At the end of March, Agalloch announced that it had completed work on new EP Faustian Echoes. The band had originally planned to release the effort—one 20+ minute song (the longest of its career) recorded live onto two-inch tape—on its upcoming US tour, but on Sunday, roughly a week before its first show, made it…

“Sit back and hold your breath/Just let nature take effect.” So said death metal OG Chris Barnes in his Six Feet Under ode to marijuana “4:20.” In addition to death and murder tales, Barnes has been an unapologetic advocate for legalizing marijuana since the early days of his metal career. Barnes has been riding high…

Since we know that a few of you may be enjoying frosty barley pops and doing your best not to blow a limb off tomorrow while celebrating Independence Day, we figured a Tankard song premiere was in order. Yeah, don’t ask us how we got from Point A to Point B on that one, but…

On today’s edition of Into the Depths we invite Karl Sanders out of the catacombs for a conversation on how a hippie-admiring kid from San Francisco became a visionary force of nature in extreme music destined to single-handedly summon the improbable subgenre of ithyphallic death metal into being. From having to pawn their guitars on…

Benefit shows always have a weird vibe but death metal benefit shows are especially weird. Maybe it’s because the genre is ordinarily used as our portal to antisocial emotional territories, and when there is the attendant poignancy of a good cause it makes everyone feel as if they’ve been given a different script for the…

The last time we featured American heavy metal phenoms Iced Earth on the Deciblog, WordPress wasn’t even cool yet. In fact, evidence of said coverage is lost in some Access database that’s sitting in some office on a tape back-up. So, yeah, we’ve been delinquent in our patriotic (hey, July 4th is two days away)…

Howdy folks… Waldo here, bringing you all the stuff that’s good to hate. Ladies and “djentlemen,” we’re going to tear this one apart. PERIPHERY release the very hateable Periphery II, as if one of these wasn’t bad enough. Apparently this is some form of music called “djent,” whatever that means, and boy howdy does it…

Nothing unites the metal community quite like a healthy hit of righteous rage.  War, complacency, ignorance, religion, technology, the opposite sex, government subsidies – if something pisses you off, someone’s encoding your disgust into guitar riff magic. Any good New Ager Rager knows that nature is very, um, fertile soil for dark musical themes.  As…

Orange County’s Seven Sisters of Sleep aren’t big on going out of their way to get in people’s faces. Then again, I’m speaking from a shaking babies and kissing hands perspective. I’ve never seen them live and judging by the rusty heroin needle guitar tone and sociopathic throat abuse that drives their hammering of metallic…

Last week, we brought you Part 1 of our interview with The Day After The Sabbath‘s proprietor Rich. This week not only includes the rest of our interview, but a mini-playlist of five tracks hand-picked by the man himself. And while you’re at it, be sure to check out the latest TDATS compilation (#71), his…