Cult of Luna – A Dawn To Fear

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In their much anticipated follow-up to Mariner, the band returned to their core writing mode free of outside collaborators for their Metal Blade debut A Dawn To Fear, and have simplified their songwriting process to eschew a full-album concept, instead offering a collection of independent songs without preconceptions in the writing process. The result of this experiment is a record that is massive, plodding, expansive, and pensive, if not daunting and exhausting for those who aren’t too keen on The Big Slow™

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Best of 1999

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The historical significance of 1999 will be remembered for a long time now. It was a cultural moment that far exceeded any other “decade closer” in the 20th century. Events like Y2K or The Matrix seemed to bring to fever pitch the technological explosion, and the subsequent mark it left…

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Wizard Rifle – Self-titled

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Even if you took a group of the most scholarly sludge punks and fed them a steady diet of Lightning Bolt, Neurosis, and Sonic Youth for years and years, it’s not likely they’d produce anything as unconventional as Wizard Rifle. Their tone and style is the connective tissue that convincingly…

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Hope Drone – Void Lustre

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It’s been a long four years since the sophomore release from Australian post-black metal outfit Hope Drone. Cloak of Ash, released July 2015 through Relapse Records, was the group’s shot at a breakout, and it was certainly a devastating and compelling release, earning a four-out-of-five score from us back when…

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Hey! Listen to Atlases!

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Many words have been spilled around these parts in service of post-rock and post-metal. Yet – outside of more expansive, god-tier, genre heavyweights; such as Isis and Neurosis – I’ve never found myself particularly captivated by the genre(s). Lush soundscapes building to cathartic crescendos are all well and good, but…

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DIRGE – Lost Empyrean

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For fans of post-anything metal, there was a turning point where we came to dismiss instant gratification. The point where we came to fall in love with the longform sonic journey, the gradual and subtle expanse of musical ideas, or the entrancing (and at times physical) nature of cascading, droning riffing and phantasmal leadwork. Bigger than that, it’s where we abandoned immediacy in exchange for the ambient, the psychedelic, the densely layered, or the ruminating.

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EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE: Yuxa Illuminate with “Founder In Light”

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Brighton, UK-based Yuxa have an intuitive grasp on the ideal ebbs and flows of atmospheric sludge and doom.  In a genre characterized by (sometimes overly) patient build-ups and measured, drawn-out compositions, it’s refreshing to hear a band who make getting to the point possible within the post-metal/sludge framework.  The slow-burning fierceness…

A Storm of Light – Anthroscene

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The world will end. The world will end. The world will end. Not with a whimper but a long, drawn-out, human-inflicted death rattle. …Or so Anthrocene, the fifth-full length from ex-Neurosis visual artist Josh Graham’s A Storm of Light, will have you believe. While I’m to understand that Graham never…