I’m a sucker for the kind of discordant, dissonant, technically adventurous death metal that leaves you simultaneously baffled and awed. Think Portal and their utterly unhinged songwriting, Ulcerate and their fire and blood approach to technical death metal, and Mitochondrion’s relentless, blisteringly paced barrage of audio brutality. It’s a sound…
January is like a box of chocolates; you never know exactly what you’re going to get. That’s how the famous saying goes, right? In any case, the start of the year does tend to be an unexpected affair. December sees many of us going into relative hibernation, as PR and…
Welcome back, hellions, to Death’s Door. Wipe your feet on the mat and pull up a bone throne. It’s time to talk death metal. New year. New filth. Oh yeah, baby. The beginning of a new year is always weird for me. It’s a time marked with artificial beginnings, often…
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…
For all its historic and contemporary emphasis on gore, violence, and the southern hemisphere of the otherworldly, it’s a bit surprising how unscary modern death metal is. Perhaps it’s my own desensitization to the music that I’ve explored in depth for the past several years, but it seems like there…
Well, here we are – another year full of new releases. In lieu of our weekly Release Day Roundup, we thought we’d preview the months ahead of us and highlight which albums we’re most heavily anticipating. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and we hope you’ll comment with…
First impressions have always been a powerful force when it comes to music consumption. Whether due to a lack of time and/or money, listeners have limited resources to dedicate to the ceaseless torrent of new music and the seemingly bottomless pool of vintage releases. And as superficial as it may…
Album art in the modern age is in a precarious position, but it’s no less important than it’s ever been. For many of us, these visuals have been relegated to a tiny square, requiring a number of pinches, pulls, and slides to explore the details of an album’s cover. Streaming…
Welcome to the final installment of Death’s Door in the Year of Our Nefarious Overlord 2017! Wipe your feet on the mat, remove that stupid holiday-induced smile from your face, and prepare yourself for ultimate year-end audio brutalization. Because, quite frankly, 2017 was one of the best years for death metal in decades. A bold statement indeed, and thankfully one with plenty of data in the form of amazing records to back it up. The overwhelming number of releases in this dirtiest of metal subgenres, coupled with the breadth of quality releases in each of the branches of the death metal tree, all accumulate to create one of the most impressive lists of death metal albums in a given year since the early 1990s. 2017 presented us with exceptional records at such an alarming clip that it was often a full-time task to keep track of them. Death metal this year was in equal measure mind-numbingly technical, socially forward-thinking, compositionally adventurous, and reverent of the past, generating albums that displayed with full clarity all that makes this music the metal behemoth that it is. What a time to be alive. In our final segment of Death’s Door for the year, we will be highlighting the trends and movements within death metal that we found to be the most significant, as well as our own personal top 15 death metal records on the year. Prepare yourself. Madness awaits.
Welcome to Death’s Door. Wipe your snowy boots on the mat. Which, I mean, is obviously a joke. Because there’s no snow anywhere on this godforsaken rock. It’s a million degrees outside and all of humanity is hurtling toward ecological destruction. How delightful. Pull up a bone chair and get…
