Adrien Begrand

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…

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…

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…

Seminal American black metal band VON has been very active ever since reuniting in 2010, following an 18-year absence. If you know your USBM, you’ll know that a pair of full-length albums, 2012’s Satanic Blood and 2013’s Dark Gods: Seven Billion Slaves, and you should know that there’s plenty more on the way. Not only…

Every once in a while a young metal band will come along with a sound, a look, and an attitude that will just make any fan over the age of 35 beam. Despite boasting a band name that makes you think they’re a Steel Panther knock-off, German quintet Alpha Tiger has steadily become a very…

Well this is a new one, and a great one at that. In this Tumblr era of clever and creative reinterpretations of metal album covers, from animated to absurdly funny, Rafael Melandi has come along and trounced them all with a new series of illustrations that take classic metal album art and re-imagine them through…

One of yours truly’s favorite musical discoveries of 2013, enigmatic Finland doom collective Mansion made an immediate impression on the debut EP We Shall Live, and turned in a stunning live performance at the Roadburn Festival last April. The band had been working on new material throughout 2014, and eight months after the seven-inch release…

When you name your band Black Pussy you’d better tread carefully, and to their credit the Portland band has made it crystal clear why they chose to call themselves that. Drawing inspiration from the original title of The Rolling Stones’ classic “Brown Sugar” Black Pussy states on their Facebook page, “Black Pussy does not condone…

Last week on Twitter I asked to no one in particular, if a publication is going to put out a “Best Metal of the Year” list, why do they all focus primarily on the extreme metal side? Hey, I like Dark Descent, Gilead, and Nuclear War Now as much as anyone else, but there’s a…

Brooklyn might be known for its rather healthy underground metal scene that revolves around more cutting-edge, extreme sounds, but it’s heartening to know that some folks in the borough are flying the old school, “true” heavy metal flag high and proud. The Defenders of the Old Fest has been kicking around the Eastern seaboard for…

One album that has snuck in under everyone’s radar this fall has been Wild, the second album by French noise trio Pord. A rambunctious hybrid of modern noise, vintage AmRep skronk, and good, old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll, it’s a clever, incessantly catchy record that’s sure to appeal to anyone who enjoys Decibel faves Wizard Rifle….

As a Canadian I can’t help but marvel at American Thanksgiving. The sheer brilliance of it: make it a Thursday holiday, which’ll in turn compel people to take Friday off, and just like that you’ve got a four-day weekend. Unless Remembrance Day or the February statutory holiday falls on a Thursday, we don’t exactly have…

Anguish, Mountain (Dark Descent): What I get most out of the second full-length by the Swedish doom band, aside from the lovably goofy cover and the simple yet enjoyable music therein, is just how well vocalist J. Dee enunciates. It’s a lost art, especially in extreme metal, and even though the lyrics are your usual…

Anatomy of Habit, Ciphers + Axioms (Relapse): Featuring members of Tortoise, Indian, and Bloodyminded, this Chicago noise rock supergroup has joined forces with producer Sanford Parker to create a spellbinding two-track, 40-minute opus that expertly blends dissonance and melody, aggression and introspection. The overall effect is not unlike that of Psalm Zero’s excellent debut from…

The year is starting to wind down, but a smattering of noteworthy new metal releases are still trickling in over the next month, including a couple this week. Read on! Apostle of Solitude, Of Woe and Wounds (Cruz del Sur): More people should be getting excited for the first new Apostle of Solitude album since…

As music writers learn when they hit their late 30s and head into their 40s, nostalgia is very powerful, to the point of being irresistible. Whenever a revered artist or band returns from a very long absence with a record that’s been hyped to the nines, you’re going to have certain critics whose attachment to…

Metal scenesters have always had a problem with artists that “dabble” in metal. In a way, that’s easy to understand: heavy metal is an all-or-nothing style of music, one whose audience embraces as not only as a diversion but a lifestyle, and they fully expect the same kind of dedication to the music, art, and…

After parting ways with vocalist Steve “Zetro” Souza in 2004, Exodus took a huge risk in hiring the unknown Rob Dukes as the band’s new frontman, but it was a risk that paid off well. The confrontational, provocative Dukes injected the band with a level of manic energy not seen since the classic Paul Baloff…

It’s got to be a surreal adjustment for certain popular metal bands who headline huge festivals in Europe and come over to North America to play venues the tiniest fraction of the size. For some bands, you can tell they’d rather be egotistically drinking in the adulation of 75,000 people in a field in Germany…

The situation surrounding the release of Witch Mountain’s latest album is not one you see very often. It’s one thing for a metal band to lose a singer – a real test of a metal band’s greatness is how difficult it is to replace the singer – but to see a band whose career was…

There were around 60 new metal releases last week, but this week we’re scraping the barrel. This silly industry is weird that way. In my digging I realized that the new Divider album is terrific, well worth investigating, but aside from that, it’s as bleak as it gets. Next week though; hoo, boy. Aside from…

When a veteran band finds its second wind working with a certain producer, it’s totally understandable if they decide to stick to that same collaboration for an extended period. Cannibal Corpse went through it in the wake of the stunning success of 2006’s return-to-form Kill; realizing they had found a perfect partner in producer Erik…

For some crazy reason the Canadian province of Alberta is on one hell of a roll when it comes to metal these days. The underground extreme side is thriving, yielding death metalers Revenge, primitive thrashers Blackrat, grind aces Wake, and old-school speed metal upstarts Gatekrashör. The Weir delivers first-rate noise, Chron Goblin excel at stoner…

There are certain bands I’ve only seen in specific settings, and in some cases it’s something where I’d like it to stay that way. I’m sure some readers might relate. For instance, I’ve seen Sodom four times, all on a cruise ship, and it’s gotten to the point now where the notion of seeing the…

Last week I mentioned how writers like yours truly like to cart out the phrase “fully realized” upon hearing an album we deem to be a creative zenith, as if to immediately negate anything the artist might have in store in the future. Nope, sorry, this is as good as it will ever get. If…

I was among those critics lavishing praise on Pallbearer’s debut album Sorrow & Extinction in February 2012, marveling at its surprisingly graceful take on doom metal. However, as the year went on, I felt I had to pull back from the praise of the critical hive mind, because the more I let that record settle,…

It’s another light week for new releases, and mercifully so for yours truly, who is currently recovering from a hot and loud weekend at Heavy Montreal, where the likes of Metallica, Slayer, Twisted Sister (who totally ruled), Voivod, Municipal Waste, Exodus, and dozens more bands played to around 40,000 people over two days. Fellow Decibel…

Happy Godsmack Day to all you Boston readers. You must be so darn proud. Anyway, on with the show: Alestorm, Sunset on the Golden Age (Napalm): What grades did the pirate get in school? HIGH SEAS!!! Belphegor, Conjuring the Dead (Nuclear Blast): A merciless return to simple, blasphemous black metal, the Austrian veterans keep it quick…

Extreme metal bands withholding lyrics is commonplace, something we writers have learned to constantly deal with, to the point now that even though we’re never given the complete album experience, it’s pretty much taken for granted that we have to give readers an even and thorough assessment of a record even though we have literally…

It’s a fairly eventful week, thanks in large part to Season of Mist and Prosthetic using this week as a dumping ground for several new releases. Considering next week is a bit on the slower side, wouldn’t it have been a better idea to spread things around more? Give an album a chance to stand…