Interviews

** Death metal record of the year? It might just be Vanhelgd’s new album, Relics of Sulphur Salvation. Featured in DB (June #116), we decided mainman Mattias Frisk had too much to say than we could fit in print. So, we took out the full transcript for ‘heads everywhere. Read on and don’t sleep on…

Semi-rural, semi-suburban Maryland is hardly an obvious spawning ground for gritty black metal.  With Washington D.C. and Baltimore hogging all the attention, and Frederick area bars almost exclusively hosting good-time cover bands of dubious quality, the area’s heavy music scene is pretty damn subdued. Dweller in the Valley drummer/vocalist Dane Olds is a current Frederick,…

Montreal’s kings of noise rock diversity and awesome promo photos, The Great Sabatini (who we have mentioned on this blog previously), have a new album in the starting gate. It’s called Dog Years and you can listen to the whole damn thing below while you read guitarist/vocalist Sean Sabatini discuss the record’s nuts ‘n’ bolts…

When Oli Peters takes his songs about “lucid dreaming, a monster made out of teeth, a king who creates duplicates of himself who then overthrow him, and a guy who feeds himself to his backyard pig” on the road (my favorite part of KSP’s recent profile), he and his Archspire brethren tend to keep the…

It’s not as if Prong ever completely fell off, really, but 2012’s Carved Into Stone nevertheless felt like a return to form in both energy and attack, and now, two years later, comes Ruining Lives, a ferocious, amped, occasionally pretty damn adventurous album that may very well be the band’s best effort since its nineties…

It takes a special band to spend twelve-and-a-half minutes slogging through a freaky-heavy doom bum-out called simply “Darkness,” then decide there’s just more to say on the issue and tuck in for another 14 minutes and call the result “Darkness, Part 2.”  It’s like being lost in a menacing forest devoid of all large predators…

Back in early 2012, Chris Dick sung the praises of Cormorant’s Dwellings. Since the band’s recently released follow-up is yet another quality entry in its still nascent catalog, we asked Nick Cohon to tell us about some of the “darker country music” that he listens to (the guitarist is also rocking a Gov’t Mule Dose…

Trans Am have been around since the 90s, and in that time they’ve explored everything from post-rock to electronica and Krautrock. They’ve always had hard rock influences, but never more obviously than on their latest release, Volume X. As soon as we heard the stoner rock and thrash vibes of a few of the songs,…

Kathmandu, Nepal’s Dying Out Flame play Vedic death metal — that is, in the words of the band’s charismatic and eloquent frontman Aabeg Gautam, “Hindu themes derived from ancient Vedic philosophy/mythology and literature, incorporating ancient sanskrit shlokas, and fusing traditional Hindu classical music to brutal death metal.” Sounds pretty esoteric and spacey, right? Well, get…

With 17 billion bands, labels and PR people all clamouring for a piece of the attention pie, it sometimes gets to the point where you want to grab a small stack of classics and go stick your head in the proverbial sand of that deserted desert island people claim to be listening to their favourite…

In celebration of Eyehategod‘s first full-length studio album in nearly a decade and a half, last week we shared five musical selections that frontman (and soon to be cover star) Mike IX Williams’ listens to on his “stupid iPod in the filthy tour van.” As promised, here are the rest of his eclectic picks which,…

Sometimes we finally get a guest we’ve wanted to host forever. We are extremely lucky today to welcome one of the forefathers of death metal to the studio: Eric Cutler of the mighty Autopsy! Eric is still shredding away — you can check out his new work on Torniquets Hacksaws & Graves. Please welcome Eric…

As we  mentioned in a recent interview with Norwegian filmmaker Christian Falch,  there’s an awfully interesting new documentary in production that more than a few of you might appreciate. ‘Blackhearts’ is slated for a September 2015 release, and follows three black metal fans & musicians from very dissimilar backgrounds as they chase their dreams and…

Last month at the 2014 Inferno Music Conference (which runs concurrently to the much louder Inferno Metal Festival), I was lucky enough to squeeze into a short presentation led by filmmaker Christian Falch. He was there to introduce his latest project, and from the looks of things, it’ll be a doozy. ‘Blackhearts’ follows three black…

** March 2014. An eternity ago. We featured Behemoth on the cover, in which frontman Adam ‘Nergal’ Darski goes through his tribulations with career, state, and cancer. Darski’s also a bit of a traveler, too. We found five quotes that weren’t used for the March 2014 issue (DB #113) that remind us why Darski (and…

