I’ve written before about black metal’s love affair with the idea of the auteur, most at length in one of my favorite pieces, my longform essay on black metal and Romanticism, where I discussed the idea of the tortured artist/genius figure. To borrow what I said there, “the figure of…
Welcome once more to Kvlt Kolvmn. It’s that time again. The year has shed its final layer, curling itself into a corner and awaiting its imminent demise. Though, thankfully, not without plenty of bite left. It’s been a doozy of a year for all things metallic, with black metal being…
Welcome to Kvlt Kolvmn, hellions. Here’s hoping your holiday is as frosty as the metal gods intended it. We’re approaching the end of the year, and prep for our Kvlt Kolvmn prospectus is in full swing. But in the midst of the maelstrom, we offer you a few choice selections…
Despite its origins, black metal continues to be a subgenre that pushes boundaries with the sound in new ways. It was originally intended to sound inherently evil to blaspheme against organized religion and spit on society writ large. The places its gone since then leave that far behind, exploring new…
Since the vast majority of Heavy Blog contributors fall on the left side of the map (shocking, we know), focusing on the latter seems like the way to go. Criticizing the other side of the political map is easy enough; taking a hard look at your own camp is where things get tricky. Thus, let us turn our eyes on one of the most typical leftist refusals to engage: the retreat. There are few places in the cultural world where this retreat is more obvious than in music and, more specifically, in metal. Even more specifically, the current throes which are black metal is undergoing are even more lucrative for our needs. There, leftist retreat is alive and happening right now, both because of the virility of the claims on the other side (read: the amount of black metal that’s truly awful) and because the themes of black metal have already been declared by the larger, more abstract “left” as anathema in the past.
The hits just keep on coming in 2018! Now comes Soul Dissolution with their new album Stardust. This is incredible atmospheric black metal from Belgium in a similar vein to Harakiri for the Sky. It combines atmospheric black metal with post-metal songwriting to deliver large and sweeping epic tomes about…
Welcome to Kvlt Kolvmn, “Is This Even Black Metal?!” Edition. We hope you’ve had a frosty, satan-blessed month. But, I mean, let’s be real. Such exclamations are couched in the traditional, stereotypical norms of a community that has built and staked its reputation on an allegiance to popularly assumed constructs…
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…
It’s hard to say much about Arson that hasn’t already been said before, by myself. That’s not to say I spend a lot of time talking about Austrian black metal outfit Harakiri For The Sky, so much as it is a comment on the fact that nothing about them has changed between July 22nd,…
For those who missed our last installment, We post biweekly updates covering what the staff at Heavy Blog have been spinning. Given the amount of time we spend on the site telling you about music that does not fall neatly into the confines of conventional “metal,” it should come as…
