Boy, it sure is hot outside, isn’t it? Here we are in the dead of summer, the dog days, if you will, and we figure maybe you could use some things to help improve your mood in the face of all this heat and humidity. So like we do every summer (this year a little later than usual), we’re doing a quick round-up of stuff we dig that we failed to cover when it came out. Turns out there are many such albums (we like to be into stuff), so we’ll be doing this all week. Hopefully we’ll shine a light on something that entertains you enough to forget for a few minutes that your AC just kicked the bucket.
OK GOODNIGHT – STOP/GO
released June 12; independent
Three years after The Fox and the Bird, OK Goodnight returned in June with stop/go, a record that on the first few listens struck me as notably “less” than its predecessor: less climactic emotion, less wild swings in musical intensity. It took an embarrassingly long time to sit down, take another listen and admit to myself – that’s the point.
Ok Goodnight have turned down the macro heaviness AND lightness to deliver a record of a more complicated middle ground. Far from the narrative of their most recent work, these tunes exist in a more human realm of a past, present and future shaded grey by life’s concurrent, contradictory lessons. The instrumentalists still brighten the mood – being prog, this is not on paper “simpler” music than their prior – but the blazes of technicality are corralled into tighter, more figure-based structures. Songs latch onto a few tight grooves and explore their innards a bit more, weaving in and out, over and under. Casey Lee Williams again reigns supreme, her elastic voice able to color every word and note with ease, grace and colossal power.
Fans of progressive metal need not be alone in enjoying stop/go. This is music light enough to satisfy listeners preferring the more artistic avenues of rock and complex enough to reward those collecting notes and time signatures like a scavenger hunt. [ISAAC HAMS]
TRICHOMONIASIS – CONTAINMENT FACILITY
released April 7; New Standard Elite
Report From The Sewer: Part 1
Last Rites Kingdom local news station LRFU received a tip from an archaeologist conducting a dig at a Kentucky home. One Dr. Grant informed us that this endeavor began after a local man, who is confined to his recliner for unknown reasons, discovered his dog had brought a dirt-caked greave in after digging in the backyard. Careful analysis at a local university determined the metal leg guard may have belonged to the original Armored Saint, and the official dig for more commenced within days. One week later, another curious discovery was made. Dr. Grant accidentally punctured a hole in what is now believed to be a natural sewer created by the Earth itself. Before the realization that a hole was made, the immensely putrid smell was waved off as likely coming from the homeowner’s unrepentant flatulence, but its overwhelming and violent persistence became a hazardous miasma leading to further examination and the discovery.
Now, the team has sent me into this earthen poop chute to learn more. The air down here is viscous, the odors noxious, and the sounds nausea-inducing. The noise, in particular, is most alarming. What’s being done to my ears is horrible. There’s a pulsing, almost ambient nature to these tunnels, but the overall aural experience is like sitting next to a canning factory as it’s being sucked into the largest commercial fan known to man. All the while, there are inhuman gurgles and grunts that make me feel like I’m being stalked by the spirit of Theseus’ minotaur. While the soundtrack to this filthscape is overwhelming, there is also a hypnotic quality that’s somehow putting my mind at ease and calls me forth like a siren.
The waste of the planet has risen above my waist. I seem to have developed some sort of vaginal infection, which is especially concerning since I didn’t have a vagina before getting in here. Despite my discomforts and the wooziness these pulsing, brutal sounds are inflicting upon me, I feel compelled to go on. I must allow myself to be subsumed by this discomforting din until I discover its source, but each step promises worse discoveries abound.
