The Land of the Midnight Sun has always cast a unique pall over heavy metal, so this December, Decibel dives deep into the thousand lakes to extract our special Finnish Metal Issue.

If you are currently on the road,  there’s simply some stuff that you’ve gotta know about the faithful roadhorse that is getting you from city to city.

Seemingly every year the NFL creates an all roads lead to Rome story line. The league’s broadcasters will focus in on two different teams, obviously an AFC team and an NFC team, and describe them as on a collision course all season season long. 

Decibel‘s publisher, editor-in-chief and managing editor are all baseball guys, but our art director quietly maintains an fierce allegiance to hockey — particularly the Flyers — so we’re sure he’s psyched about the very likely unironic image of southeast Pennsylvania noise-rockers Carved Up above. 

Metal bands have been using literature as inspiration for decades, but for whatever reason, the two worlds seldom intersect when it comes to actual production…writers tend to stay on one side of the room while musicians stare at them from the other. Shuffling around somewhere in the middle are people like Nathan Carson, drummer of Portland-based doom titans Witch Mountain and published author of short fiction.

Noise-rock quartet Kowloon Walled City have gone all-in on slow-burning bad mood.

Battle scenes, H. R. Giger artwork, huge skulls, and pseudo-corpsepaint lead to some confused metalheads. 

Peter Steele might have taken umbrage with the “Softly” in the title — the man had a knack for bluntness — but we’ll give Pinkish Black predecessor the Great Tyrant a pass.

A bit back, I wrote a piece on our blog about how women are treated in metal, and I learned a lot from the experience. The main takeaway? Holy shit, are there a lot of stupid people out there.

Mine is a Black Mouth’s music is pure crunch ‘n’ snarl, a harrowing and inspired avalanche of bassy blasting that is well worth the 20-minute run time.