Envenomed have been positioned as the next big thing in Australian thrash metal for a while now. The Melbourne band offer a brighter and more melodic alternative to their often more extreme and aggressive (read: Slayer-influenced) brethren. They’ve remained an entertaining live staple within the Melbourne scene since their inception.…
India might not be the first country that springs to mind when you think of thrash metal, and you’d be forgiven for thinking at first glance that these guys were from the San Fransisco Bay Area, rather than Mumbai. However, what you see you might not get, and we can…
Hello fellow pit-sters! This month, I thought we could do something a little different. You all know I’ve been playing fast and loose with the schedule of this column, and August will be no different! Fellow thrash Josh Bulleid and I thought we’d introduce ourselves to you all a little…
Killswitch Engage have had a bit of a rough go of it over the last decade. The once trailblazing popularisers and perfecters of modern metalcore have maintained both a steady output and flawless live reputation since the first broke through with now-legendary albums like Alive or Just Breathing (2002) and…
Thrash-turned-black metallers Blackhelm have been building a name for themselves amid the Melbourne underground for some time. The band, who started off under the name Metalstorm, already have a series of impressive EPs to their name, but last Friday saw the release of their debut album, Dark Clouds of the…
Germany’s Destruction are by no means an unknown quantity, but they’re also frequently the most overlooked and neglected of the Teutonic thrash scene’s “Big Three”, which they form alongside the much more widely celebrated Sodom and Kreator. (Some people might attempt to add Tankard to that list in order to…
Many bands would like to claim to be wild. There’s something inherently attractive about savageness, especially in metal. But very few bands actually feel unleashed, regardless of the states of mind that might have possessed the members as they were writing/recording the music. Wildness is more than just being experimental…
Trends can sometimes be difficult to identify. You see something over and over again, but you’re not always sure if there’s a pattern or just a series of coincidences. Until you see other people asking around about that thing you saw, you’re not even sure if you’re seeing something correctly…
Metal and punk are really two sides of the same coin. Both explore the darker side of life and express thoughts using extreme aggression. They differ in the way that they accepted influences and used them for their craft. Punk rejected the idea that you had to have some musical…
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…
