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The forthcoming What Are You Doing Here: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal is such an exquisitely rendered, inspiring melange of memoir, cultural criticism, extreme music history, and fiery, righteous polemic it only seemed natural to offer up some Deci-space to author Laina Dawes for a list of five albums the spurred…

On November 16th, Savannah sludge/metal/psych/punk/other band Kylesa will release From the Vaults Vol. 1 through Season of Mist. It’s been two years since the release of Spiral Shadow, and given you’ll will have to wait until the spring for a follow-up, those of you jonesing for a fix of heavy-and-trippy should check out this out….

France’s Hell Militia have been kicking (unfortunate) Euro ass since the early aughts, so it stands to reason there’s a “sizeable” contingent of believers into the group’s three full-length albums, the most recent of which is Jacob’s Ladder on the Season of Mist label. “Jacob’s Ladder reveals the inner side of Hell Militia,” says the…

Welcome to The Lazarus Pit, a biweekly look at should-be classic metal records that don’t get nearly enough love; stuff that’s essential listening that you’ve probably never heard of; stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for. This week, we have, by special request of…

Because every day another band records another song.  Because 83% of those songs are unlistenable and you can’t be bothered to sift through the dreck.  Because metal is about not giving a shit and waking your own personal storm.  Because music is universal, expression is boundless, and even indie labels (whatever that means these days)…

In the boundless quest to distinguish one’s band from metal’s ever-growing pack, comes another new sub-genre, given birth by Vancouver’s Auroch. Referring to themselves as “Lovecraftian death metal,” the trio is set to release their debut full-length From Forgotten Worlds via Poland’s Hellthrasher Productions. The band’s debut, which follows a spate of five demos that…

We’ve been lucky enough to have the likes of Shane Embury, Greg Mackintosh and Anders Nyström tell us about records that related in some way to each of their bands’ studio albums. This time around, Aaron Stainthorpe (that’s him on the far right) combed through My Dying Bride’s discography (including the quintet’s eleventh and latest,…

How instrumental was the faux-documentary/film The Hellstrom Chronicle to the making of Insects?v.03/170: The film wasn’t that essential on our musical concept, but it surely influenced the overall lyrical concept on Insects. Its abysmal mood and the menacing close-ups of actually small creatures give a special kind of impression which helped to form pictures in…

We offer this as more of a geographic reference than a musical one, but if you’re curious about the origins of Troubled Horse, you need look no further than the the same Swedish town, Orebro, that spawned both Graveyard and Witchcraft, who coincidentally have new albums just out or on the way. The Witchcraft connection…

The long-awaited follow-up to Look What I Did’s fantastic 2010 everything-and-the-kitchen-sink kaleidoscope of smart-as-fuck chaos metal Atlas Drugged is nearly upon us and if the below exclusive stream from the larger “epic rock opera” entitled Zanzibar III is any indication these Nashville boys continue to raise virtually every aspect of their game — musical, lyrical…

According to those gentle, God-fearin’ souls at Studylight.org, Maveth—transliterated from Old Testament Hebrew and translated into English—is defined as: “death, dying, Death (personified), realm of the dead; death; death by violence (as a penalty); state of death, place of death” . . . And my, how that is apt, because Finland’s Maveth are pretty much…

The quote, “This is a good place to start where we left off”, seems appropriate for death metal outfit General Surgery. The first new material since 2009’s Corpus In Extremis: Analysing Necrocriticism effort, Like An Ever Flying Limb—yes, that’s a nod to Hall of Famers Dismember—follows in the gory, early Carcass-like footsteps of General Surgery’s…

Last year, we waged war on Christmas with possibly our most infamous flexi disc to date: Agoraphobic Nosebleed‘s 11-tracks-in-four-minutes Make a Joyful Noise. Well, the unkind grinders are back to stuff your frozen corpse with even more holiday cheer! For their second-annual Decibel holiday flexi, ANb have concentrated all their good tidings into one epic,…

Rarities, remixes and covers, OH MY! ISIS are releasing Temporal, a posthumous collection that contains unreleased demos, remixes and some videos.

