Sweden’s Khoma is probably best known on this side of the Atlantic – assuming they’re known at all – for being the side project of Cult of Luna’s Johannes Persson and Fredrik Kihlberg. Au contraire. While they may not have been as on the radar of metalnerds as Cult of Luna, Khoma has existed in…

Since it’s getting near the end of the year, I figured I’d mix things up a little bit and fill a couple of these posts with some bands that I’ve been lucky enough to discover over the past 11 months or so. And since this quartet made one of the biggest impressions on me, with…

In 2010, one-man black metal outfit Xasthur released its final album, Portal of Sorrow. That it would be Xasthur’s swansong was announced in advance by its creator, Scott Conner, who abandoned his longtime alias “Malefic” and used his real name in the credits for the first time in a career that spanned 15 years and…

Fall has been kind to the mighty Incantation. They released their boss new album Vanquish In Vengeance (read more about the creation of the album in our new issue). And they charted like a Britney Spears single in our top 100 death metal albums of all time. One of the reasons they are shredding so…

Rock and metal’s history is filled with super-success stories. The likes of which have landed Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, KISS, and countless more into the memory banks and culture stream of headbobbers and normal joes everywhere. But there’s an opposite side to mountains of cocaine, private jets, and endless pyro fountains. “Un-success” is…

We don’t talk about love a whole lot here at Decibel, and we don’t cover a lot of bands that take influence from Duran Duran. But if you’re tuned into the singularly unique world of Sacramento’s Deftones, you’ll understand that songs of love will be surrealistic, open to interpretation, and tempered with an undercurrent of…

Sorry for the tease, but this post isn’t exactly about Motorhead’s Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers compilation. Bear with us, though, because it does have some relevance to the topic at hand. You may or may not remember a regular part of the Deciblog rotation a couple years ago was a little thing we called…

The Foo Fighters may be on a hiatus important enough to be noted by the nation’s newspaper of record, but Dave Grohl remains busy, putting the finishing touches on his debut directorial effort Sound City, a documentary about “the truth, the craft and the integrity of Rock and Roll.” And as part of the buzz-building…

In the latest issue of Decibel (#99), I interviewed J.D. Cronise of the Sword about the band’s new album, Apocryphon. All was going in a predictable manner until, toward the end of our chat, Cronise began discussing his distaste for mosh pits and moshing, and how he prefers people to keep their shit together and…

On January 19th, Decibel will celebrate a century of extremely extreme issues at Philadelphia Union Transfer in exalted company: four-time cover stars Converge; swine-ablating grindhogs Pig Destroyer; crossover champs Municipal Waste; Repulsion (be still, beating heart); 2011’s AOTY artists Tombs; and funerealy epic doom titans Evoken. It’s the perfect Decibel storm, a line-up of bands…