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If there’s one black metal album that changed black metal—in almost every respect—it’s Dimmu Borgir’s Death Cult Armageddon.

So. If you didn’t know you were hungry for full-bodied alternate dimension dark fiction reinterpretations of Danzig-era Misfits, Weirdpunk Books is here to correct that failure of imagination with the  straight-up surrealist mindfuck of Hybrid Moments: A Literary Tribute to The Misfits, featuring fifteen fun, disquieting, extremely extreme stories that raise the “horror” element of “horror punk” to a completely new (and brutal) level

Hellenic occultists Disharmony return after a nearly twenty year hiatus to unleash Goddamn the Sun upon our unsuspecting asses, and we’ve got an exclusive sneak peek with grand leveler “The Gates of Elthon.”

Things have been quiet on the Rottenness front for a while, but the band is ramping up again and aiming to keep busy throughout 2017.

For a brief time in the early 90’s Cyclone Temple was one of the best heavy metal bands on the planet…

So argues No Echo proprietor/Deny the Cross vocalist Carlos Ramirez in the liner notes to the reverential, enlivening reissue of 1991’s I Hate Therefore I Am — available as an import courtesy Divebomb Records International alongside a fascinating collections of demos, early and live tracks, and of the Greed, Home of the Depraved — and we’re streaming the Chicago thrashers’ seriously underrated, boundary-defying full-length debut below as evidence that our man is not engaged in any sort of idle smoke blowing: This superior sonic marriage of Spreading the Disease-era Anthrax and circa-Age of Quarrel Cro-Mags, further empowered and set apart by Brian Troch’s ferocious Dio-meets-street vocals, remains far ahead of its time in many, many ways. Indeed, I Hate Therefore I Am, in this humble scribe’s opinion, is the real, vulnerable, defiant shit the retro kids actually should be jamming into the metal-future.

Apparently it’s difficult to pull off a good metal video. Richmond’s BAT make it look not only easy, but fun as hell, too, with their new black&white, B movie-inspired thriller, “Beware of the Bat.”

Check out this exclusive premiere of the song, “Time of the Moon,” by Denmark’s Vomit Angel  from their debut mini-album, Sadomatic Evil. But you’ll never guess who it is they’re covering . . .

On this week’s Demo:listen, we spike the drinking water with Cleveland’s Grave Plague.

Considering the inventive, meditative, cagey nature of the top-shelf metallic hardcore he’s long delivered as guitarist of Shai Hulud, it perhaps will not come as too much of a surprise for readers to learn Matthew Fox is also one of the more introspective, thoughtful, intelligent interviews in the kingdom of heaviness. So when Fox said written a long piece on wrestling with how to commemorate the end of 2016 deaths of major figures from his childhood who took a backseat — then and now — to his heavy metal and hardcore heroes…well, we jumped at the opportunity to publish it as a guest column. Read on, friends…

Catch this exclusive premiere of Silenced by Death, the debut 7” from Sweden’s brand new deathdealers, Plague, featuring members of Entrails, Eviscerated, Nominon, and more.

Check out this exclusive track premiere from Primordial Malignity, the debut full length by Tomb Mold, and hear for yourself why this Toronto-based death metal two piece is one of the most talked about bands in the underground.

Death metal legends Immolation get their first Decibel cover. Grab a copy here. 

Hailing from Kentucky, Pissed On’s forthcoming The Hanged Man EP promises to be one of grindcore’s most jam-packed releases in 2017.

Saxon‘s NWOBHM building block Wheels of Steel enters Decibel’s Hall of Fame.

The New Wave of British Heavy Metal wasn’t a movement. Until it was a movement. Early on, bands—mostly categorized as hard rock—merely created music the only way they knew how.

Check out this exclusive premiere of the track, “Slaughterers of the Flocks,” from Seattle’s cruelest bunch of blasphemers, Crurifragium, off their debut album Beasts of the Temple of Satan.

On this week’s Demo:listen, with a little help from some of our friends, we look back on 2016, a year of great demos.

Legendary Boston extreme music pioneers/provocateurs SIEGE are in the middle of a string of reunion dates — see our recent interview with drummer Robert Williams for the deets here — which arrives at the Red Alert Skateboard Shop for a New Year’s Eve pummeling alongside Sadist, Infernal Diatribe, Crystal Methodist, Guilt, Rejiem, and Nycterent, as well as fast-rising crust-grinders LEASH, a band recently joined by Backstabbers Inc/Northern Curse vocalist/guitarist Matt Serven ahead of the straight-up nasty leveller of an E.P. entitled Dead End Breeders, which Decibel is pleased to exclusively stream in its entirety below. 

Check out this exclusive track premiere of “Triumph Continuum” off the debut mini-album Quantum Noose of Usurpation from U.S. warlords Ululatum Tollunt.

On this week’s Demo:listen, we are visited by the ghost of Underground Metal Present in the form of the UK’s Spectral Apparition.

You want the truth about “Lies,” the track we’re exclusively premiering this morning from upcoming extreme metal opus Soul Demise courtesy  Italian quartet Maze of Sothoth? It’s dark, nasty, gloriously old school death metal that will gutpunch fans of early Morbid Angel, Vader, and Nile right in their deviant feels. 

Just in time for the holiday season, we bring you this exclusive full album stream of Veneration of Armageddon, the sophomore record from Germany’s Goatblood.

Between the epic Gods of Violence, The Decibel Magazine Tour and this band new flexi disc, 2017 sure looks like the year of thrash metal godfathers Kreator. 

Says David Hall: “I almost died making this video….I passed out and woke up covered in beer and bong water and all the candles I had set up had been knocked over, but luckily they landed in a puddle of my urine and didn’t burn my tits off.”

“Works fine, but looks a little beat up due to being my main bass during Brutal Truth’s career in the early 90s.”

So reads the no doubt understated Ebay listing for the US-made B.C. Rich 4-string bass extreme music trailblazer and living heavy metal legend Danny Lilker — revisit our “Better Living the Danny Lilker Way” for a reminder of the man’s unquestionable supremacy — deployed on such landmark Brutal Truth grinders as Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses and Need To Control as well as S.O.D.’s 1992 Live at Budokan.

There’s more than a little similarity between Metallica’s new album cover and a classic Crowbar album cover; we caught up with one of the guys who worked on the Metallica cover to find out what’s going on here.

Take a nine minute sojourn down into the dark vale of black metal’s unfathomed depths with Reykjavík’s Draugsól.

Only death, Tom G. Warrior, Hellhammer and the Decibel Hall of Fame are real! 

Prefer your doom nasty and crusty as fuck? Well, you’re gonna absolutely love capital-“C” Cowardice then. (Your level of adoration for lowercase-“c” cowardice, on the other hand, is a personal matter, but do feel free to confide what you feel you must in the comments section below…) The New Jersey quintet’s admirably expansive and unpredictable debut full-length Without Condolence strives, roughly speaking, to bridge the gap between early Paradise Lost, Black Sabbath circa Vol. 4, and latter day Gorguts — a perfect backdrop for vocalist John Jones’ feral blackened death shriek-growl-shriek. 

Exalt, for the wait to hear the new Panzerfaust album is over. Today we bring you the exclusive premiere of The Lucifer Principle, the fourth album from these Canadians in Satan’s Service. Warning: This material may be hazardous to your soul.