Heavy Pod Is Heavy Cast! A lot of good stuff this week! New material from Astralborne, Imperial Triumphant, Omniarch, Killitorous, Kardashev, and Creature. Also check out Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger’s ebook on creativity! Then, cool people time with No One Lines Under the Lighthouse, Monster Train, Dispatches From Elsewhere, and Daniel Isn’t Real. Enjoy!
Some albums feel specifically designed to propel music forward. Like their very existence is intended to challenge listeners’ notions about what music is, what it can and/or should accomplish, and how we can expect to consume and enjoy it. Extreme metal, perhaps more than any other genre in any medium…
It’s been a while since we premiered something bizarre from the greater NYC area. Something in the water there (excellent water in NYC, don’t you know) appears to make artists want to take metal and jazz and violently smash them together. From acts like Stimpy Lockjaw through Kayo Dot and…
I listen to a lot of music every year. Which is as it should be. I do write about this shit regularly, so some semblance of a finger on the pulse of various scenes is, in my mind, essential to writing meaningfully about music. One thing that I’ve marveled at…
Michigan’s Thoren are the death metal institution you’ve probably never heard of. Which is a damned shame, honestly. Their 2018 record, Gwarth I, was a labyrinthine collection of instrumental progressive death metal that gave fans of Dysrhythmia, Gorguts, and Ulcerate plenty to go ballistic over. Which makes sense, given the…
The murky and amorphous style of extreme metal that has taken root in the wake of acts like Gorguts, Portal, and Deathspell Omega has seemingly become the predominate driving creative force in the underground extreme metal zeitgeist in recent years. The emphasis on weird, Lovecraftian atmospheres has infected both black and death metal, with acts like Imperial Triumphant, Artificial Brain, Pyrrhon, and Dodecahedron, to name a few, land on year-end lists with wonky, dissonant riffs, and a flair for the experimental. The trouble at this point is that when working within such an esoteric sound, it becomes difficult to carve out a niche and break out from the pack. Up and coming bands, take note: murk chords and blastbeats aren’t cutting it anymore.
Welcome, my hellions, to Death’s Door. Wipe your feet on the mat and pull up a bone throne, for old time’s sake. We’ve finally come to it. The auspicious end to one of the best years for death metal in recent memory. It’s close to unfathomable, upon reflection, how absolutely…
Welcome back to Genre Genesis. For newcomers, here’s a brief overview of how this works. Four of the other editors – Nick, Scott, Jonathan, and Eden – have partners who are, shall we say, not nearly as invested in heavier music as we tend to be, and so their knowledge…
It’s hard to write these intros without spoiling other posts from our end of year content; after all, this intro is focused on 2018 and what it has been and that’s addressed in multiple upcoming posts as well. However, it still needs to be done and this post is, nominally…
It’s difficult to extricate new death metal records in 2018 from the context of time and place. While many (including myself) found 2017 to be an absolute treasure trove of death metal goodness that might be unsurpassed outside the work of the early 90s, 2018 has proven equally if not…