Suicide Silence seemingly started playing shows out of the blue, and quickly ascended to headliner status and gigantic tours. In 2007, I saw them lugging gear outside of a small club as they prepared to open early in the evening for Nile. In 2009, they had moved up the ladder and were second on the…

This year’s pre-Halloween weekend marked the beginning of (hopefully) a new Baltimore tradition: the Autumn Screams Doom two-day festival. As coordinator/originator Dan Petruccelli tells it, he hopes ASD will “bring old school doom and new school doom together. There’s so much each one brings.” He noted the periodic fluctuation of the audience’s mean age as…

The Slovenly Swiss sludge slatterns better known as Abraham were brought to my attention courtesy their label boss, Robin Staps. You may recognise Robin’s name as he’s the driving engine behind The Ocean and, because he seems to think that the seven or eight hours of sleep he gets each month is a luxury, he…

So far, Decibel has expelled three special collector’s edition one-offs: the Thrash Metal Hall of Fame issue, the Black Metal Hall of Fame issue and the (sold-out) Top 100 Albums of the 2000s issue. Our fourth stab at limited-edition putridity is the best yet–this time, all of the content is 100 percent new and exclusive:…

Two years after the tragic death of Makh Daniels, Early Graves triumphantly returned with a new record this week (Justin M. Norton put it much more eloquently in his review in our December issue). Instead of putting together a typical playlist to celebrate Red Horse, the quintet decided to go all multimedia with its theme:…

“How’s the iPhone pit over there,” Converge vocalist Jacob Bannon says at one point midway through the band’s headlining show last week at Slim’s in San Francisco. Good question. It’s hard to figure out who would want to mind meld with their personal device when a trashcan was lobbed into the pit midway through “Trespasses.”…

In less than one week Dragged Into Sunlight will unleash Widowmaker, and while perhaps not quite powerful enough to actually slay a significant other, it is a churning, seething beast of a record sure to raise the bar in the world of pitch black epic, serpentine metal. Those sky high post-Hatred for Mankind expectations? Widowmaker…

Samhain is upon us! It’s better known as All Hallow’s Eve or Halloween these days, but that’s the Christians-supplanting-an-ancient-pagan-ritual-for-conversion-purposes naming convention thing. Ah, they did such dastardly deeds all over Europe, the Near East, Africa, Asia, and so forth. Anyway, it’s time for the leaves to turn a golden brown, the air to have a…

Welcome to The Lazarus Pit, a biweekly look at should-be classic metal records that don’t get nearly enough love; stuff that’s essential listening that you’ve probably never heard of; stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for. This week, we have a special treat (or…

Originally, this frickin’ boner was supposed to go out to the tragically unsigned Secrets of the Sky, an Oakland, CA collective who specialize in black-splashed prog-n-doom awesomeness.  Now that Secrets of the Sky are untragically signed to Gravedancer Records, you’re hopefully going to hear a lot more about them in the coming months and years. …

When word arrived that the Darkness would be rolling through L.A. again on their way to meet up with Lady Gaga in South America, we told J. Bennett to grease up his tits for a pre-show rematch with frontman Justin Hawkins. The following conversation took place on Tuesday, October 23, the night before the band’s…

Ok motherfuckers, starting tomorrow, one of the most fun-filled touring adventures of the year kicks off in Springfield, Virginia. A co-heading run featuring grind grand pappies Napalm Death and the travelling bachelor party known as Municipal Waste with the reigning good-time guardians of gore grind, Exhumed offering direct support would normally be enough to top…

Since All That Remains released its debut a decade ago, the band has been a model of consistency in terms of the album cycle. In fact, it has dropped a new record like clockwork every two years since 2002, meaning no one should be surprised that full-length number six is set to drop on November…

Venomous Maximus isn’t a cover band that does a cool version of “Witching Hour.” This Houston band likes riffs, penned a song that’s an indirect ode to King Diamond (see below) and has earned comparisons to Pentagram and Electric Wizard. We’ll gladly take that over a Cronos impersonation. For your exclusive streaming pleasure, Venomous Maximus…

Only a short few months ago, Killing Joke frontman Jeremy “Jaz” Coleman went mysteriously missing. Canceled shows happened and, well, a bunch of (admittedly European) press covered Killing Joke when they would’ve anyway. Turns out Coleman was running around the Western Sahara, working on a solo album and a book. Neat. Coleman’s never been a…

Metallica were wise to wait several years before making their first promotional music video. Having experienced it first hand—waiting patiently for a metal video to pop up so we could capture it on our VHS recorder—we can attest to the fact that the dawn of music videos in the early ’80s was the worst. Especially…