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Counting members of such forward-thinking hardcore acts as Have Heart, Fucking Invincible, Verse, and Soul Control amongst its ranks, Sweet Jesus‘ vivifying and powerful debut full-length You Destroy Yourself pays homage to late 80s/early 90s D.C. emotive hardcore without sliding into pure imitation. Today Decibel brings you a taste of what’s to come with the…

So Decibel assumes at this point you’ve got your dozen roses, the perfect card, maybe some wine. All these have been easily attainable and, really, almost unavoidable for the last four to six weeks. Valentine’s Day mood music, on the other hand, has remained maddeningly elusive for those inclined towards the extremely extreme. Until now….

Later this month, Dutch sextet Izah will release their first full-length document of sludgy aggression through the always dependable Nordvis Produktion.  It represents a major step in a very long road for the band, and its four gargantuan tracks make that point crystal clear.  But these aren’t the sprawling teases that some bands employ in…

Finnish Viking metal quintet Ensiferum return with their sixth album One Man Army next week, but that doesn’t mean you have to wait until the February 20 release date to hear the thing. In this day and age, who in the hell has the patience to do such a thing? The band and Metal Blade…

I originally got my hands on Barishi’s self-titled, self-released, full-length album via guitarist Graham Brooks who was filling in for fellow Vermonters, Vaporizer during a tour with Vattnet Viskar. After figuring out who the hell I was, he passed along a copy of the record and Bob’s yer fucking uncle. That was about a year…

Former Caustic Resin guitarist/vocalist and Built To Spill-er Brett Netson went and done got himself a brand new rock quartet — that’d be Brett Netson & Snakes — and Decibel has got the opening single from the band’s ridiculously killer, utterly fucking triumphant Scavenger Cult EP. Here’s the breakdown: The Scavenger Cult EP features three…

“Fear and Fury,” the first taste of new Pallbearer music since our favorite album of 2014, Foundations of Burden, is one of the Little Rock doom quartet’s shortest songs yet, clocking in at just under six minutes. But it’s not wanting for the intense, emotional thunder the band has built their following on. It was recorded specifically…

One of the more pleasant surprises for me so far this year has been Karma to Burn‘s new LP. I’m a big fan of Almost Heathen (especially these two neck snappers), and the reason Arch Stanton–much like 2001 precursor–works is simple: the riffs. Just check out “Twenty-Three” below (yes, all of their song titles are…

A year and a half after making a very strong first impression with the Knights of Darkness EP, Finnish speed metalers Ranger are set to return in 2015, this time with full-length debut Where Evil Dwells under their collective bullet belts. Unlike other bands that profess to creating old-school heavy metal with a more modern…

What’s better than a wolf? A black wolf, of course. What’s even better than a black wolf? A black wolf with umlauts. Oakland’s Blackwülf bring some serious stoner vibes to the party, hitting the listener with some fat bottomed rock. “Wings of Steel” is so fresh that it comes from an album they haven’t even…

“Some of you might have been conceived to this song,” Ringworm frontman James “Human Furnace” Bulloch told the gathered at Sonny’s Tavern, the small, homey New Hampshire bar the Cleveland metallic hardcore levelers were then steadily transforming into an overly-amped emotional and physical pressure cooker. “The album it’s on came out in 1993. You do…

The videos that arrive at Decibel headquarters are often predictably bad. There are the things we loathe (lyric videos), things we find annoying (videos talking about the making of videos) and the low budget (we’ll just record ourselves playing live and hope people give a shit). Boy, did Shredhead’s new animated stop motion video just…

It took us a good 10 years to get it right, but Rwake is really just pronounced “wake”. Good to know since Relapse is re-issuing the group’s debut demo, Xenoglossalgia (The Last Stage of Awareness), with stunning limited 3D art with 3D glasses. We can finally sound intelligent while descanting about Dostoyevsky’s formative years, vegan…

A year ago, metal enthusiast and writer Dayal Patterson presented the world with his authoritative document Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult, claiming the dark hearts of literate misanthropes everywhere.  To anyone who read the book and thought it could have been more developed… well, the author thought so, too.  This year, we will have…

Last week, we debuted the track “Caravan” from Monolith’s soon to be released album Against The Wall Of Forever. It turns out that there is a pretty decent audience for the band’s proto NWOBHM sounds. So, our friends at the new label Funeral Noise Records (a spinoff of death metal staple Gore House) asked if…

