I’ve long maintained that all the best metal has a bit of punk in it, and all the best punk has a bit of metal in it, and this new four-way split Blood Price is a fine case in point, showcasing four bands that sit snugly at the interchange between black metal and hardcore punk. London based Final Dose have already featured in Noel Gardner’s punk roundup, but they’re equally at home here and these two tracks might be their most ferocious yet, pairing sumptuously eerie riffs with boisterous punk battery. Boston duo Prayer Position utilise distorted vocals and an even harsher production to great effect on one original and a Rudimentary Peni cover, whilst Slovakian quintet Otras are perhaps the tape’s most aggressive offering, dishing out some absurdly fast blasts with a charmingly rough practice room production. Rhode Island’s Haunting Figure close the tape on a particularly atmospheric note, with their gnarly metal/punk hybrid shrouded in a sinister lo fi smog. A perfect antidote to all the dour, overproduced black metal and squeaky clean, sportswear ad approved hardcore doing the rounds at the moment.
If you’re looking for black metal fused with something even more bizarre, check out Haunted Plasma’s debut, in which Oranssi Pazuzu guitarist/vocalist Juho Vanhanen teams up with fellow Finnish psych enthusiasts Timo Kaukolampi of K-X-P and Pharaoh Overlord drummer Tomi Leppänen. The record delves deeper into the squelchier electronic sound Oranssi Pazuzu explored on Mestarin Kynsi, but with the metal influence toned down in favour of more of a goth sheen on the Mat McNerney fronted title track, or even a 90s big beat flavour on the pounding but ethereal ‘Echoes’, before thirteen-minute closer ‘Haunted Plasma’ manages to tie all these disparate styles together in a full on motorik powered kosmische belter. It won’t fill the “new Oranssi Pazuzu album” shaped void in your life, but if you were curious what those murky electronics on the last record would sound like in a less metallic context, have at it!
Elsewhere, the current death metal boom just keeps on booming, with Hyperdontia’s latest Harvest Of Malevolence offering up another slab of brutal riffery. Much like their last album Hideous Entity, the sound is crisper and crunchier than the more rancid, cavernous style they debuted with of Nexus Of Teeth, but this sound suits them well – it helps that their riff-writing chops are sharper than ever too, and what initially sounds like a solid if unremarkable death metal record just seems to keep offering up more nuances the more I listen to it.
French death metallers Skelethal are sounding heavier than ever on their third LP Within Corrosive Continuums too, their best yet to my ears. It’s hard to explain exactly why; they’re still peddling rambunctious old school death metal, but it just sounds that much more lucid and aggressive here, with a strong Altars Of Madness influence shining though on ‘Spectrum Of Morbidity’. There are some more atmospheric elements on tracks like ‘Upon The Immemorial Ziggurat’ and the epic thirteen-minute title track, but for the most part this album is just an onslaught of vivid, imaginative death metal riffing, and it’s fucking great.
Speaking of imaginative riffing, Norway’s Diskord and London’s Atvm are both responsible for some of the most psychedelic old school death metal in recent memory, so their recent split release seems like a perfect match. Diskord’s material is some of their most bizarre yet, with the shifting rhythms of opener ‘Onward! To Nowhere’ sounding like a rougher, strung out version of Obscura era Gorguts, whilst the likes of ‘Pass The Baton’ apply more blackened riffing styles to similarly disorientating structures. Atvm too offer up some particularly ambitious material, as the spidery fusion-esque bass lines and kaleidoscopic guitar leads that open the nine-minute ‘Cancer’ immediately let you know you’re in for a wild ride. ‘Morphine’ even takes a detour into tropical samba grooves before letting rip with wonky, pinch-harmonic drenched atonal riffing, like Santana crashing through the wall of a Demilich practice like the Kool-Aid Man. Great stuff!
ScarcityThe Promise Of RainThe Flenser
Scarcity’s hypnotic debut Aveilut was one of the most startling black metal records of 2022, with current Glenn Branca Ensemble conductor Brendon Randall-Myers expertly transposing his dense, spiralling compositional style into a more metallic context. This follow-up is a fairly different beast, however; perhaps wisely opting not to try and out-do Aveilut’s long-form, almost orchestral odyssey, The Promise Of Rain is instead structured more like a traditional song-based metal record, with the project expanding into a full band set-up too – Pyrrhon vocalist Doug Moore remains from the last record, but he’s now joined by his bandmate Dylan DiLella on guitar, Tristan Kasten-Krause on bass and Krallice drummer Lev Weinstein behind the kit. This gives the project more of a live feel, with much of the album apparently being captured in a handful of takes – no easy feat when you consider how knotted and complex this stuff is. The eleven minute ‘Scorched Vision’ in particular is astonishing, as both guitarists play totally different dissonant riffs at the same time, entwining together in fascinating ways as the blasting rhythm section brings the intensity levels to boiling point.
