Generally Impressed With Riffs
[Album artwork by Harshanand Singh] The third album is in some ways a litmus test for a band’s longevity. Three albums is a sufficient sample size—you can generally tell where a band is headed, whether they’ll last, whether they speak …
[Pre]-historically speaking, the boys, Nocturno Culto and Fenriz, have always been influenced by the likes of Celtic Frost, Bathory, and all things ‘80s. In fact, they don’t shy away from the fact that it’s always been about that era. After …
[Cover art by Quinn Henderson] You’re familiar with the term, “unc,” right? If not, it generally refers to a washed up older feller whose personality in large part revolves around extravagantly performing confusion and/or displeasure at the mere notion of …
[Artwork by Caroline Harrison] “Nonsense” opens with a slow fade-in of distorted guitars and seismic drums — the chaos before the swarm. It’s a trick of the trade, the extreme metal equivalent of a camera operator calling out “speed” before …
Kia ora, crüe. Welcome back to In Crust We Trust. This semi-regular round-up focuses on crust punk, d-beat, stenchcore, raw punk, and every other Dis-charged subgenre. Artier punk occasionally appears, but in the main, ICWT …
For a band with a somewhat complex legacy, Cathedral really knew how to wrap things up with a very high quality bow back in 2013. The Last Spire was a heavy, deathly serious slab of …
Miasmatic Deathless Chamber is Demiurgon’s third album. And because I am not familiar with the band’s prior two albums, I had decided at some point that I would dig before I attempted to describe this …
[Cover art by Eliran Kantor] Thrash metal is a young man’s game. Glance across the genre’s 40-plus years of history and you’ll find that the vast majority of great albums were released when the musicians …
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a person within spitting distance of heavy metal on the internet in possession of some dumbass opinion about power metal must be in want of having their dumbass …
[Album artwork by fleshflies] If Conan The Sumerian had pursued The Secret of Acid in lieu of The Riddle of Steel, Conan The Barbarian would have been a very different film. Like, eat shit, Wheel …
[Cover artwork by David Dubenic] It’s tempting to call Dissona a passion project. Based in and around Chicago, they’ve been making progressive metal for more than 15 years, outlasting the tides of misfortune and disappointment, …
[Cover art by Alex Eckman-Lawn] If you look at other pages and conversations about An Abstract Illusion, you’ll likely find that they are most often saddled with the progressive death metal genre tag. Surely, I’m …
