Shawn Macomber

Future noise rock royalty Plaque Marks discuss soaking up the dissonance at Philly heavy music oasis Kung Fu Necktie.

Listen to Nomads give vivifying props to the old school on this exclusive stream.

Swedish perception-expanding post-metallers Cult of Luna and singular, legendary Made Out of Babies/Battle of Mice vocalist Julie Christmas bring their extraordinary 2016 collaborative effort Mariner to North America for “the first and last time.”

Check out a new track from reactivated NYHC legends Burn.

“I quit my job at Apple to start a metal station that sells vinyl records,” Gimme Radio founder and CEO Tyler Lenane tells Decibel. “To a lot of people that probably sounds fucking insane. But I believe in it — and I’m hoping to turn a lot of other heavy music lovers into believers, too.”…

Hot on the heels of the towering The Grand Annihilation, Tombs mastermind Mike Hill returns to walk us through another province of his ongoing aural apocalypse with his chilling dark ambient project Vasilek. “I would like listeners to separate themselves from what they normally expect from music,” Hill tells Decibel. “These are not ‘songs’ in…

On its brilliant boundary-annihilating upcoming third full-length A Wake in Sacred Waves — out vial Sailor Records in October — Denver quartet Dreadnought delivers a deftly executed, completely entrancing sonic amalgamation that calls to mind everything from Bergtatt-era Ulver, Wolves in the Throne Room, and Kate Bush to Slint, June of ’44, Sabbath at its psychedelic doom-iest. This particular Rocky Mountain High has got the raining-fire-in-the-sky blast beats, guttural vocals, and fuzzed out nasty riffs, but also serious grooves and softer-than-a-lullabye ethereal croons, mandolin, flute, and saxophone.  

Legendary Brits Paradise Lost took their first tentative steps away from metal with this unsung classic, which was released 20 ago today.

In his exhilarating, consciousness-mutating debut novel Secrets of the Weird, Chad Stroup fuses a kaleidoscopic embrace of the surreal and fantastical with a punk hardcore velocity and sensibility — think Twin Peaks meets Damaged or David Cronenberg adapting I Against I. Which is why it is not all that surprising when a Minor Threat-esque band dubbed Civilized Cannibals materializes amongst the tome’s motley crew of willful outcasts, reluctant protagonists, and apocalyptic cultists.  

Nightmare Future
Arise to grind anew
dB rating: 9/10

The UK/Serbian MRTVI describes itself as a “one-man black metal project concerned with exploring the negative dissonance and atonality of the aural and emotional spectrum,” secured the Facebook URL “/sustainedthroughdeath,” and has whittled its about section to a single Tolstoy quote: “I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guess of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless” — which is a pretty steep goddamn self-created mountain of malcontent to scale. And yet “Negative Atonal Dissonance” — the long, dark sonic journey streamed exclusively below from the album of the same name out July 30 via Transcending Obscurity — manages to accomplish just that.  

Three years after unleashing a self-titled debut that turned many a (metal)head — including a spot on Decibel‘s Best Bandcamp Finds of 2014 list — Toronto doom rockers Olde are set to return August 11 with the STB Records release Temple, on which the quintet’s already solid fantastically heavy, catchy-as-hell take on the ol’ crush n’ fuzz continues to evolve and deepen. 

White Halo — the seven-years-in-the-making third full-length from Tokyo quintet Heaven in Her Arms — is a fierce and lush amalgamation of post-metal atmospherics, classic screamo, black metal, prog rock, and trad metal sure to trigger metalgaze haters even as it subverts and expands the boundaries of that sub-subgenre. 

Maybe it’s a growing-up-stateside thing, but I can’t honestly say I’ve ever met a single headbanger who got into metal through Helloween.

Shelter. Buried Alive. A Pulling Teeth reunion. Madball. Disembodied. Bloodlet. Leeway. Code Orange. Killing Time. Earth Crisis. Ramallah. All Out War. Terror. Martyr A.D. 100 Demons. 

The list goes on and on. 

Even in the context of one of the greatest, most singular heavy music events on the face of the planet, the extremely extreme 2017 This Is Hardcore lineup is something extraordinary and special.

Mustering up a defense of Slither is a strange, somewhat lonely business — never mind the fool’s errand of hunting for freethinkers in the Earth Crisis fanbase to back me up on this one…

In a rave review, Jonathan Horsley describes the sophomore full-length from Artificial Brain, Infrared Horizon, as an album which “envisions an extinct humanity, our place in the universe taken by robots and cyborgs, synthetics who believe they have naturally evolved from mankind, as though the species of Aristotle, Einstein, da Vinci was only ever primordial goo,” adding that vocalist Will Smith’s lyrics “read like Mr. Spock took a word cloud of Skynet’s internet search history and made beat poetry of it.” Combined with the decidedly sci-fi imagery the Long Island quintet employs for both album artwork and tour posters, it seemed apropos to reach out the the band for a list of their literary influences.