The Promise Of Rain may follow a more traditional structure, but it’s certainly not a traditional sounding metal record by any means. Even ‘Venom & Cadmium’, perhaps the most crowd-pleasing track here with its rolling, Bolt Thrower-esque double kick and anthemic riffing, threatens to careen off into the unknown, with a palpable sense of anxiety mounting until the song’s uncomfortable finale. It’s remarkable how well Scarcity’s style has adapted to this more direct songwriting approach, and the album really does feel like a full band effort this time, from the more rambunctious energy right down to the numerous gang vocals peppered throughout, occasionally coming across like a far more blackened Destroy Erase Improve era Meshuggah. There’s an explorative quality to tracks like the churning, jammed out ‘Undertow’, as the rhythm section grinds away on a sludgy groove allowing the guitars to really spread out and take flight over head. Whilst The Promise Of Rain isn’t quite as enveloping and all-consuming a listening experience as Aveilut was, it’s a really interesting (and somewhat unexpected) evolution of Scarcity’s sound. It’s refreshing to hear the project refusing to repeat itself, whilst continuing to make some of the most interesting and original metal around right now.
KralliceInorganic RitesP2
Speaking of Krallice, their productive streak still shows no sign of slowing down – this is the seventh full-length they’ve released in the last four years, and is arguably the most well-realised and cohesive of the lot. Perhaps fittingly given this is the last record to be recorded at Colin Marston’s Menegroth studio in New York, Inorganic Rites seems to be the defining statement for this more adventurous, synth-focused era of the band, marrying the spacious atmosphere of records like Porous Resonance Abyss with the denser compositional style of earlier albums like Years Past Matter. Opener ‘Parataxis’ comes across like a warped, fun-house mirror reflection of Into The Nightside Eclipse, with frosty tremolo riffs boosted by sweeping blastbeats and eerie keys, but things just get even weirder from here. The following ten minute epic ‘Flatlines Encircled Residue’ is perhaps more representative of what’s to come, as the band patiently coax a climax of celestial, glistening keys out of a swampy, distorted smog, whilst the brisk ‘Irdischen’ demonstrates how effortlessly Krallice can strike a balance between sounding hooky and downright bizarre, as plunging electronic swells erupt atop some seriously nimble riffing.
The cosmic synth composition ‘Universe Ancestral Talisman’, meanwhile, is one of the most cinematic pieces in the band’s whole oeuvre – proof that Krallice have transcended the black metal tag almost completely at this point to inhabit their own unique, self-contained sonic universe. Personally, I don’t think the quality of Krallice’s output has ever really dipped, but the criticism that most of their post-lockdown material feels more experimental and scattershot isn’t entirely baseless – if you’ve been waiting for a more coherent, defined album statement from the band however, then Inorganic Rites is most certainly it. Where they go from here is anyone’s guess, but this is a fantastic way to cap off their last few years of synth-smothered exploration.
Vuur & ZijdeBoezemProphecy
Here’s yet another gem from the Netherlands’ fertile black metal scene. Comprising members of bands like Laster, Terzij de Horde, Silver Knife and Witte Wieven, it’s tempting to dub Vuur & Zijde (that’s Dutch for “fire and silk”, if you were wondering) as a supergroup of sorts, but the band came right out of the gate with a very distinct aesthetic of their own on their 2020 split with German miserablists Impavida, combining harsh, lo fi black metal with sumptuous atmospheric flourishes and the soaring, melancholy vocals of frontwoman Famke. Debut album Boezem takes an interesting change of direction however, really emphasising the band’s post-punk and darkwave influences on nocturnal anthems like ‘Omheind’ or the Cocteau Twins-esque mist of ‘II’.
There are still elements of black metal here – both opener ‘Onbemind’ and the frosty ‘Nest’ seamlessly slip some gnarly blasting into the band’s sultry gothic stomp, and the coldly hypnotic ‘Ús’ could easily pass as an Urfaust song, with it’s eerie mid-paced pulse and Famke’s triumphant wail – but for the most part, Boezem finds the band straddling genre boundaries and generating a distinctively dark sound all of their own.
CowardiceAtavistBurning World
Cowardice always seemed like the most interesting of the current crop of Thou worship bands to my ears. The New Jersey quintet’s 2016 debut Without Condolence seemed to have a bit more depth to it than their peers, and after honing their sound across a handful of splits and EPs since, the almost 90 minute Atavist is the album I was hoping they had in them all along. The band still wear their Thou influence on their sleeves on hulking slo-mo riff-fests like eleven minute opener ‘To The Hilt Of Humanity’, but embrace more shoegaze-esque textures along the way, like the gorgeous tapestry of shimmering guitars that blossoms around halfway through, or the blissful haze that the appropriately named ‘Eastern Woodland Reverie’ opens up into.
