I grabbed the debut full-length album from Barcelona’s Mankind Grief as Lacerated Enemy has released a couple of solid blackened deathcore releases already in 2022 ( Hurakan’s Via Eterna and Downfall of Mankind‘s Vile Birth) and Monarch had a song on it called “LV-426”, so I was hoping for a full-on Alien/Aliens themed album. Alas, […]

Now THAT is an album cover. T-shirt immediately purchased. But how is the music? Well, Lacerated Enemy has taken a break from symphonic/blackened deathcore and delivered us a fucking monster of a slam/brutal death metal record from France’s Kanine. And if you thought Organectomy (whose Nail Below Nail releases the same day as Karnage) or […]

So a handful of excellent blackened/symphonic deathcore (or whatever you want to call it) releases have come out in 2022 to basically keep fans satiated until Lorna Shore drop Pain Remains later this year; Shadow of Intent, Hurakan, Downfall of Mankind, Worm Shepherd (who will somehow be releasing a second album later this year…) to […]

Sharing 3/5 of its members with new, very popular deathcore act Crown Magnetar, you’d be forgiven for simply assuming Detroit’s And Hell Followed With was a new, flash in the pan band that sounds exactly like Crown Magnetar. And they do play deathcore, so you’d be partially correct. However, let’s not forget that AHFW were […]

France’s Hurakan (the Mayan god of wind, storm, and fire?) has apparently undergone a bit of rebirth from their first two more brutal death metal/slamming death/tech death albums, which feature songs titles like “Brutal Slamming Shit”, “Intergalactic Moo Moo Imperator”, “Xenometh” and “Transdimensional Whorehouse Spaceship”. They have changed logos, and now jumped on the more […]

It’s amazing what adding a new band member or two can do for a band. After a self-released EP, The Prophet of Disgust, in 2018, Colorado’s Crown Magnetar added vocalist Dan Tucker and guitarist Nick Scott From And Hell Followed With, a decent deathcore band who were actually on Earache Records at one point (and […]

Around the esteemed Teeth of the Divine halls, unlike a lot of metal websites full of elitists, we like deathcore. The proof of this would be the reviews from Aethereus, Devils of Loudon, Shadow of Intent, Mines of Moria, Signs Of The Swarm, Worm Shepherd, Fit For an Autopsy,  and The Last Ten Seconds of […]

Man… now that is an album cover. In the annals of heavy metal/extreme music, the writings of JRR Tolkien have long resided in largely black metal  (Summoning), power metal (Blind Guardian), ‘garb-core’ (Battlelore) and even death metal (Khazaddum). But what the world was clearly lacking was some Tolkien-based, technical, blackened deathcore. Well, here comes Washington […]

January of 2020, specifically January 14th, was quite the day for deathcore. You had releases from Worm Shepherd, Fit For An Autopsy, Enterprise Earth, and a new Ingested single, as well as album number four from Connecticut’s Shadow of Intent, one of symphonic deathcore’s top bands As with 2019s excellent Melancholy, which tackled mental health […]

Deathcore is having another moment. This new wave is being led by such heavyweights from last year such as Worm Shepherd, Osiah, Mental Cruelty, Signs of the Swarm, and Bound in Fear, and looks to be off to a good start with new Worm Shepherd and Shadow of Intent due out in January along with […]

It’s a shame when a band, especially one so far into their career, doesn’t know who or what they want to be. With a discography in the range of good to great, unfortunately it feels like this is where we find deathcore veterans Fit For An Autopsy. I’ll explain… While the opening track, which is […]

Symphonic or blackened deathcore blew the fuck up in 2021. Though it was certainly a thing before 2020, After the success of Lorna Shore‘s Immortal in 2020, the genre simply exploded with already established and new bands like Mental Cruelty, Shadow of Intent, Sin Deliverance, Dead World Reclamation,  Darker By Design, Carnifex, Assemble the Chariots, […]

