Summertime. The living may be easy, the fish jumping and the cotton high, but Humanity’s Last Breath couldn’t give a shit about that. As Europe is broiled by a particularly ferocious heatwave, the Swedes prepare to deliver a relentless blast of bleak and uncompromising gloom on harsh Scandinavian winds. Abyssal,…
Progressive and technical death metal has been having a real moment over the last couple of years. As with everything, however, there is a dark side to the genre’s current boom. With so many fantastic progressive death metal albums flooding the market, listeners run the risk of becoming disaffected by…
Like their previous release, which we also covered on the blog, Of Modern Architecture’ Matricide is an aggressive whollop in the gut. One part modern, heavy, chuggy metal that borders the lines between deathcore and djent, one part progressive experimentation and unexpected, spastic structures, Matricide just keeps on hitting. The…
“Good artists borrow; great artists steal.” – Pablo Picasso, maybe This axiom drives metal. It only becomes more true as time’s inevitable march covers more and more ground and an increasing number of sounds are necessarily retread. I’ve written on this before in other reviews, but this holds especially true…
A Gift to Artwork, taken from the Caligula’s Horse song “A Gift to Afterthought”, breaks down and analyses your favourite album artwork. The first time an album’s name appears, it will link to a large and (where possible) high-resolution image of the cover so that you can take a closer…
Inanimate Existence have had one hell of a journey. They drew widespread acclaim without really managing to take off following their first two records, 2011’s Liberation Through Healing and 2014’s A Never-Ending Cycle of Atonement. They made a name for themselves with their intricate compositions, labyrinthine riffs, ability to neatly…
We recently mused on the failures of, and potential remaining hope for, melodic death metal. Briefly, we said that while the genre is on the ropes, there’s still good music to be made within it, either by “owning” the classic tropes of the genre or experimenting with new sounds. That…
Hello and welcome to this, the second part of our *prognotes installment analyzing Alkaloid’s The Malkuth Grimoire. I usually don’t make a big deal out of it but, in this case, it is absolutely essential to read the first part this post, which you can find here. I won’t spend…
I’ve been expecting the new Contrarian album to release from before 2019 even started; we received the promo a while ago and I was absolutely blown away by the album. Building on everything that worked with their previous release, namely excellent progressive death metal in the style of the legendary…
Cracking the code to a successful debut is no cakewalk. Few are those who can define themselves well enough or crystallize their sound over the course of a few demos or EPs that their LP can stand out from the crowd in a sea of half-baked, messy introductions. To be…
