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…
Sometimes, you need a record that is no-nonsense. You don’t always need a huge prog rock record packed to the gills with flowery guitar work and instruments you’ve never heard of. Sometimes you just need a record that’s straightforward pure rock fury. You need a record that’s just aggression given…
Flick…flick…bubble…exhale. Though maybe there should be a few extra flicks and bubbles since we’ve been waiting nearly 20 years for a new Sleep record. The stoner legends surprised us all on April 20th when they dropped The Sciences with less than 24 hours notice. And their first album since the…
Greetings, heaviest of Heavy Bloggers! Welcome to Doomsday, our monthly roundup of some of the most noteworthy releases in the doom world released over the past month. April was a true sleeper month for doom as some of the most titanic releases were saved for the month’s back half. Who knows? Maybe there was even a surprise release last week you heard about perhaps? With this much to bang our heads to, we better get straight to it. Enough chatter! Grab your earplugs, it’s doomsday.
Even a cursory glance of our biweekly playlist updates will reveal that there is a great deal of variety among our staff’s musical tastes. Due to this, we brainstormed the idea of Playlist Swap, where two of our contributors pick their favorite track from each of the nine albums in their grid…
It’s hard to believe Death Is This Communion is a decade old this year. High on Fire have quite a few great albums in their discography, and while I got into them some time after Blessed Black Wings came out, it was Death Is This Communion that really cemented my…
The early 2000s brought us a wealth of riff-worshipping, bone-quaking goodness – what has essentially become the foundation of many current doom, stoner, and sludge metal acts. Bands like Mastodon, High on Fire, and Baroness expanded upon the standard set by metal’s forefathers with more progressive tendencies, expansive arrangements, fiercer presentation, technically demanding performances, and (presumably) better strains of grass. At the same time (and likely benefitting from the same improved… *ahem* genetics), there was also a bubble of traditionalists like The Sword, Wolfmother, and Saviours who made the case that a more conventional approach was worth revisiting, reinvigorating classic sounds for a new generation of headbangers. It’s from this very specific nexus that Australia’s Hypergiant explode, harkening back to familiar territories on both sides of this early-00s coin.
As a genre, sludge has it tough. As the oft-neglected son of the more well-established sounds of doom metal and hardcore, sludge often seems trapped in relative obscurity compared to other thriving and evolving scenes of the past few decades. Whereas, for example, black metal has consistently expanded its worldwide…
There’s no dearth of bands inspired by the likes of Motorhead or the Obsessed but many miss the mark when trying too hard to emulate their forebears rather than putting their own aggressive stomp on the tried and true sound. This particular blend of blues-y, groove-laden metal often stays too long in its own lane, rarely straying from the formula to stretch and add enough of a band’s individual identity, but when a band is able to take this style and bend it to *their* will is where we get something unique.
Metalcore wasn’t always the poppy, hair-flipping, Jonas Brothers-ass affair that it turned into during the early to mid 2000s. Metal and punk have always had an interesting dynamic and when the two cross over it has almost always resulted in compelling music. Black Flag showed their love for Black Sabbath on My War and the first thrash records of the early 80s are seriously indebted to hardcore punk and crust punk. In the 1990s, metalcore was one of the many punk-metal amalgams thriving. It combined the sludgy, downtuned, groovy metal of the day with the politics, angst, and breakdowns of hardcore punk. One of the originators of this fusion, Integrity, gained their popularity off their highly influential debut album, Those Who Fear Tomorrow, a thundering record that still holds up today. Unlike many of the bands in that early metalcore scene, Integrity hasn’t gone away since their legendary early release. On the contrary, the band is still firmly plugged into the current metal-punk world and makes some of the most interesting metalcore available. Their newest album, Howling, for the Nightmare Shall Consume, continues their long streak of successes.
