Portuguese death metal crew The Ominous Circle are a mysterious bunch, so we caught up with them just before their debut LP drops to try to make some sense out of it all.

Warbringer ponder what happened to the souls of those destroyed by the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Are their souls trapped in their shadows forever? 

Things have been quiet on the Rottenness front for a while, but the band is ramping up again and aiming to keep busy throughout 2017.

Read about former Yob drummer Gabe Morley’s struggle with mental illness and homelessness and learn how you can help him secure stable housing. 

Necrowretch deliver the first ripping song off of Satanic Slavery, their newly-announced full-length. 

For a brief time in the early 90’s Cyclone Temple was one of the best heavy metal bands on the planet…

So argues No Echo proprietor/Deny the Cross vocalist Carlos Ramirez in the liner notes to the reverential, enlivening reissue of 1991’s I Hate Therefore I Am — available as an import courtesy Divebomb Records International alongside a fascinating collections of demos, early and live tracks, and of the Greed, Home of the Depraved — and we’re streaming the Chicago thrashers’ seriously underrated, boundary-defying full-length debut below as evidence that our man is not engaged in any sort of idle smoke blowing: This superior sonic marriage of Spreading the Disease-era Anthrax and circa-Age of Quarrel Cro-Mags, further empowered and set apart by Brian Troch’s ferocious Dio-meets-street vocals, remains far ahead of its time in many, many ways. Indeed, I Hate Therefore I Am, in this humble scribe’s opinion, is the real, vulnerable, defiant shit the retro kids actually should be jamming into the metal-future.

Phil Anselmo and horror icon Bill Moseley join forces as Bill & Phil. Hear the full stream. 

Apparently it’s difficult to pull off a good metal video. Richmond’s BAT make it look not only easy, but fun as hell, too, with their new black&white, B movie-inspired thriller, “Beware of the Bat.”

Swedish doom trio Laser Dracul are the children of the night, and the music they make is LOUD.

No words are used (and none are needed) to tell a story on “…The Idyllic Realm.”