Rising metalhead horror author John Boden peppered his recent haunting, lyrical coming-of-age novella Jedi Summer With The Magnetic Kid with a slew of knowing nods to eighties heavy metal and hard rock. And he’s cited such distorted-yet-diverse bands as Masters of Reality and the Pixies as influences on his delightfully demented post-apocalyptic children’s book Dominoes. So it seemed apropos to hit the eloquent Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-based world-builder up for a few recommendations on where those looking to blend their loves of reading n’ riffage.

More than two decades into its career, Paris, France purveyors of smart, adventurous, textured extreme metal Comity is set to unleash what is perhaps the quartet’s greatest, most transportive full-length yet — A Long, Eternal Fall. And we’ve got the exclusive world premiere of the strange and creepy Clement Huot-helmed clip for the track “I” streaming below. 

It takes a pretty goddamn nasty mix of sludge, crust, and top shelf death metal to live up to a name like Casket Huffer(!), but this Wyoming quartet pulls it off on its fantastic, ridiculously under the radar full-length sneak attack debut Gospels of Scum. 

Coming at its beguiling brand of blackened death metal with what feels like as much reverence for Emperor and Paradise Lost as Morbid Angel, long-running Modena, Italy quartet Valgrind hit a new high-water mark on Seal of Phobos, a diverse, assured slab of extreme metal full of deftly executed heavy riffage, pitch-black atmospherics, and hairpin turns.

Incendiary unleashed its head-turning sophomore full-length Cost of Living all the way back in 2013, but the Long Island quintet clearly has not spent the ensuing four years soothing the savage beast: Thousand Mile Stare is a staggeringly ferocious, relentlessly virulent slab of sterling, forward-thinking, put-the-entire-scene-on-notice, next gen hardcore.   

Dust off that space suit, friend: Dayton, Ohio’s intergalactic metal transcendentalists Mouth of the Architect are reissuing a stunning limited remastered edition of the band’s lush beauty-and-the-beast crusher of a debut Time & Withering on Translation Loss Records, which Decibel is pleased to exclusively stream below along with some reminiscences from drummer David Mann. 

Hopefully you held onto a least one tooth…

To celebrate the 10 anniversary of Martyr Immortal, Pulling Teeth — a ferocious, restless entity  that brilliantly Frankenstein-ed a slew of extreme music elements into a completely idiosyncratic whole during its stunning seven year run — is dragging itself away from the cold embrace of the grave long enough to reissue that landmark metallic hardcore masterwork and perform the LP in its entirety at a one-night-only performance at this year’s This Is Hardcore Fest. 

Sometimes there are things in life which you cannot just let pass. Sometimes you have to speak up and not be a silent spectator.

So wrote undercover provocateurs Heathen Beast in announcing its new full-length ambush $cam, inspired and enraged by the Indian government’s November, 2016 demonetization decree 

Italian blackened doom merchants Naga formed in the shadows of Mount Vesuvius — the volcano which infamously laid waste to Pompeii — and the influence of that environment are all over the band’s magisterial new full-length Inanimate, a brilliant eruption of oppressive, brutal, dark, unrelenting, implacable sounds and atmospherics.

Even judged alongside its contemporaries from those fertile, boundary-obliterating metallic hardcore glory days of the late 90s, the discography of Tampa, Florida’s Reversal of Man — a singularly potent amalgamation of powerviolence, post-hardcore, grind, indie, and impossibly abrasive hardcore — stands out and, in many ways, remains ahead of its time nearly two decades after disbanding.  

Lord! It may have taken long-rising future progressive doom kings Kenoma eleven years to follow up that leveling 2006 split alongside Mouth of the Architect, but with Tides Will Prevail the Dayton, Ohio quintet delivers an empyreal debut full-length intricate, beguiling, and memorable enough to justify the gestation.

The sludge-heavy stoner rock of Hark takes on myriad new dimensions throughout the Welsh quartet’s exapansive, high-octane sophomore full-length Machinations, out later this week via Season of Mist. Decibel recently interrogated guitarist/vocalist Jimbob Issac about the brutal and harrowing personal roots of the album’s thematic content, finding the unlikely inspirational sweet spot between Azeaila Banks, S.O.D., Unsane and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and the way playing large, prestigious festivals can expand a band’s sense of what is possible.

Remarkable things are afoot over at the YouTube page of Magic Bullet Records — one of the best, most adventurous independent labels currently in existence, led by the incomparable artist/musician/leader Brent Eyestone whose efforts we’ve previously covered here, here, here, and here — where a series of amazing live performances captured on videotape during various revolutionary heavy music moments of the nineties are now being digitized and posted for posterity.