asgardian black metal so I need somewhere to give me all the good stuff in one place. That place is Heavy Blog Is Heavy. No! Shit! That place is Holy Roar Records! On the block today is Germany’s melodic hardcore mega upstarts Giver with Where The Cycle Breaks.
This post has been a long time coming. Heavy Blog has been around for almost 10 years now, and in that time we’ve grown in every possible way. The breadth of music that we cover has grown. We’ve launched new initiatives, such as the podcast Noyan and Eden have made…
Debut albums are an odd beast. Even when they’re good they tend to come with a lot of growing pains, and bands at this early stage in their career tend to lack the self-awareness to really exploit their own potential. Sometimes, this rough, unrefined approach is great. It can often…
