France’s Aosoth released one of the greatest black metal albums I ever heard in 2013-IV: An Arrow in Heart. It made my best of list and I interviewed them as well.  Nice dudes, creating some dark and brutal music.  There were a few death metal elements on the album and it was just fantastic.  Fast […]

We had to wait 13 years between Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Age and its second chapter, Dialogue with the Stars – which has since become one of my favorite metal albums of all time. Now Vindsval has only taken 5 years to deliver Saturnian Poetry. Don’t hold it against him; in the meantime, he’s started and completed the 777 trilogy, […]

The self-titled album. A tradition as old as almost metal itself. There are several reasons for the eponymous album title. An introduction, by which the band simply says “We are Iron Maiden. We are Black Sabbath. We are Bathory. And this is our sound.” Or a re-introduction, where the band has undergone some significant change, […]

I’ll be honest, the French (Canadian) spelling of the word ‘nuclear’ is about as threatening as George W. Bush’s ‘nucular’. Also, when you title your album Unrelenting Fucking Hatred, that sets all kinds of warning signs that this is not going to be particularly original. However, given that this project was started by Lord Worm […]

Cult of Fire are described as “the new Czech masters of atmospheric black metal,” following in the tradition of forebears like Master’s Hammer and Root. A lofty statement, but once you hear Triumvirát, it’s an undeniable one as well. (And if those names aren’t enough for you, drummer Tom Coroner also led a previous life […]

The press notes for this French black metal band mention the strange, underground terror of Les Legions Noires as part of their heritage. Not quite; that’s a comparison better suited for atmospheric and boundary-straining countrymen like Deathspell Omega or Blut Aus Nord. I’d place Fhoi Myore – named for a tribe of frost giants from […]

One of the recent forum threads here at Teeth of the Divine tried to define a signature sound or aesthetic for USBM (that’s American black metal for those of you in the dark). I arrived at the conclusion that it’s a meaningless exercise, because the term is so broad. Just as the United States contains […]

Eastern Europe has produced some excellent pagan black metal bands over the last decade or more, the most well-known being Drudkh, Negura Bunget and Nokturnal Mortum. Yet there are undoubtedly dozens of other quality, uniquely Eastern acts still sheltered by those untravelled hills and forests. Ukraine’s Khors is one of those treasures. Wisdom of Centuries is their […]

Laster, from Utrecht, in the Netherlands, have a classic ’90s atmospheric black metal sound – some might label this as DSBM (depressive/suicidal black metal), a term that gained popularity around the time of Leviathan and Xasthur, but Burzum’s spare and vicious nocturnes needed no such moniker back in the day. Others might also tag this […]

My boys and I sometimes look under the stones around our property. We know what we will usually find – dry, dusty things, the occasional beetle, maybe some fungus. Occasionally we are surprised by a lizard or newt, if it is wet enough. And so it goes with bands like Mystagog, from Hungary. I know what […]

“If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” Everyone knows that Nietzsche quote. The man is featured on the cover of Ihsahn’s fourth solo album – inverted, but there nonetheless – but I’m not going to choose that overused and pithy bit to describe the darkness contained within. Too obvious. Instead, […]

Vetterkult, the newest album from Norway’s Vetter, is one of those albums that just misses on almost all marks. It’s one of the classic albums that builds up to a crescendo but falls short of being dynamic. When the elements and ideas come together on Vetterkult, the album works well. Unfortunately, those moments are not […]

It’s not often these days that a brand-spankin’ new black metal band comes out of the woodwork and does the genre of music properly. Usually the young “kvlt” tikes latch onto the typical Dark Throne/Dark Funeral/Burzum/early Emperor coloring book and fail miserably. The general reasons for said failures is because the kids just don’t know […]

Oh man, what a weird little album this is. Hail Spirit Noir are two guys from Greece, playing a kooky mix of black metal and late ’60s psychedelic folk. I wish Pneuma were actually 40 years old, and that I’d found it on vinyl in the back of some musty old secondhand store, all covered […]

Cthulhu mythos and Lovecraftian fiction have long been a part of metal, but in my experience it’s generally been in the realms of cavernous doom or gnarly, undulating death metal and typically a more nasty, disturbing musical representation of the subject matter. But here come France’s The Great Old Ones, and in typically elite French […]

If Satyricon weren’t boring they’d be Panchrysia. I hadn’t heard of these Belgian black metallers until recently so I had a peek through their back catalog. I was surprised to find how familiar the riffs were. After two releases with an oppressive, Zyklon-esque production, 2008’s Deathcult Salvation adopted more of the cold, clinical style of […]

It’s been awhile since I’ve had anyone satisfy my yen for Dimmu Borgir-style symphonic black metal. For awhile, and mostly in the late ’90s, it seemed to be everywhere: Old Man’s Child of course, but also Mactatus, Mystic Circle, Stormlord, Morgul, Anorexia Nervosa, Thyrane, Carach Angren, Ninnuam, and so on. And although most of those […]

Kommandant‘s approach to black metal is one that is strongly focused on invoking a particular ambiance and frame of mind. The aim here isn’t to simply grab one by the throat and desecrate; there’s a strongly adamant intention to progressively absorb the listener with the elements present in this sound. Make no mistake, there’s plenty […]

There’s an old adage that states ‘never judge a book by its cover’, and that applies aptly in the case of the debut album from Columbia’s King. Based on the Dark Funeral reject cover art, song titles like “Non laughter – Zero Fucking Happiness” and “Kill the Posers Like Fucking Christians” as well as the […]

Empyreal Cycle is the second self-released effort from Slovenia’s Smargroth, a fantasy based (knights, dragons, wizards etc) melodic black metal band. And while they aren’t bringing anything really striking or new to the table, they perform their chosen style well enough to be checked out by fans of Dissection, Sargeist, Naglfar and other less extreme […]

Willowtip has scored yet another massive-sounding and terrifying band in Australia’s Beyond Terror Beyond Grace. If you want to know what they sound like, well, the name says it all. These guys have created a black/post-metal sound at once brutal and transcendent – full of terror, full of grace and yet beyond both. Nadir pulverizes you with […]

Remember that jaw-dropping moment in your childhood when you saw ex-Green Ranger Tommy Oliver coming back stronger than ever as the badass White Ranger in Season 2 of the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers? Yeah, Sigh’s upcoming album certainly did an excellent job at evoking that long-forgotten feeling of inane joy. As always, the Japanese are […]

France’s Griffar started out as a pagan black metal band; their 2000 release Of Witches and Celts featured lengthy, highly melodic compositions and a buzzy, wall-of-sound approach. After a few aborted attempts to return over the last decade, they’ve finally reformed with an updated and more muscular sound. Griffar now sounds like late 90s melodic black […]

The Pacific Northwest gets a lot of USBM love – all those towering primeval forests, rugged coastlines and deep, billowing fog banks conjure the same fascination and mysticism as the old country (i.e. Norway). But what about the Great Northeast? There’s more up there than just Martha’s Vineyard, dropped r’s and lobster rolls. They’ve got […]

Viktor Scheer and András Nagy are the only holdovers from the last album. Viktor producing and András doing virtually everything else.Everything old is new again. Welcome back founding guitarists János Barbarics and Csaba Csejtei. János played on The Pagan Winter, Phantoms and Haunting, Csaba played on The Pagan Winter, Phantoms, Forsaken Symphony and Glory And […]