Happy summer, folks! It’s become tradition here around LR HQ to spend part of July catching up with the things we’ve missed throughout the year, or at least the things we really dig that we missed. No one is going to pretend that we’re catching up with everything, after all… we’re busy, you’re busy, and music is very busy. So what follows is the first part of our favorite things we haven’t yet covered in 2025. Hopefully you find something you love. Also, how is this year already halfway over? Time wins all wars.
CRISIS ACTOR ‒ LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH
released March 10; Wise Blood Records
A name like Crisis Actor is certainly a loaded one in the modern day. Still, luckily, Long Live The New Flesh is loaded with kickass, crusty grind, accompanied by the appropriate political outrage to justify the moniker. Song titles like “Dogshit Politicians” and “The Future Is A Bloated Corpse” are far from subtle nods as to the band’s opinion of the current state of the world. Politically charged tunes should be pissed the fuck off, and Crisis Actor fits the bill perfectly.
What we have here is a group that loves grind but looks most fondly upon its punk roots. There are gang vocals, the absolutely bopping bass on tracks like “Rot,” classic uptempo breakdowns, and the beloved ranting spoken-word intro of a track like the aforementioned “The Future Is A Bloated Corpse.” But, you could also hit play on “Order Of The Gash” and think those deathly growls and vicious feedback are tricking you into hearing a Wormrot song you missed. While the vocals largely stay in the feral lane of a Barney Greenway, the band knows just when to pop in some guttural nonsense or shout-alongs to keep things interesting.
There isn’t anything particularly novel happening here, but there’s not supposed to be. Crisis Actor understands the tools of its trade and expertly deploys them for a sub-20-minute blast you should turn on every time a politician’s bullshit makes your head spin. Ok, maybe not that, since then you’d be listening to it roughly 78 times per day. [SPENCER HOTZ]
TRAUMA BOND ‒ SUMMER ENDS. SOME ARE LONG GONE
released January 12; Independent
Heaviness is relative, of course, and for as long as I’ve been talking about metal with other people who like to talk about metal, there’s the eternal conversation of “What is the heaviest metal of all time?” That’s a conversation that we don’t have time for here, of course – because there’s no real answer – but to tie it to the task at hand: Trauma Bond is what we in the record-reviewing world call “really damned heavy.”
Occupying primarily a grindcore ground, this duo’s sound spreads its tendrils outward into post-punk, Godflesh-esque dystopian industrialized harshness, hardcore punk… It’s a bleak and ugly world that Trauma Bond inhabits, and that’s entirely the point. From the martial whispered chanting of “Brushed By The Storm” to the squalling epic cacophony of “Dissonance,” Summer Ends is 28 minutes of cathartic harshness, sliding easily between more straightforward grinding like “Good Grief” or the punkish “Son Of Scum (Son Of None)” to the somehow even uglier climes of “Chewing Fat” or “Wolfing The Lamb To Mutton.” Eloise Chong Gargette’s vocal range from those whispers to full-throated screaming, while Tom Mitchell provides the (sometimes un-)musical underpinnings, all of it designed for maximum destruction and explosive emotional release.
Having enjoyed the band’s previous EP, I’m not sure how I managed to somehow miss this full length for… oh, about five months or so, but hey, better late than never, right? (I mean, that’s the point of this article, after all.) Summer Ends is all screaming lungs and raging heart, and a no-brainer, through and through. It’s as close to a year-end shoe-in as could possibly be, this one.
Oh, and for the record, Summer Ends is one-hundred-percent heavy as hell, and though they’re very far apart in time and space and scope and sonics, nevertheless, to answer the opening question: Nothing will ever be heavier than those first three notes of “Black Sabbath.” Just my two cents…
Now go listen to Trauma Bond. [ANDREW EDMUNDS]
CKRAFT ‒ UNCOMMON GROUNDS
released January 17; Independent
Now it’s true that the very first thing to notice about Ckraft is the accordion and, as such, odds shoot through the roof that potential listeners will casually dismiss the band as a gimmick. Shame, but I get it. Artists naturally look for that special glinting edge to pull audience eyes and ears and, too often, the result is a nifty novelty that reveals its superficial silliness in short order. Ckraft’s Uncommon Grounds is anything but that.
