There are few scenes in the metal world that have drawn as much attention and critical acclaim as Icelandic black metal has over the past several years. Band’s like Zhrine, Sinmara, Svartidauði, Auðn, Wormlust, and a host of others have created a regional nexus for dense, aggressive, highly atmospheric black…
Each month, we always seem to come to the same conclusion when it comes to our Editors’ Picks column: Friday release days open the floodgates and unleash a seemingly endless stream of quality new music. But while some of our Editors and Contributors sit down gleefully each week to dive into this newly stocked treasure…
Writing about a new Abbath album without mentioning Immortal would be tantamount to writing about Bruce Dickinson’s solo albums (The Chemical Wedding still holds up!) without mentioning Iron Maiden. It’s simply not done. It’s uncouth. Almost a quarter century after co-founding Immortal, Abbath struck out on his own in 2015 to assemble a…
Telepathy have recently released live footage of “Celebration of Decay” from one of these said festivals, Dunk!Festival. You might recognize the name from our seemingly endless coverage of bands which operate in the sphere of Dunk!’s influence, seeing as they are one of the lodestones of post-rock and metal today. Their presence immediately sparked our fascination and once again pointed to their rising popularity, drawing us towards the performance and how it was received. It also helps that this is one of the best tracks on Tempest and that the performance is top notch. Put all of these things together and you get this post, which, beyond including the clip from the performance itself, also has a brief chat with Richard Powley of the band about this show, the future of the band, what comes next and how they feel about what’s happened for them so far. Read on below for excellent post metal and an interesting peek into its European scene!
2018 has been quite the year for metal as a whole. With big releases from big bands hitting all the high notes, and several subgenres experiencing some of their most consistently impressive output in decades, it’s fairly safe to say that this has thus far been a premium year for…
When Abbath left Immortal in 2015 it was largely assumed that the band itself was done for, with their iconic frontman reportedly intending to release the band’s newly completed material under his own moniker. Abbath’s self-titled solo venture (2016) came and went with seemingly little fanfare, however, and anyone who…
Last year I took it upon myself not only to organize and compile our own staff’s AOTY list, but to take things one insane step further and compile a bunch of lists from major metal or metal-covering publications and websites into one MEGA AOTY list to rule them all. Eden and I then analyzed the list and made some (mostly snarky) comments about the metal journalism industry and how they approach these sorts of things. Though I still 100% stand by what we wrote there and the conclusions we drew from it, I was really interested in seeing how well some of them would stand up to another year to use as a data point. Thankfully, this year I had a lot of help in all of our list-making efforts thanks to fellow editor Noyan, who put a ton of work into coming up with the method we ended up using to aggregate our lists (if you haven’t already, you should absolutely read his post delving into the nitty-gritty of that methodology) and then did the actual number-crunching.
Hi, friends! We’re back again with another sick Decibel Magazine Tour in our photographic ranks! Last year, we were blessed with an At The Gates headlining tour alongside their first album in nearly twenty years! This year, the mighty Abbath, following his split from Immortal, brought his icy winds from…
Courtesy of C3 Presents, we’re giving away two pairs of tickets to catch this year’s Decibel Magazine Tour — featuring Abbath, High on Fire, Skeletonwitch, and Tribulation — next week in Austin, Texas!
If this is all we as metal fans get out of the Immortal dispute, then this is more than acceptable olive branch. While the album certainly could have been enhanced with the natural chemistry that Abbath had with his former band, it still feels like the most well-rounded album that he’s released since 2003’s masterpiece, Sons of Northern Darkness. It’s got a great mixture of rawness, accessibility, brutality and cheese, and is 2016’s first essential release for all fans of extreme metal. A must have for fans of unending grimness.
