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Almost exactly a year after founding guitarist Jeff Hanneman’s untimely passing at age 49, Slayer have reemerged with not only their first new studio recording in five years, but a surprising departure from their longtime label. The Big Four’s most consistent horseman — already recognized twice in the Decibel Hall of Fame — had been a mainstay…

The second Brainsqueeze Fest put on by our friends at Tankcrimes was held last weekend in lovely Oakland. Our friend and frequent Decibel contributor Raymond Ahner was onhand for the second day to capture the festivities and document them. Check out our exclusive photo gallery below courtesy of Ray.

Ever since I saw them play twice at Roadburn 2013, I’ve been spouting a lot of praise about power trio Satan’s Satyrs, whose idiosyncratic blend of proto-metal and Nuggets-era garage rock scratches an indescribable itch for yours truly. Equal parts boogie, psychedelia, and cheeseball horror, it’s ferocious, catchy, and enormously fun. Sure, it’s all reminiscent…

Aurvandil play sick folk-influenced black metal. You can listen to our debut of their second screed to the darkness below, and in the meantime, here’s the man himself to explain what’s going on. What’s your writing process like? There are a lot of intricate layers going on in the music and that must be complicated…

After an extended layoff Justin Trosper of the late, much-mourned noisy post-hardcore heroes Unwound has returned with an excellent infectious-if-still-decidedly-off-kilter outfit of musical subversion, Survival Knife. Our Deci-antennae really started vibrating, however, when Trosper cited Enslaved and Opeth, among other extreme metallers, as influences for his new venture in a great interview over at Stereo…

** Norwegian thrashers Nocturnal Breed have been kicking it old-school for the better part of the last 15 years. Formed by guys originally associated with the black metal scene, but are now fully entrenched in the rigors of thrash, Nocturnal Breed know exactly what they’re doing on new album, Napalm Nights, the group’s first in…

One of the least brewtal beers we included in our Brewtal Truth Guide to Extreme Beers had to have been Shmaltz’s He’Brew Jewbelation Sweet 16. Well, the beer itself was pretty insane—16 hop varieties, 16 types of malt and brewed to 16% ABV—but the pastel-colored label, complete with little dancing unicorns, didn’t accurately represent the…

Record Store Day (RSD) is tomorrow, April 19th. Record Store Day was created to celebrate and extract cash from habitual brick and mortar record store junkies (hey, Decibel are record store junkies). But the best thing about RSD is that labels, large and small, produce cool one-offs for collectors (nay, junkies) to stash, drool on,…

Finally, it’s here!  I’m referring to the one weekend every year when even the brightest eyed, bushiest tailed Christian joins our cult of death for 48 hours and worships the treachery of friends, agonizing torture and public humiliation, and the brutal suffocation of a (reportedly) innocent life, just before we all pay lip service to…

Gospel of the Witches is a new project of Karyn Crisis (Crisis), Davide Tiso (Ephel Duath), Ross Dolan (Immolation), Danny Walker (Intronaut). If the lineup wasn’t cool enough, the musical statement — made by Ephel Duath’s Tiso — is quite something else. Check out Crisis’s explanation of the project. Says Crisis: “The album is a…

This bit of news may be a week or two old, but considering the connection to the Decibel family and that this album is one of the unsung, unheralded, un-everything albums of the 2000’s that you probably don’t own but should, we felt it merited some more mention. Here are a few informational snippets from…

We’re still recovering from a long, drunken, ripping Sunday night in Silver Spring, MD, the last (slam) dance of the third annual Decibel Magazine Tour. Regional openers Coke Bust got their moniker hilariously plastered on the Fillmore’s marquee; Noisem, Gorguts and the Black Dahlia Murder were in full take-no-prisoners mode; and Carcass blasted through over…

Back in 2010, Scion ran the “No Label Needed” contest in which the car company enabled a band to “receive insight and instruction on the music industry from music industry professionals while recording an EP at the Machine Shop” (you can read more about it here). Minnesota’s Iron Thrones came away winners and proceeded to…

As every Flexi lover and vinyl nerd knows this Saturday is Record Store Day. There’s no one better to break down what it all means than our main man, Low Fidelity columnist and record store employee Neill Jameson. He is the brains behind the great black metal band Krieg and also survived years as a…

I don’t issue perfect scores to new albums very often. As Craig Hayes so eloquently wrote a couple weeks ago, positivity and over-praise is a plague in metal criticism, so much so that some publications so constantly hover in the 7 to 10-out-of-10 that a 6 is a negative rating. Ratings, to be honest, are…

