No one wants to admit it, but thrash fits into transitional times because it skips all the politics, religion, and philosophy in order to focus on the lived experience of marginalized outsiders (skateboarders).
3 CommentsOnslaught, Warlord, and New Skeletal Faces Tour 2026
Transitional speed/death/punk/NWOBHM hybrid Onslaught shocked the world (or at least the five hundred metalheads paying attention) with their Power From Hell album that pushed metal further toward both extremity and an odd literary-mythological sense of authenticity instead of an individualistic one.
7 CommentsArktheos – Cosmolith (2025)
Music communicates an experience more than emotions directly; our emotions arise in response to it. The best music first manages to hold together as a consistent voice, and then explores its own take on the world, even if not original in style or necessarily profound; it needs personality.
22 CommentsTags: arktheos, death metal, War Metal
Merry Christmas (And Fuck Christ!)
The normie content you expect: let’s celebrate a very metal Christmas! Throw up the horns and hail Santa! What’s the best way you can think of to celebrate Christmas as a metalhead? By the way, there is no other content than this; it is simply the sleazy adult version of those reaction papers you wrote back in your mediocre high school education.
53 CommentsTags: AIDS, christmas, hannukah, happy hannukah, happy holidays, heri za kwanzaa, merry christmas
Wernesgrüner Brauerei AG – Pils Legende (2025)
When you travel through Germany, you encounter many cities and towns each with their own local brewery, and they all make beer slightly differently. Like Warsteiner, Wernesgrüner Pils Legende offers a light beer with a slight spicy malt flavor and relatively low sweetness.
14 CommentsTags: beer, pilsner, wernesgruner
Hirayasumi (2025)
The name translates to “regular day off” or other notions of a break from the manic pace of society, and this defines the charters involved, especially Hirohito the protagonist, who has essentially dropped out of the rat race to enjoy normal life to the dismay of all of those around him.
10 CommentsTags: hirayasumi, slacker culture
Tenebro – Una lama d’argento (2025)
This album combines the dynamics of black metal with an Incantation/Asphyx/Immolation approach that brings lots of tasty surging riffs while at the same time building songs out of the conflict of these riffs, making for an album that is inscrutable to 90% of the listening audience at this time.
9 CommentsTags: death metal, tenebro
Venator – Psychodrome (2025)
Malaise shares a space between underground metal, heavy metal, and classic jazz: the greats came and left such a legacy that few stand up to it, and little can be so distinctive that it will gain the status of perceived greatness, so most stay away.
38 CommentsTags: Heavy Metal, judas priest, mercyful fate, scorpions, venator
D&Q The Beer Station (Houston, TX)
If you are stuck in Houston, more pity to you. It has renown only for being less suck than Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio, and less hipster than Marfa or Marble Falls. But if you like hot, wet, and flat places which are more international than the UN, it might warm your heart.
14 CommentsCecil’s Pub Reopens In Blighted Concrete Culturevoid Houston
It baffles the mind as to why someone would try to open a killer pub in Houston, but Cecil’s Pub comes from an older time, when Houston had culture (Anglo nerd pioneer cowboy) and was a small city instead of the place people go when they fail in Los Angeles and New York.
2 CommentsTags: beer, cecil's pub, jonah herd
