Other than the blackest, darkest depths of winter, I find that summer’s zenith is when I listen to black metal the most. The genre’s obsession with every manner of the frigid, frostbitten, grim pastoralia one associates with the long Scandinavian cold season is practically a simulation of stepping into a…
2019 is a big year in more ways than one. For starters, it’s one year before the the big 2020, where our collective minds lose themselves (there’s a joke on one of the album titles in here) over a round number. Are you ready for “Best of The Decade” lists?…
Writing about a new Abbath album without mentioning Immortal would be tantamount to writing about Bruce Dickinson’s solo albums (The Chemical Wedding still holds up!) without mentioning Iron Maiden. It’s simply not done. It’s uncouth. Almost a quarter century after co-founding Immortal, Abbath struck out on his own in 2015 to assemble a…
February is such a dump of a month. It’s snowed well over a foot in the last two weeks in my home state, and we’ve nothing to show for it but mud splatter, sidewalks covered in ice left by feckless neighbors, and frigid temperatures. February is the microcosm of all…
February; or, as I like to call it (I literally just invented this), “The Bastard Month.” It’s not just the weird length which makes this month hard to pin down; it’s no longer “The First Month of the Year,” but nor is it close to its half. It’s not Midwinter…
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…
When you throw off what black metal might like to think of itself, or the image certain members of it would like to present rather, the essence of the genre seems to be rooted in love rather than hate. Perhaps more than almost any other genre of metal, black metal…
Heavy Pod Is Heavy Cast!
New year, new music! We discuss new material from Jinjer, Dream Theater, Born of Osiris, Saor (and an extended discussion on nationalism), In Flames, Soilwork, and Astronoid. Plus Genghis Tron being on streaming services and Al Mumin’s repsonse to The HAARP Machine’s crowdfunder failing. Then, cool people time with Informer, Darkest Dungeon and more. Enjoy!
The fatal flaw, to me, of end-of-year music journalism content, is that lists discussing stuff from the past year often forget to mention that a lot of music discovery happens later. Now, no music writer is outright saying this – and of course everyone knows that people find albums in…
There are few genres in music that have a deeper and more fundamental connection to nature and history than black metal. From its earliest thematic inception, the most evil of metal’s subgenres has sought to restore through music and philosophy a way of life that, for the most part, has…
