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What’s better than a wolf? A black wolf, of course. What’s even better than a black wolf? A black wolf with umlauts. Oakland’s Blackwülf bring some serious stoner vibes to the party, hitting the listener with some fat bottomed rock. “Wings of Steel” is so fresh that it comes from an album they haven’t even…

“Some of you might have been conceived to this song,” Ringworm frontman James “Human Furnace” Bulloch told the gathered at Sonny’s Tavern, the small, homey New Hampshire bar the Cleveland metallic hardcore levelers were then steadily transforming into an overly-amped emotional and physical pressure cooker. “The album it’s on came out in 1993. You do…

The videos that arrive at Decibel headquarters are often predictably bad. There are the things we loathe (lyric videos), things we find annoying (videos talking about the making of videos) and the low budget (we’ll just record ourselves playing live and hope people give a shit). Boy, did Shredhead’s new animated stop motion video just…

It took us a good 10 years to get it right, but Rwake is really just pronounced “wake”. Good to know since Relapse is re-issuing the group’s debut demo, Xenoglossalgia (The Last Stage of Awareness), with stunning limited 3D art with 3D glasses. We can finally sound intelligent while descanting about Dostoyevsky’s formative years, vegan…

A year ago, metal enthusiast and writer Dayal Patterson presented the world with his authoritative document Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult, claiming the dark hearts of literate misanthropes everywhere.  To anyone who read the book and thought it could have been more developed… well, the author thought so, too.  This year, we will have…

Last week, we debuted the track “Caravan” from Monolith’s soon to be released album Against The Wall Of Forever. It turns out that there is a pretty decent audience for the band’s proto NWOBHM sounds. So, our friends at the new label Funeral Noise Records (a spinoff of death metal staple Gore House) asked if…

It’s not often a new band drops jaws. Dutch black metallers Kjeld, from Friesland, are one such band. Corrupting the good minds of northern Netherlands (and Germany) for the better part of their eight years as a band, Kjeld is modern yet reflective on new album, Skym. They play “Proud and pure Frisian black metal…

The 2015 Decibel Tour is still just under two months away, but it’s cold and terrible out (grim in a bad way), and you deserve some righteous news before the weekend. We have six outstanding, hand-picked regional openers who will get the party started in advance of At the Gates, Converge, Pallbearer and Vallenfyre’s trail…

Nightmares about my nonexistent children being killed by a falling flatscreen. Thanks, Super Bowl commercial. Season in Hell So, it’s several days after the big game. The dust has settled. We’ve watched every obnoxious and sad self-filmed fan reaction to Malcolm Butler’s miraculous end zone interception that the internet has to offer. I don’t think it was…

Every depressive suicidal black metal dude we went to high school with is dead.  Well, not really, though we probably could’ve seen it coming if it were true.  What I mean is, Xasthur groaner Scott Conner got a new gig playing dark bluegrass.  And where the fuck are Striborg and Nortt?  I feel sad sometimes,…

Most of the promotional methodologies of the digital age are platforms I don’t quite get and don’t think I’ll ever be able to hang with. In addition to the constant fishing for complements that are disguised as update/progress reports (“We’ve got two-and-a-half new songs written and we can’t wait for you guys to hear them!”…

Undead is Listenable Records‘ latest signing, but beyond that, there’s nothing else we can tell you (seriously, we asked) other than we’re pretty sure it’s not one of the ten other bands going by the same name on Encyclopaedia Metallum. What we can offer, however, is a premiere of “Voices”, which at least gives a…

We will never miss a chance to host some new music from our friends in Sandrider. They were the band, after all, that premiered a song here on the ways one might conceivably become the ultimate urban legend. If our math is correct this is the third time they’ve made a streaming appearance on the…

How have you spent the past decade? Think you’ve been productive? Sabertooth Zombie might have you beat: since forming roughly 10 years ago in Northern California the hardcore meets Americana meets classic rock band has released 15 albums or EPs. Fifteen! Today, we are streaming “Gardens Of Loss” from Human Performance IV, the fouth and…

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…

You want a crazy ass music video? A Forest of Stars sure have one for you! In this 10 minute animated film by Ingram Blakelock, a little dude sets out on an epic journey across a video game-like world to do… Something, I guess? You’ll have to watch to find out. Oh, and there’s anachronistic…

What do you get when you combine two of the ugliest doom bands out there today? Well, it sure ain’t gonna be pretty. For their latest collaboration, You, Whom I Have Always Hated, The Body and Thou make some serious noise and cover Nine Inch Nails. They also made a video (directed by Thou’s Mitch…

Damn, this new Call of the Void joint has some cool textures on it. Featuring a sort of His Hero Is Gone by way of latter day Napalm Death sound, Ageless goes a lot of interesting places, both sonically and compositionally. The record is out next week via Relapse, but we’ve got the full-stream for…

Heaving Earth takes their name from a Morbid Angel song (on the underrated Formulas Fatal To The Flesh). They are from the Czech Republic, where we think some of scenes of Hostel or at least one misanthropic slasher film was set. And they have a new album out on Lavadome called Denouncing The Holy Throne….

Europe had Metal Forces, Kerrang!, Metal Hammer and a host of language-specific publications—Rock Hard and Aardschok, for example—for literate longhairs to satisfy their hard, fast and heavy fix. The States, however, had no real unifying print magazine. Until Metal Maniacs. The staff had enough experience under their bulletbelts for it to feel like a veteran…

When Moonspell emerged in 1994 with the Goat on Fire / Wolves from the Fog 7″, there was no indication they’d be killing it two decades later. Initially, their homeland (Portugal) was a strike against the Lisbon-based black metallers. The Iberian Coast wasn’t Norway, Sweden, Finland, Greece, or Great Britain; it didn’t have the Nordic…

Matt Olivo is the founding guitarist of extreme metal trailblazers Repulsion, whose Horrified LP ranks as Decibel’s #1 grindcore album of all time.