Stay tuned for part two on Wednesday. [SPENCER HOTZ]
POWER PALADIN – BEYOND THE REACH OF ENCHANTMENT
released March 27; ROAR! / Rock of Angels Records
Iceland’s Power Paladin have presumably stared into the face of restraint and subtlety and said, “No thank you.” On the power metal purists’ second album, there’s a laser focus on sturdy, boisterous riffing, piercingly clear vocals and easily hummable choruses, and just enough guitar flash to spice the stew without dazzling it to death. For the power metal-unconverted, yes, Power Paladin will still feel like everything happening all at once, but in the midst of the busy, fret-bothering pyrotechnics, there’s a much more classicist heavy metal core. The band shines especially on the storming one-two opening of “Sword Vigor” and “Glade Lords of Athen Loren,” the dramatic, Avantasia-ish “The Arcane Tower” (featuring excellent guest vocals from Majestica’s Tommy Johansson), and the tastefully epic closer “Valediction.” Truly, “Camelot Rock City” is the only bit of rough going, but even so, it’s hardly for lack of commitment. Simply put, Beyond the Reach of Enchantment is sterling Euro power metal that fully understands its assignment and delivers the goods with panache and great relish. [DAN OBSTKRIEG]
PANOPTICON – DET HJEMSØKTE HJERTET
released May 8; Nordvis Produktion
“So much of this album is about things that have passed,” – Austin Lunn
“One time, this guy handed me a picture of him. He said, ‘Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.’ Every picture is of you when you were younger,” – Mitch Hedberg
Every nano-second of our lives represents the present becoming the past. Our selves becoming our former selves. Everything is amid the never ending process of becoming a thing that “has passed.” Every picture is of you when you were younger.
Det Hjemsøkte Hjertet, the twelfth full length project from Ely, Minnesota’s Panopticon, attempts to use melodic, riff-oriented American black metal to communicate how the inexorable march of loss makes us feel. How it feels to know that 100 years ago a man might gaze over a campfire into the woods of northern Minnesota and catch a fugitive glimpse of a herd of Woodland Caribou, but now nobody will ever do such a thing ever again. Because the Woodland Caribou have passed on. How for many years maybe you sat down to family dinners of varying quality but consistent company, but then not so much, and someday never again. How now your child calls you “daddy,” and one day will you “dad,” but one day might stop calling altogether.
The passage of time and the losses we accrue as we endure it are brutally painful, but there’s also beauty in loving something so much that it pains you to feel it slip through your fingers. Det Hjemsøkte Hjertet lives at this nexus of pain and beauty. [DAVID FONSECA]
ARMORED SAINT – EMOTION FACTORY RESET
released May 22; Metal Blade Records
Eternal underdogs, Armored Saint soldiers ever onward, coming off one of the strongest records of their four-decade career in 2020’s Punching The Sky. That one delivered everything the longtime Saint faithful have come to expect: rifftastic classic-styled heavy metal, driven by Gonzo’s rock-solid drum battery and topped off with one of the finest voices to ever grace a metal record in any decade, the powerful sandpaper-throated soar of the man himself, John Bush.
So does (the admittedly awkwardly titled) Emotion Factory Reset live up to the band’s legacy? Well, of course – Armored Saint doesn’t make bad records, really. But that said, it’s not as immediate a smasher as Punching was, more of a settled-in, grower-not-shower type when it all comes down to it. Being fully honest, upon initial spins, I would’ve said that it was a slight disappointment, but over repeated re-listens across a few months, the hooks have sunk in deeper, and I’ve come around on it quite a bit.
Opener “Close To The Bone” is a full-on Saint ripper, and “Hit A Moonshot” manages to both rock and rhyme the titular lucky hit with “jack squat” and come out for the better. (Bush’s propensity for atypical phrases and idiosyncratic lyrical twists remains fully intact, fear not. Emotion Factory Reset features what is likely the first-ever appearance of the phrase “dollars to doughnuts” on a metal record.) Not every song is a total knockout – the latter half feels a bit lesser, overall – but with each repeated revisit, I find more to like about even those that I discounted at first, and at the end of it, that’s clearly enough to keep me coming back.
