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A couple months back we premiered a new Backstabbers Inc track and now, with barely time enough for a gasp between, guitarist/vocalist Matt Serven is prepping Bury Me in a Hole in the Ground, the super limited double cassette from his digital hardcore side project GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD!!! We’ve got an exclusive stream of the…

English grind trio Human Cull don’t look to reinvent the wheel each and every time they step into the practice space. They are way more interested in trying to split the atom with bass, drums and throat. Originally formed under the name Gran Toucher, they soon got serious in 2011, became Human Cull, and focused…

Only a mere month ago German black metallers Entartung featured a track (HERE) on the Deciblog. Spirits were crushed, churches were defiled, and minds were corrupted. Now, the time has come for Entartung to unfurl the great fear that is Peccata Mortalia. Normally we laugh at our own hyperbole, but Peccata Mortalia is, like other…

** It’s not secret dBHQ gets excited when we hear Swedes Grand Magus have a new album at the ready. So, when the Stockholm-based trio Grand Magus announced Triumph and Power as their new full-length our Malevolent Creation sweat pants bulged a bit. The following is the full conversation between Decibel and Grand Magus beardman/ass-kicker…

If ever you’ve set up a tour for your band, you know what a logistical nightmare it can be just to make sure your bandmates actually show up to the van, let alone finding venues willing to book you and somehow breaking even each night. Imagine doing that shit. This is the domain of the…

Rather than planting our flag in one fertile corner of the extreme musical universe, Decibel has always enjoyed scrambling back and forth along the continuum, from the dingiest anti-production muckfests (found in our recent Top 100 Black Metal Albums special issue) to the most gorgeous prog explorations (such as Jeff Wagner’s super-mellow Cynic piece in the current…

It’s hard not to see the irony in drummer Dave Witte—he who has “Play Fast” tattooed across the knuckles of his hands—collaborating with a brewpub called Tired Hands. Witte’s hands, which have pounded on quite an array of extreme albums—from Discordance Axis to Municipal Waste—don’t ever seem to get tired. But Witte put his hands…

Norway’s Barren Womb may have a blue plasticine frog as their mascot, they may have just set themselves up for a lifetime of ribbing by titling their debut album The Sun’s Not Yellow, it’s Chicken and a good number of their promo photos may have the general public wondering how serious they should be taken,…

So many bands give the devil all the gloryIt’s hard to understand, we want to change the story We want to rock one way, on and on… Hard to believe nearly thirty years have passed since Stryper frontman Michael Sweet threw down that gauntlet with a crooning roar on the Yellow and Black Attack anthem…

The hard road of Pentagram frontman Bobby Liebling, who has fought the real demons of addiction for decades, was well chronicled in the documentary Last Days Here as well as J. Bennett’s May 2011 cover story. While the film had a happy ending everyone knows that after the credits roll life continues. Hollywood doesn’t like…

Metal musicians quote Nietzsche far too much, almost as much as they quote H.P. Lovecraft. Sometimes it’s for blatant and misdirected political purposes; other times, to add a veneer of intellectual heft to mediocre material. But when you consider the short life of musician Selim Lemouchi, one of the German thinker’s best known quotes resonates:…

Three new albums stand out above the rest this week, and what makes it particularly fun is just how completely different from each other they all are. From happy Germans, to grim Swedes, to avant-garde Brooklynites, this week’s Sucker For Punishment has got you covered. Power metal is the one metal subgenre that’s the most…

Waldo wasn’t a big fan of the new Acheron album, Kult Des Hasses, but he’s a parrot – what does he know? They’ve been doing their death metal thing for 25 years now, and they sound just as putrid as the day they were first spawned. Lots of guest players, lots of Satan, lots of…

Just a quick listen to Cynic would reveal that Paul Masvidal and company probably have pretty eclectic musical tastes. Given that the band dropped its third full-length, Kindly Bent To Free Us, last month, the guitarist/vocalist was kind enough to pass along a medley of recent (and fairly nostalgic) listens. As he explains, “Playlists have…

Towers come from Portland, Oregon, and have this awesome sound that’s a strange brew concocted of low-end bass hum and psych-stoner doom, post-punk and krautrock. There is a lot more in there, too. Putatively, it’s metal all right, but with a center so dark and heavy it can pull in all manner of outré influences…