It’s not often a new band drops jaws. Dutch black metallers Kjeld, from Friesland, are one such band. Corrupting the good minds of northern Netherlands (and Germany) for the better part of their eight years as a band, Kjeld is modern yet reflective on new album, Skym. They play “Proud and pure Frisian black metal…

The 2015 Decibel Tour is still just under two months away, but it’s cold and terrible out (grim in a bad way), and you deserve some righteous news before the weekend. We have six outstanding, hand-picked regional openers who will get the party started in advance of At the Gates, Converge, Pallbearer and Vallenfyre’s trail…

Nightmares about my nonexistent children being killed by a falling flatscreen. Thanks, Super Bowl commercial. Season in Hell So, it’s several days after the big game. The dust has settled. We’ve watched every obnoxious and sad self-filmed fan reaction to Malcolm Butler’s miraculous end zone interception that the internet has to offer. I don’t think it was…

Every depressive suicidal black metal dude we went to high school with is dead.  Well, not really, though we probably could’ve seen it coming if it were true.  What I mean is, Xasthur groaner Scott Conner got a new gig playing dark bluegrass.  And where the fuck are Striborg and Nortt?  I feel sad sometimes,…

Most of the promotional methodologies of the digital age are platforms I don’t quite get and don’t think I’ll ever be able to hang with. In addition to the constant fishing for complements that are disguised as update/progress reports (“We’ve got two-and-a-half new songs written and we can’t wait for you guys to hear them!”…

Undead is Listenable Records‘ latest signing, but beyond that, there’s nothing else we can tell you (seriously, we asked) other than we’re pretty sure it’s not one of the ten other bands going by the same name on Encyclopaedia Metallum. What we can offer, however, is a premiere of “Voices”, which at least gives a…

We will never miss a chance to host some new music from our friends in Sandrider. They were the band, after all, that premiered a song here on the ways one might conceivably become the ultimate urban legend. If our math is correct this is the third time they’ve made a streaming appearance on the…

How have you spent the past decade? Think you’ve been productive? Sabertooth Zombie might have you beat: since forming roughly 10 years ago in Northern California the hardcore meets Americana meets classic rock band has released 15 albums or EPs. Fifteen! Today, we are streaming “Gardens Of Loss” from Human Performance IV, the fouth and…

Two years ago Brooklyn-based instrumental band Sannhet turned a few heads with their confident debut album Known Flood, a record that showed that it’s still possible to create vocals-free “post-metal” that somehow, miraculously, still feels fresh. By incorporating black metal and prog into the usual morass of sludge, the band showed they’re no slouches when…

You want a crazy ass music video? A Forest of Stars sure have one for you! In this 10 minute animated film by Ingram Blakelock, a little dude sets out on an epic journey across a video game-like world to do… Something, I guess? You’ll have to watch to find out. Oh, and there’s anachronistic…

What do you get when you combine two of the ugliest doom bands out there today? Well, it sure ain’t gonna be pretty. For their latest collaboration, You, Whom I Have Always Hated, The Body and Thou make some serious noise and cover Nine Inch Nails. They also made a video (directed by Thou’s Mitch…

Damn, this new Call of the Void joint has some cool textures on it. Featuring a sort of His Hero Is Gone by way of latter day Napalm Death sound, Ageless goes a lot of interesting places, both sonically and compositionally. The record is out next week via Relapse, but we’ve got the full-stream for…

Heaving Earth takes their name from a Morbid Angel song (on the underrated Formulas Fatal To The Flesh). They are from the Czech Republic, where we think some of scenes of Hostel or at least one misanthropic slasher film was set. And they have a new album out on Lavadome called Denouncing The Holy Throne….

Europe had Metal Forces, Kerrang!, Metal Hammer and a host of language-specific publications—Rock Hard and Aardschok, for example—for literate longhairs to satisfy their hard, fast and heavy fix. The States, however, had no real unifying print magazine. Until Metal Maniacs. The staff had enough experience under their bulletbelts for it to feel like a veteran…

When Moonspell emerged in 1994 with the Goat on Fire / Wolves from the Fog 7″, there was no indication they’d be killing it two decades later. Initially, their homeland (Portugal) was a strike against the Lisbon-based black metallers. The Iberian Coast wasn’t Norway, Sweden, Finland, Greece, or Great Britain; it didn’t have the Nordic…