The accordion in question is a special one, designed by master Ckraftsman Charles Kieny to support synthesized output, and he plays it alongside Théo Nguyen Duc Long on tenor saxophone. Oh boy, here we are now two layers deep in the gimmickry so that one might expect some kind of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum or Mägo de Oz rerun at best, but Ckraft is also not that.
Sharing the stage with Kieny and Long are Antoine Morisot on guitar, Marc Karapetian on bass, and William Bur on drums, comprising a proper rock-and-roll backing band that happens to specialize in the heavy metal variation as proficiently as they do the jazz fusion variation. Their instruments are configured to the deep end of modern metal on the tuning dial without crossing fully into djent and they play with a lithe precision which allows them to adventure in spaces that only rarely coincide and almost never in true synthesis.
Finally, Kieny’s composition skills enable the construction of songs from a bin of pieces that just wouldn’t occur to most folks. A devoted fan of music and its history, Kieny draws from these disparate pools out of more than mere curiosity, tracing the evolution of each backwards to a unifying idea; heavy metal’s fascination with the beauty of death and chaos, the irrepressible yen for freedom that gifted jazz to the world, each of these sharing the spiritual purity of Gregorian chants, from which Kieny draws melodic inspiration.
Pulled off competently as it is, that sort of integration is remarkable in itself, but these players make Kieny’s music with such natural passion that it transcends the crafting of it. Put most simply, the resulting output is something like Meshuggah meets Mahavishnu Orchestra, or King Crimson feat. Tosin Abasi. And of course, that is woefully inadequate. Listen and know. [LONE WATIE]
VAURUVÃ ‒ MAR DA DERIVA
released May 9; Independent
After two stunning displays of lush, progressive black metal, Brazilian duo Vauruvã returns with perhaps their strongest album yet in Mar da Deriva. Despite being only 35 minutes in length, the record shows great range from serene ambience and soft, acoustic passages to intense, raging, blasting black metal, with some of the best moments coming when everything is layered together.
With everything being a really neat mix and adaptation of some very familiar names. The overall aura and folk-tinged passages – including liberal use of flute, subtle keys, and non-kit percussion – ought to remind listeners of peak Negură Bunget (and the way it fades in could be taken as an homage to the opening moments of Om). Add to that Krallice’s heavy use of gorgeous and extremely ample tremolo lines that weave and change shape and a lot of Enslaved’s riff punchiness (think Below the Lights era) and you’ve got most of the picture.
But Vauruvã’s songcraft and soulfulness (if that’s the right word?) are all their own, resulting in an album that flows magically and dynamically from moment to moment, working as both a passive listen and gripping one. Equal parts soothing and intense, escapist and intimate, Mar da Deriva is a beautiful little record that expands what is already becoming quite the catalog from this still very young band. [ZACH DUVALL]
EFFLUENCE ‒ PIANISTIC DISMEMBERMENT
released February 26; Independent
How high is the ceiling for oddity and derangement as it relates to brutal death metal when a brutal death metal album greases its way into your life with all the guitaring replaced by a piano that sort of sounds as if it’s being played by an outraged orangutan that’s been denied its afternoon pail of California clementines. Can you even see the ceiling? Is there even a ceiling up there? I mean, it should be there, because it’s dark in here, the air is deadly still, and there just has to be some sort of limit to how high these walls can reach. Are we in an asylum, me and this orangutangian version of David Helfgott?
Everything about what I’m hearing on this recording feels like a warning of grave danger, but as long as that allegedly great ape continues to focus its wrath on that unfortunate piano instead of turning on me, things should be okay. I think. There are definitely drums here, too, by the way. That is not a machine gun you’re hearing, despite us being in the U, S and A. And there might be another instrument breaking through at times? Yes, let’s just assume this album finds a way to fold a Sarrusophone into the battle, because anything is fucking possible when you can’t tell if you’re hearing vocals or if perhaps a local garbage truck has a Kodiak bear caught in the gears of its trash smasher. Play this album at the same time as another album and you might not tell the difference. Is that a negative feature? It is if you’re a WIMP, because whatever album gets played whilst Pianistic Dismemberment gets air time is an album that’s seen its last days on this toilet earth, and the death blow will not be for the faint of heart. Play any or all of these songs as your first dance with a blushing bride and your firstborn will surely burst from the womb with monster truck tires instead of limbs. Play us a sonnnnng, you’re the orangutan. [CAPTAIN]
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This vauruva really kicks ass, love that second track