Savage Messiah frontman Dave Silver knows his thrash ABCs. Formerly of Brit thrashers Headless Cross, Silver’s built a veritable thrash empire around Savage Messiah, for which there are four neck-snapping full-lengths, the newest of which is the upcoming The Fateful Dark. Actually, on new album, The Fateful Dark, Silver and his fellow Messiahs embark on…

What up, beak freakz?  Notice the “z”? Yeah, I’m going nu-metal; a-parrot-ly it’s making a comeback. Nah, juzt kidding. Did you know there were two bandz named Portal? I did, and I’m going to review one of them. Oof. What time is it? Huh? PORTAL — no not that one, the one from Sweden — release…

Prepare yourselves, mortal ones, for a mighty slab of awesome to descend upon your unworthy skull.  First arising from the industrial haze of the mid-90s, France’s Dirge has shape-shifted through the past 16 years and (now) six albums to crush souls with music entirely in concert with their name. In two weeks, Dirge will see…

Last week’s Q&A with Exit-13 vocalist Bill Yurkiewicz got us thinking about Belgian beers. Actually, we’re frequently thinking about Belgian beers, but this is a good time of year for drinking the the big, high-ABV ones—and there are plenty of them out there. It also made us consider the “classics” of the beer world, iconic…

Late-breaking news for the just-around-the-corner 2014 Decibel Magazine Tour. We’ve added another regional opener that should get you lucky SoCal metalheads good and stoked. L.A.’s mighty deathgrind institution Nausea will be added to the Santa Ana show on Tuesday, March 25, at the Observatory. Gotta appreciate how we’re sticking to the theme of bands who take…

California’s Exmortus blew my ears and balls back with their debut full length, In Hatred`s Flame back in 2008. The quartet seemed destined to take their prodigious talents, love of aggressive 80s-inspired metal, interest in neo-classical shred and proclivity for combining all three of those elements to the top of the then-bubbling thrash revival. Then,…

Melt-Banana‘s last record Fetch earned a place in our top 10 of 2013. Since Kevin Stewart-Panko already asked the now duo of vocalist Yasuko “Yako” Onuki and guitarist Ichiro Agata nearly every question imaginable back in October (most importantly about their Geocities website), we weren’t left with much ground that hadn’t already been covered. Onuki…

Bob Pantella spends part of his year behind the kit for the Hall Of Fame certified band Monster Magnet. When he’s not playing with them and several other bands he leads RiotGod. We’re streaming their new track “Driven Rise” below. The band’s third album Driven●Rise will be released March 18th on Metalville Records/E1 and is…

This week’s a funny one, with one hugely, hugely obvious Album of the Week pick, one that’s most likely destined for my personal best metal of 2014 list. But after some real digging, I’ve found a couple other albums well worth checking out, too: a long lost reissue from a forgotten Metal Massacre band, some…

Hey, finally a band name AND song title combo that describes my managing editor’s life. Vices play hardcore with a blues rock edge, reminiscent of Maylene and the Sons of Disaster before they started to suck. “Wasteland” will make you want to go smash some liquor bottles down by the creek real good. Their debut…

This morning we’re streaming an exclusive new earthy, driving rocker from Seattle’s self-described “caveman goth” heroes Constant Lovers.

**Welcome to the inaugural Deciblog Film Club, where each month we’ll poll someone from the extremely extreme community at large on a handful of films that have had an impact on their lives and their art. Think of it as an opportunity for all of us to lay down the blast beats and death growls…

Last year Tribulation blew minds with The Formulas of Death. This year, fellow Swedes Morbus Chron are all grown up—the average age is 27.5—from 2011’s Sleepers in the Rift effort. By aging a few years, refining their craft, and spreading respective wings, the Stockholmites have created a record so immersive, so penetrating, and so tuned…

Decibel and Handshake, Inc. are teaming up to give away TWO (2) copies of Gridlink’s new album Longhena. Why is that so cool? They’re test presses. The kind the label and band get from the pressing plant to spot check for errors and other vinyl-related anomalies. So, test presses, in general, are rare birds. The…

Michael Klassen has never met Daniel Jansson. OK, you’re thinking, why should he? But given that Jansson is the singer in his band, it is kind of weird. Well, unconventional certainly. Klassen plays guitar, bass and provides other instrumentation in Culted, working out of Winnipeg, Canada, with Kevin Stevenson (Drums), Matthew Freisson (guitar/bass/other) and Erik…