Metal music stood against its time by endorsing the mythological-historical view of our world instead of linear progress driven by technology, metaphysical dualism, and peer pressure. As such it is the ultimate minority voice calling for realism among the blur of human emotions and fears.
87 CommentsSlayer Haunting The Chapel Hits 40th Anniversary
When we look back at the present era, we will separate out stuff that was aligned with the mainstream illusion from material that tried to discover an inner truth paired with external reality. Anything outside of the bourgeois Consumerist, Communist, and Christian social bubble will endure.
15 CommentsTags: cold war, death metal, Satanism, slayer, Speed Metal, underground metal
From Hades to Valhalla: Bathory The Epic Story by Jose Luis Cano Barron (2024)
By the time black metal and death metal made it back, the actual inspirations — Slayer, Hellhammer, Sodom, and Bathory — were almost forgotten in a rush toward the new style that was birthed from combining their approaches. Now the history fleshes itself out a bit.
115 CommentsTags: Bathory, Black Metal, book, jose luis cano barron, pagan records
Condemner Releases Demo Track “Waters of Infanticide”
Condemner pursues more of an explicit war metal sound that merges Havohej with touches of Demoncy and Beherit along with ancient death metal like Mythic and modern war metal like Kaeck. It grinds, it establishes a primal and intolerant logicality, and then it expands into mystical texture.
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What Is Art?
Writing about a dead genre can be exhausting. You search through ten thousand bands looking for the few that grasp what the genre was always about — its newer incarnations are meaningless — and despite enjoying this, find that the good is drowned out by the mediocre.
103 CommentsTags: art, Black Metal, Heavy Metal, Satan, underground metal
Unholy Craft – Saa Mørkt, Saa Mektig (2024)
Unholy Craft builds in the style of later Darkthrone with the pacing of Mayhem, delivering an enjoyable journey through melody meeting noise and pummeling d-beats and blast beats, which although somewhat fungible manages some unique riffs based in compelling rhythm accented by melody.
36 CommentsTags: Black Metal, unholy craft
Pestilence – Levels of Perception (2024)
Attempting to create continuity between older and newer works, Pestilence re-recorded a selection of “greatest hits” that leans hard on the more recent albums, as such compilations always tend to do. This proves an intelligent idea since it creates an album that sounds internally consistent and gives the band a chance to give these songs a more aggressive edge.
16 CommentsTags: death metal, pestilence
Unleashed – Before the Creation of Time (2024)
Before the moniker Goat found me, friends called me Sven because after a few bonghits my conversation tended toward praise of Swedish death metal. The Swedes perfected death metal, working in melody as structure and turning rhythm into a primitive but nuanced weapon.
61 CommentsTags: darkness shall rise, death metal, Sweden, Unleashed
Interview With Eli Azrael
As our longtime readers know, this site started out in the hacker days of the 1980s as a type of free speech protest designed to expand the various Overton-style Windows through shocking, disturbing, blasphemous, gory, apostatic, and sodomitic propaganda. We dislike censorship.
9 CommentsTags: bandcamp, censorship, eli azrael, soundcloud
Judas Priest – Invincible Shield (2024)
Judas Priest came out of the era that melded Black Sabbath with Led Zeppelin and came up with some of the most creative guitar riffology in history, raising the standards by which any new album will be judged, and Invincible Shield tries to balance their past with multiple career peaks.
56 CommentsTags: Heavy Metal, judas priest, NWOBHM, power metal