I don’t know if Ihsahn’s new album qualifies for one of my most anticipated of 2024 because I received the (streaming-only) promo slightly before it came out. It still hit me out of nowhere. I will confess to being a fan, but his solo works haven’t done much for me on the last few records. […]

Shade Empire, if nothing else, is a band who has time and again shown a willingness to let their sound morph and mutate into new forms, almost with every single release. When they entered the chat back in 2004 with their debut Sinthetic, they brought with them a Melodeath attack akin to fellow fins’ Mors Principium […]

To this day, Defeat from California’s Armed for Apocalypse is one of the best and heaviest sludge albums I’ve ever reviewed. A meaty, filthy guitar tone with an almost doom/death metal backbone, it was and still is an incredibly heavy album. They followed that up with The Road Will End in 2018, a solid follow-up, […]

The UKs Necronautical (which I’m now learning means ‘to explore death’, and not something maritime related…) first appeared on my radar their second effort, 2016s, The Endurance at Night on the then reborn , legendary UK label, Cacophonous Records. They were a solid , enjoyable, but unspectacular symphonic black metal act with innate Cradle of […]

Sometimes as a reviewer here at Teeth of the Divine I will randomly click on something and just let it buck while I am working on something else.  That was the case for me with Shrapnel’s’ Palace of the Insane. Hailing from Norwich England this Shrapnel’s third full length and have been around since 2009.   […]

Norway’s Blood Red Throne return with their eighth studio album. For those of you that are not familiar with this group was started by Dod (Satyricon) and Tchort (Emperor) and have been around since 1998 and they play a murderously American style of brutal old school death metal. Union of Flesh and Machine opens with “Revolution […]

The lone traveler on the cover of Arktis, Ihsahn’s sixth solo release, may as well be the man himself. Ever since departing Emperor, Ihsahn has charted his own paths across rough and largely unknown terrain. Previous album Das Seelenbrechen veered off into particularly strange and challenging territory – even for me, a die-hard fan of his work […]

I am one for concept albums especially when they revolve around late 1970’s Horror Films and that is exactly what Demon Lung’s A Dracula is. Produced by Billy Anderson (Neurosis, High on Fire) A Dracula has a fantastically heavy and sludgy production.  I was not too familiar with Demon Lung when I choose to do […]

Sigh. It’s been awhile. This is a band that I was once totally in love with; going all the way back to the release of their 1997 album, Hail Horror Hail. Sigh have always been a completely fearless musical entity; even from their formative, moribund Venom necro-worship on Scorn Defeat, they were already taking chances […]

I really enjoyed Bite Your Head Off, the 2012 debut album from Australia’s King Parrot. It was a fun and rollicking blast which hybridized grind, thrash and punk into a fresh and unique sound, spiked with a refreshing sense of humor. Apparently a lot of other folks enjoyed it as well judging by the rising […]

Do you remember the first time you heard City by Strapping Young Lad? Can you also remember trying to describe it to your friends? You’re going to have the same problem with London. But, you won’t be able to say it sounds like City, because for the most part, it doesn’t. So, why am I […]

When covering the newest release from a group with a storied back catalogue, the question of how to approach the writing always exists.  Of course each album should be judged based on its own merits, but within that set of boundaries other issues arise: how it compares to the last record, how it compares to […]

The debut Where Distant Spirits Remain, from Glasgow’s Falloch was an interesting post rock/black metal/grey metal opus with Agalloch-ian hues. However it was the work of a duo, Andy Marshall and Scott Mclean, and Marshall since left the band (creating more atmospheric black/Celtic metal with Saor, which I highly recommend) leaving McLean to rebuild, and rebuild he has […]

One of the things that makes black metal so interesting as a genre is it unique ability to capture the essence of a particular place and use the listeners imagination to take them there. Winterfylleth is a band that has always made good use of their English surroundings for inspiration and do so again on […]

I must confess I am not well versed in Krieg‘s back catalogue, being more familiar with Neil Jameson’s work with Twilight. I enjoyed The Black House but I haven’t listened to it in years. However, Krieg is a key USBM band that stands alongside the likes of Leviathan, Mutiilation, and Nachtmystium in terms of importance […]

The oddly named Pet Slimmers of the Year have released one of the best post-rock/metal albums I’ve heard in a long time, and it’s thanks in part to incorporation of elements not commonly found in post-rock: clean vocals, a sincere sense of melancholy usually reserved for gothic rock, and a thorough understanding of what makes […]

Bite Your Head Off, the debut album from Australian extreme metal troupe King Parrot, was released domestically back in 2012 amidst largely positive reactions. Now after deservedly landing a multiple record deal with Candlelight Records, and currently carving their path through a string of shows in North America, King Parrot are making significant waves and […]

Ok, here is a brief history of Pestilence & some out there may have similar viewpoints.  Their first 3 albums are legendary in my book, therefore pointless to comment on.  The 1993 release of their progressive, jazz-fusion hybrid death metal album, Spheres, polarized their fan base so much that fans dropped off the face of […]

“Art of the ugly soul. One is limiting art much too severely when one demands that only the composed soul, suspended in moral balance, may express itself there. As in the plastic arts, there is in music and poetry an art of the ugly soul, as well as an art of the beautiful soul; and […]

It would be easy to assume that a band who takes their name from an Electric Wizard song would fit in nicely with the bleary eyed stoner doom bands roaming metal’s landscape nowadays. It’s an easy assumption, but a wrong one. Despite the implication of their moniker, Las Vegas’ Demon Lung stands out as a […]

It’s one thing to have some kickass tunes loaded up on your album. It’s another thing entirely to have kickass tunes loaded with more energy than a pack of hyenas. For Scotland’s Cnoc An Tursa, the relative newcomers have delivered an album that is overflowing with hooks, melodies, grooves and an endless surplus of raw […]

It goes without saying that the United Kingdom has birthed some of the greatest acts the rock and metal world has ever heard. Pink Floyd. Led Zeppelin. Black Sabbath. Iron Maiden. Napalm Death. Carcass. Cradle of Filth. The list is seemingly endless, though the majority of what many believe to be the best of the best hail from England. Yes, Ireland has had its fair share of terrific musicians/bands over they years but there’s one country that is hardly, if ever, mentioned as even a hive of metal: Scotland. With their debut full length The Giants of Auld just released last month, black/folk metal act Cnoc An Tursa are hoping to change that.

Over the course of the past few years, Iceland has become a hotbed (or cold bed; however you want to say it) of metal. Skalmold, Dynfari, Ophidian I, Solstafir and others all call Iceland home and all have their own uniqueness to stand out in front of the growing pack. Though it’s not about to […]

Candlelight Records today confirms April 23 as the North American release date for Withdrawal, the third album from black metallers WOE. Produced by vocalist/guitarist Chris Grigg and mastered by Colin Marston, the album features seven new songs with a running time of 43 minutes. It is the first new material by the band since 2010’s […]

First off, I am most honored to be writing for Teeth of the Divine. Instead of routinely misspelling the URL (long domain names are a problem spot for me), I can now have it saved to my favorites and see my work alongside some rather top-notch writers. Prior to this, I was editor for Blistering.com, […]