As fun as it is to cover everything Carcass and At the Gates are up to, occasionally it’s nice to shine a light on a truly underground band. Dallas’s Bludded Head definitely fall into that category, scooping out unpleasant sludge with a tendency towards the minimalist. Their misery comes from a real place, too – singer/guitarist…

Intro-ing the full-album stream last November of the sophomore effort from Czar, No One is Alone if No One is Alive, our pals over at MetalSucks praised this ultra-power trio for “effectively straddl[ing] the line between precise tech-y metal and earthy post-hardcore” — an apt observation we won’t quibble with here. In recognition of Czar’s…

After getting sick and cancelling tours and being nearly 70 years old and generally scaring the piss out of fans everywhere, Lemmy finally emerged from his West Hollywood meth lair/Nazi shrine to play the first Motörhead show since last summer’s appearance at Wacken, when severe back pain and oppressive heat forced him to walk off…

By Justin Foley, DOWNLOAD THE SONGS HERE The Golden Era of American Independent Noise Rock (GEAINR) was the early to mid 1990s and the GEAINR Golden Format (GEAINRGF) was the 7”. At the time, putting out a 7” was a potentially quick and cheap way for a band to get people interested in their music…

Melodic death metal, crust, d-beat, black metal, doom, post-metal . . . It doesn’t really matter how you label Nux Vomica because it’s pretty much impossible to adequately describe their wayfaring sound in terms of genre alone. Yeah we went for crust in this headline, but that was more of a convenient adjective, headline shorthand,…

Pushing boundaries is taken for granted in extreme music. The review pages of Decibel are packed with bands that eschew convention in the hopes of creating something different. In the early 80s, hardcore punk and metal were ruled by dogma. T.S.O.L. was one of the standard bearers: Weathered Statues and Dance With Me were benchmarks…

Gainesville, Florida’s Frameworks aren’t on your radar. If you’re into stuff like Slint and Sincebyman, well, they should be on your radar. Self-described–we think they’re trying to be funny–as “Lounge Screamo” or “Tropical Punk”, Frameworks recalls a time when playing hardcore with a bit of gloom in it wasn’t cool or respected. You had to…

I’m not really sure what to make of this week. Just seems like it’s pretty dry out there lately. Hopefully that new Autopsy or Misery Index will be out soon. THE OATH S/T is released on Rise Above. They basically pump the fact that this is a female-fronted band; not that it matters to me,…

The French black metal oddity Paramnesia is slowly, casually crawling out of obscurity, now that Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions are set to release the band’s self-titled full-length on April 16th.  Having apparently existed since 2005 (thanks metal-archives!), the project has only recently released recordings in the form of an EP and a split with German…

Satanic powerviolence. Say what? Yes indeed, this is a thing, or at least a band. Decibel was so intrigued with the workings of the Southern California band Antichrist Demoncore that we teamed up with main man Sergio Amalfitano to offer an exclusive studio report on the makings of their Melotov Records debut, due June 24….

Why does Canada’s Frenchiest province, Quebec, love Belgian-style beers so much? Is it the shared language? Is it something in the Quebec palate? Or is it just disdain for anything English in origin? We have no idea, but if we want a killer Belgian brew without going to Belgium, there are plenty of options from…

Baton Rouge doom/sludge prolific over-achievers, Thou has returned from an almost unheard of (for them, anyway) two years of silence as far as releases are concerned with their latest and greatest full-length, Heathen. We recently sent guitarist Andy Gibbs and vocalist Bryan Funck a bunch of questions to respond to via email. It would appear…

If you’re anything like me, you’ve welcomed the last five years of Scion’s patronage of metal with a mix of gratitude and suspicion. No doubt, they’ve made it possible for fans to hear new tunes and see lives shows from some of the best bands in extreme music, usually at zero cost to all parties…

Back in 2012, Mehdi Safa, the man behind shelsmusic, was kind enough to talk to us in detail about his label (you can read that here and here). Six months later, we interviewed Astrohenge, one of my favorite discoveries of 2012. So when we heard this week that shelsmusic had signed the London quartet, we…

Many of our readers are aspiring musicians or already recording and touring. But the music business is a dicey proposition in today’s world: record royalties are a rarity, and touring is necessary if you want to make a living. How can you be a metal musician and not wreck your adult life in the process?…