When an artist breaks the mold such as Imperial Triumphant have, there’s often a ripple effect. Yet in the wake of 2018’s Vile Luxury, few bands have achieved the grandeur and scale of Imperial Triumphant’s aural world building. Short of a handful of releases over the last few years – most notably 2019 HBIH…
Metal has a penchant for the transcendent. As an avid music consumer, it’s a rare occurrence for a record to stop me dead in my tracks and demand my complete, undivided attention. No working. No multitasking. No casual listening. Instead, on first listen, complete and total surrender to a wave…
Atmospheric black metal has been doing a lot of things in the last five years or so. Beyond “just” an explosion in release numbers, atmospheric black metal also seems to be undergoing another (re)negotiation of what constitutes its basic parts, with the genre splitting off into further sub-genres. You have…
Hailing from the perpetually sunny, oftentimes snowy state of Colorado comes with its fair share of outdoor rituals. One of these, found deep in the throes of deepest winter, manifests itself as shoveling stupid amounts of snow off of my driveway. Waking at 6:00am to clear a path for my…
We here at Heavy Blog like to ponder the big questions: Who are we? Why are we here? What makes one album “better” than another? You know, the big stuff. In order to better address such pressing matters, we bring you Heavy Issues: a semi-regular column by which we plan…
This is one of those years where you’re writing your end of year summary every day. It’s a year which inundated all of us with so much music, and from so many angles and genres, that it almost begged to constantly be analyzed, made sense of, and conceptualized. I’ve written…
Welcome, friends, to the final installment of Kvlt Kolvmn in the year of our infernal overlords 2019. What a year it’s been. From releases by foolproof genre legends like Mayhem, Blut Aus Nord, and Abbath to seething experimental shots across the proverbial bow from Liturgy and Botanist, this past year…
I’ve spilled many a digital word on describing just what Iapetus’ album from this year, The Body Cosmic, makes me feel so it was a no-brainer to reach out to Matthew and Jordan as our first guest list. At the end of the day, I love these lists because they…
We all know where post-black metal is coming from, black metal of course, but where is it going to? As the sub-genre draws close to double digit age, what is the purpose of post-black? The initial infatuation with the permutations it offered black metal is fading; we need something more…
There’s a genre of science-fiction that’s all about love. Or, rather, it’s about the human emotional landscape in general, magnified against the vast canvas of space. Emotions become grandiose, cosmic even, the only bridge we have across the relative emptiness of the galaxy. You’re actually familiar with the genre; in…
