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From Friday 03 February 2017

Stay Frosty with Norway’s SIBIIR

Traditionally Norway has been pretty excellent in providing the world with the best in frost-bitten extremity, so it comes as little surprise that progressive blackened hardcore troupe SIBIIR, who’s self-titled debut album dropped at the very tail-end of 2016, call capital city Oslo their home. Their country’s dark musical

Tuesday 31 January 2017

Galactic Empire – ‘Galactic Empire’

Unless you’ve been living in a Sarlacc Pit for the last few years, it’s fair to assume you might have noticed that Star Wars is popular again. After a decade of Prequel Trilogy hangover, Disney’s intervention, and the subsequent release of The Force Awakens and Rogue One,

Friday 27 January 2017

The Drip deliver face-peeling grind straight to your veins

I’m a sucker for HM-2 soaked grind and hardcore, and thanks to good old Relapse Records I may just have discovered a new favourite band in Washington State’s The Drip. Having released their debut album this month in the shape of ‘The Haunting Fear Of Inevitability’, The Drip take

Tuesday 24 January 2017

Twinesuns – ‘The Empire Never Ended’

Historically, drums have played a pretty important role in the evolution of heavy music. From the crushing doom grooves Bill Ward brought to Black Sabbath, through to the embryonic blastbeats of Mick Harris on Napalm Death’s legendary ‘Scum’ album, via Dave Lombardo’s neck-breaking thrash playing and double-kick

Sunday 22 January 2017

Ruetz – ‘Melanoma’

There’s a scene at the beginning of the (not exactly wonderful) movie ‘Prometheus’ that shows one of the Engineers sacrificing itself, breaking itself down at a molecular level in order to seed new life on a young planet. If you’ll allow this terrible excuse for an Alien prequel to

Saturday 26 November 2016

Witchery – ‘In His Infernal Majesty’s Service’

It’s been 6 agonising years since Sweden’s blackened thrash-meisters Witchery last unleashed their brand of furious devilment upon the world with 2010’s ‘Witchkreig’. That’s a long time for any band to wait between releases, and though Witchery have remained a vital staple of the world’s live circuit,

Wednesday 23 November 2016

Zao – ‘The Well-Intentioned Virus’

Legendary. It’s a word that carries a lot of weight, and one that often gets thrown around without real due cause. Plenty of artists over the years have been dubbed ‘legends’ simply by having been around for a long time, or for amassing a hefty back-catalogue. However,

Monday 07 November 2016

Calligram – ‘Demimonde’

When most people think of black metal, they conjure up images of long-haired ghouls in corpse paint and spiked arm gauntlets, running around frost-bitten forests in Scandinavia and burning churches. The iconography of the genre is well known, and at this point also a little hackneyed. Where

Monday 31 October 2016

Red Fang – ‘Only Ghosts’

Suits of armour made from Pabst cans. Vengeful LARPers. Beer zombies. A beaten up car smashing through a china cabinet. There’s a good chance that one of these comes to mind when you hear Red Fang’s name. In an age where people can become self-made millionaires by

Thursday 27 October 2016

The Sword – ‘Low Country’

There’s a school of thought that suggests the true test of a great song is that it can be stripped down to its bare bones and still have the same impact. Texan riff-mongers The Sword have taken this idea and run with it on their latest release ‘Low Country’,