There are enough ideas to justify the record’s length, whilst still remaining thematically consistent and maintaining a dark, melancholic mood throughout. The gentler, folky interludes sprinkled throughout help to break up the thick, churning sludge epics surrounding them, but thankfully this sound isn’t just confined to the intermissions; songs like ‘Cloisters’ and the wounded ‘Annulment’ weave subtle acoustic flourishes in amongst the band’s pummeling doom, with soaring guest vocalist Kate Parker lending some more emotional nuance to Mark Guiliano’s throaty screech. This is undoubtedly Cowardice’s best release yet, and one of the more hypnotic and immersive sludge records I’ve heard so far this year. I still can’t get enough of the punkier, more aggressive direction Thou took on this year’s Umbilical, but I’ve met more than a couple of people who were a bit disappointed they hadn’t delivered another vast, introspective epic in the vein of Heathen or Magus; if that’s you, then you’ll want to pick up a copy of Atavist immediately.
AmarokResilienceVulture Print
Grab yourself a copy of Amarok’s second album Resilience too, while you’re at it. Following their promising but rough-around-the-edges EP in 2010, the Californian quartet gradually refined their slow-motion sludge on splits with the likes of Hell, Pyramido and Enth before laying dormant for several years. 2018’s Devoured hinted at an even slower, mournful direction more akin to funeral doom than sludge metal, and Resilience deftly walks the line between the two, delivering all the nihilistic fury of the latter with the former’s delicate, morose atmosphere. Opener ‘Charred (X)’ kicks off with brash, aggressively sludgy grooves before gradually dropping the pace as emotive guitar harmonies entwine atop cavernous bass lines, slowly but surely building back up to a humongous blackened finale as the drums pick up to blasting tempo.
For the most part though, Resilience moves at a glacial pace and does a very convincing job of it, with songs like ‘Ascension (XI)’ and the devastating ‘Legacy (XIII)’ patiently unfurling heart-wrenching melodies in their leaden, murky morass. More focused and memorable than Devoured and heavier and more dynamic than their EP, Resilience is the best thing Amarok have released thus far, and essential listening for fans of bands like Bell Witch, Mizmor and Lycus.
KólgaOtitis Media
This isn’t, as I’d initially presumed, a baffling change in direction from Panopticon man Austin Lunn’s early 2010s side-project of the same name, but an entirely new Kólga from Texas, who are determined to find the middle ground between black metal and surf rock on this hallucinogenic debut. Whilst numerous YouTube guitarists have attempted the same with their tongues planted firmly in cheek, this quintet approach the task with refreshing sincerity, despite the album’s cartoony aesthetic and thorough lack of pretension. For the most part, they’re pretty successful too, with opener ‘Space Beach Massacre’ volting between raucous Dick Dale riffs and furious blast beats, whilst the likes of ‘Tethys’ marry slower, more ominous metallic riffing with quirky B-52s-esque keys and watery castanets.
Truthfully, Black Tides is more of a surf rock record with black metal influences than a full blown fusion between the styles, but it at least seems to respect each of these genres in their own right, aiming for a genuinely psychedelic sound-clash rather than languishing in smirking, meme-rotted irony. Hopefully they can dive even further into this idea in the future, but for the time being, this is a great springboard to leap off from.
HarvestmanTriptych: Part TwoNeurot
Seven years after the otherworldly Music For Megaliths album, Steve Von Till has resurrected his Harvestman project for not one, not two, but three new records which feel like a continuation of …Megaliths in many ways, drawing inspiration from ancient English folklore and channelling the same pastoral psychedelia. With the release dates tied to lunar cycles (this one coincides with the Buck Moon on July 21st, whilst the first celebrated April 23rd’s Pink Moon, and we’ll have to wait until October 17th’s Hunter Moon for the final instalment), Triptych feels more conceptually focused than …Megaliths; though perhaps not musically, with the project’s trademark drone and folk soundscapes augmented with traces of dub, space rock, post-punk and doom metal. Despite being sonically all over the place, these disparate sounds coalesce quite nicely across both of the records released so far, with the almost cyclical album structure binding them to the overall concept.
Both records kick off side A with a long jam (the first with ‘Psilosynth’, a deep low-end workout centred around the bong-rattling bass of Sleep’s Al Cisneros, and the second ‘The Hag Of Beara VS. The Poet’, an enveloping slab of rustic doom with von Till and Cisneros joined by current Yob drummer Dave French), before returning with mirrored dub versions of the same track on their respective B side. Both albums work well together but this second one is perhaps the meatier and more substantial of the two, breaking up the wistful ambient drones with the hypnotic Eastern pulse of ‘Damascus’ and gorgeous synth backed Americana of ‘Galvanized And Torn Open’, which sounds like Earth playing one last mournful song whilst being beamed up by the mothership.