I’m not exactly sure where Jason Netherton finds the time and energy to do everything he does, but he does. Most of you are probably familiar with him via Misery Index, a band he formed after his departure from Dying Fetus. However, it doesn’t stop there. Presently, he’s kinda-sorta uprooted from his Maryland home and…

It’s been nearly 14 years since Eyehategod graced us with a new long-player, but thankfully that drought will come to an end in a matter of weeks when the band’s self-titled fifth LP drops on May 27th. Not only are the album’s 11 songs well worth the wait, but frontman Mike IX Williams was kind…

Marissa Martinez-Hoadley is: A. Awesome B. Bandmates with our first ever studio participant Elizabeth Schall C. A bonafide shredder She’s also working to finalize a new Cretin album for release this year. It’s about eight years later than we wanted but it’s a new record so we’ll take it. Please welcome Marissa Martinez-Hoadley the shredder’s…

While the moniker may conjure up images of retirees bashing each other over the head with hoes, slashing at their wrinkly skin with hand rakes, Freddy Kruger-ed up gardening gloves and lots of screaming while being chased by gnarly pairs of razor-sharp hedge clippers, Psychotic Gardening is actually a band. You may have made that…

** Finnish death metal lords Corpsessed have come out of an unlikely grave. Formed in 2007 in the quaint town of Järvenpää from Tyranny and BeDimmed members, the Finns quickly set out to craft death based on their predecessors–no need to name names, really–but with a modern, individual touch. The group’s debut EP The Dagger…

About six months ago, a Salt Lake City, UT band called Gravecode Nebula heaved out its first album, Sempiternal Void, despite the fact that the band has been playing together in some form since 2006.  Fellow Salt Lake slowniks and Decibel faves SubRosa have mentioned GN a couple times when discussing local bands they enjoy,…

Admittedly, I haven’t been an obsessive listener of Impaled Nazarene since their formation back in 1990 in the shadowy flanks of Finland’s goat brothels.

Florida may not always have the most sterling reputation, but it’s produced a slew of the bands that we cover and love. For starters, consider Atheist, Hate Eternal and many Morrisound alumni. As Jason Heller detailed in our latest issue, Floor–another Sunshine State spawn–returns next week with its first new record since 2004’s Dove (which…

** Norwegian thrashers Nocturnal Breed have been kicking it old-school for the better part of the last 15 years. Formed by guys originally associated with the black metal scene, but are now fully entrenched in the rigors of thrash, Nocturnal Breed know exactly what they’re doing on new album, Napalm Nights, the group’s first in…

Finally, it’s here!  I’m referring to the one weekend every year when even the brightest eyed, bushiest tailed Christian joins our cult of death for 48 hours and worships the treachery of friends, agonizing torture and public humiliation, and the brutal suffocation of a (reportedly) innocent life, just before we all pay lip service to…

Back in 2010, Scion ran the “No Label Needed” contest in which the car company enabled a band to “receive insight and instruction on the music industry from music industry professionals while recording an EP at the Machine Shop” (you can read more about it here). Minnesota’s Iron Thrones came away winners and proceeded to…

Melodic death metal, crust, d-beat, black metal, doom, post-metal . . . It doesn’t really matter how you label Nux Vomica because it’s pretty much impossible to adequately describe their wayfaring sound in terms of genre alone. Yeah we went for crust in this headline, but that was more of a convenient adjective, headline shorthand,…

Pushing boundaries is taken for granted in extreme music. The review pages of Decibel are packed with bands that eschew convention in the hopes of creating something different. In the early 80s, hardcore punk and metal were ruled by dogma. T.S.O.L. was one of the standard bearers: Weathered Statues and Dance With Me were benchmarks…

Baton Rouge doom/sludge prolific over-achievers, Thou has returned from an almost unheard of (for them, anyway) two years of silence as far as releases are concerned with their latest and greatest full-length, Heathen. We recently sent guitarist Andy Gibbs and vocalist Bryan Funck a bunch of questions to respond to via email. It would appear…

Back in 2012, Mehdi Safa, the man behind shelsmusic, was kind enough to talk to us in detail about his label (you can read that here and here). Six months later, we interviewed Astrohenge, one of my favorite discoveries of 2012. So when we heard this week that shelsmusic had signed the London quartet, we…