So here is one of my more obscure forays into 2021’s bumper crop of deathcore and it’s from Ukranian act, Lieweaver who split the middle ground between burly mid-paced downtempo deathcore and more technical death metal stylings and also throw in a few atmospheric keyboards here and there. It’s not doing anything particularly original or […]

Osiah, Lorna Shore, Signs of the Swarm, Crown Magnetar, Worm Shepherd, Lieweaver, Distant, Slaughter to Prevail, Mental Cruelty, Dead/Awake, and others, : “We released the heaviest deathcore releases of 2021!” Bound in Fear: “…Hold my beer”. The UKs Bound In Fear snuck onto my 2019 year-end list with The Hand of Violence (“Stigmata” and “Hate […]

“Breathe in through your nose and out through your vagina.” This is the breathing process. At least that’s what I told a former friend who was getting a particular painful wrist tattoo. There’s also a band with the name The Breathing Process, and they may beg to differ. MAY. Anyway, I’ve never heard these blackened […]

Like it or not, deathcore is having a pretty solid comeback over the last couple or years, and it appears to be peaking in 2021 with Unique Leader Records leading the charge with releases from the likes of Distant, Osiah, To The Grave, Humanity’s Last Breath, Mental Cruelty, Worm Shepherd, Bound In Fear, (a few […]

The debut album, Misery Sermon from these track suit and mask wearing Russian deathcore thugs was one of my guilty pleasures of 2017, but then they went a bit quiet for a couple of years. But a flurry of singles and videos in 2019, 2020 and 2021 (and even got the famed metal gunner/drummer treatment […]

New Jersey’s Lorna Shore has come a long way since I reviewed their 2013 EP, Maleficum, a decent but standard deathcore release that had a few symphonic elements here and there. But through  2015s Psalms and 2017s Flesh Coffin, they gradually added more epic, symphonic elements, but they really didn’t register as something special at […]

Despite being one of the early deathcore bands to successfully add keyboards to their repertoire and become more of a blackened deathcore band 4-5 albums ago, Carnifex has been surpassed by the likes of Shadow of Intent, Mental Cruelty and Lorna Shore when it comes to this supposed  ‘blackened deathcore’ sound (and you could make […]

Sun of the Suns is a new band from Italy featuring members of tech-death act Carnality, deathcore stompers The Modern Age Slavery, and symphonic death metal band Nightland, but also features  Francesco Paoli from Fleshgod Apocalypse helping out on drums. And for once, the FFO recommendations in the promo actually nail it pretty hard, mentioning […]

I rather enjoyed 2019s Tyrannotophia, from this Dutch downtempo band, as it ended up being one of the better deathcore/ downtempo releases I have still heard. Then I found the follow-up EP, Dawn of Curruption a bit boring, and the band got surpassed by label mates Bound In Fear as the best band in the […]

Every time I’m ready to signal the death knell for deathcore, along comes a release that kinda gets me excited about the genre again, whether it’s a veteran band like Despised Icon coming back from the dead or a newcomer like Anime Terror. Right now it happens to be the Unique Leader duo of Mental […]

In the promo materials, Mental Cruelty is described as “haunting death metal.” As I’ve yet to be visited by any ghostly apparitions, I call shenanigans! However, when it comes to what style of music these dudes play, it’s more along the lines of symphonic brutal blackened deathcore. Think somewhere along the lines of Lorna Shore, […]

Like many, I’ve been waiting on a new Vildhjarta album for almost a decade now as the band has yet to release anything other than a few teasers and track or an EP since 2011’s, Masstaden. But little did I know there has been a perfectly good (and more productive) stand-in band lurking in the […]

Unique Leader has been heavy on the deathcore/downtempo so far in early 2021 with 2 conceptual EPs from Distant (both a bit underwhelming), Australia’s to To The Grave and their debut, Humanity’s Last Breath,  and this the second release from the UKs Bound In Fear, and boy it is  a doozy. Distant might have been […]