One of the more pleasant surprises for me so far this year has been Karma to Burn‘s new LP. I’m a big fan of Almost Heathen (especially these two neck snappers), and the reason Arch Stanton–much like 2001 precursor–works is simple: the riffs. Just check out “Twenty-Three” below (yes, all of their song titles are…

Boy, it’s easy to get lost in music videos these days. In the latest black-and-white video for Lay Siege’s “Hollow Hands” the English sludge/hardcore hybrid certainly does their best headbanging. But the camera keeps panning to a guy who looks like a community college English professor who is very pissed off at the book he’s…

A year and a half after making a very strong first impression with the Knights of Darkness EP, Finnish speed metalers Ranger are set to return in 2015, this time with full-length debut Where Evil Dwells under their collective bullet belts. Unlike other bands that profess to creating old-school heavy metal with a more modern…

What’s better than a wolf? A black wolf, of course. What’s even better than a black wolf? A black wolf with umlauts. Oakland’s Blackwülf bring some serious stoner vibes to the party, hitting the listener with some fat bottomed rock. “Wings of Steel” is so fresh that it comes from an album they haven’t even…

“Some of you might have been conceived to this song,” Ringworm frontman James “Human Furnace” Bulloch told the gathered at Sonny’s Tavern, the small, homey New Hampshire bar the Cleveland metallic hardcore levelers were then steadily transforming into an overly-amped emotional and physical pressure cooker. “The album it’s on came out in 1993. You do…

The videos that arrive at Decibel headquarters are often predictably bad. There are the things we loathe (lyric videos), things we find annoying (videos talking about the making of videos) and the low budget (we’ll just record ourselves playing live and hope people give a shit). Boy, did Shredhead’s new animated stop motion video just…

It took us a good 10 years to get it right, but Rwake is really just pronounced “wake”. Good to know since Relapse is re-issuing the group’s debut demo, Xenoglossalgia (The Last Stage of Awareness), with stunning limited 3D art with 3D glasses. We can finally sound intelligent while descanting about Dostoyevsky’s formative years, vegan…

A year ago, metal enthusiast and writer Dayal Patterson presented the world with his authoritative document Black Metal: Evolution of the Cult, claiming the dark hearts of literate misanthropes everywhere.  To anyone who read the book and thought it could have been more developed… well, the author thought so, too.  This year, we will have…

Last week, we debuted the track “Caravan” from Monolith’s soon to be released album Against The Wall Of Forever. It turns out that there is a pretty decent audience for the band’s proto NWOBHM sounds. So, our friends at the new label Funeral Noise Records (a spinoff of death metal staple Gore House) asked if…

It’s not often a new band drops jaws. Dutch black metallers Kjeld, from Friesland, are one such band. Corrupting the good minds of northern Netherlands (and Germany) for the better part of their eight years as a band, Kjeld is modern yet reflective on new album, Skym. They play “Proud and pure Frisian black metal…