May the Saint march on for many more to come. [ANDREW EDMUNDS]
BURIED – IMAGINED DEFORMATION
released February 6; independent
What more do you idiots want? Bask in the glory of these three crucial attributes. Riffs: The mid-paced death metal churn of “Psychogenic Excoriation” is like Nightmares Made Flesh-era Bloodbath with a brutaler build and ignoranter skill tree. Pedigree: Greetings, Joel Sta (vocals) and Mark Wormmeester (bass) of Pyaemia, one of the Dutch scene’s greatest BDM exports that combined catchiness with gut-spilling shred. Co-sign from very important people: I like Imagined Deformation, Buried’s second album, a lot. Ultimately, I think what people might get hung up on is that Buried isn’t a great first-blush band. Compared to what is probably banging around your Bandcamp feed if you follow the right degenerates, it’s not flashy; it’s not weird. Like, Trichomoniasis or Effluence make Imagined Deformation sound downright Top 40 radio-ready, or a yacht ride away from a Grover Washington Jr. feature. But Buried’s solidness really, uh, solidifies with multiple listens, letting the hefty hookiness come through. It reminds me of Baest in that regard, another solid death metaller that ain’t a stranger to memorability, but gets short shrift because it’s not bonkers blogger bait. The difference between the two is that Baest is Swedeath while Buried fits right in with a long lineage of Dutch depravity. To that end, sleeving Imagined Deformation in a CD booklet alongside two of its immediate relations, Arsebreed and Disavowed, makes sense, even if Buried is the brother who simplified their life by cleaning themselves up. There’s just that grooviness and attention to shred present, prime old dog traits, and something you could trace back to the pestilential progenitors of the regional style, as much as that style can be a recognizable thing in the post-globalized blergh world. Anyway, Buried is good, idiots. [SETH BUTTNAM]
FAKE DUST – DECREPITIZING DIN OF THE CEREBRAL PSYOPTICON
released May 15; Iron Lung Records
I understand this statement will likely make me sound as old as I actually am, but if you’re a technical grindcore act with a clean and overly precise approach to the blueprint, I’ll probably drag my feet and just about any other feets in my vicinity when it comes time to check out your wares. Granted, I have softened on that stance over the years, but I still fall the quickest and hardest for those acts that remember how impactful grindcore can be when they underscore the more raw and feral side of the off-shoot’s hardcore / crust punk roots. Grindcore is an explosion of intense outrage, sending splinters in indiscriminate directions as listeners are sent hurtling through brick walls and plate-glass windows like a scene out of an old Charles Bronson movie. This, I am very pleased to report, is the realm of Fake Dust, one of the best things to come out of PDX since Big League Chew (it’s true, look it up), or at least since… Rigorous Institution?
You want it fast? Decrepitizing Din of Cerebral Psyopticon is faster than the Roadrunner with a bee up its ass. You want bulldozing? This record will tenderize a 25-pound brisket before the last song crosses the finish line. You want scootable grooves? You will pick one of these songs to dance with your dear abuela on her 90th birthday, and she’ll only have to put up with it for 52 seconds. You want guitar solos? Well, you’re pretty much fucked in that department.
Basically, this is 2026’s answer to Anal Cunt, but replace the crack-addicted songs about tree shredder foreplay and EMF covers with topics such as “self-medication, anxiety, paranoia, data collection, disillusion, deception, etc.” [CAPTAIN]
JAKABOL – LEORNIAN
released March 26; independent
The UK’s Jakabol are chimerical. They build with familiar pieces from disparate places – folk, metal, prog, psych, a little noise – and then fill the space with strange shapes, eerie light and shadow.
Their second album, Leornian, is a laudanum embrace. Comfort to be whatever it wants to be, even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially. Just when you’ve steadied yourself against the tilt, familiar sounds make you question the need to; you’ve been here before, done this. But not really. And so you brace for a new descent, only to find yourself surrendering. It’s warm. Enveloping. Safe?
You’ll hear other albums this year with violin (and viola) and heavy distorted guitars, static and noisy effects and odd instrumentation (not many with harmonium, though, I bet!), and thoughtfully experimental songwriting, and none of them will sound like Leornian. One of the year’s true hidden gems. [LONE WATIE]
