The metal institution known as Grave Digger has been around almost as long as the genre of heavy metal. They will release their seventeenth album (yes, that’s correct) called Return Of The Reaper on July 11. Your friends at Decibel got a chance to premiere the lyric video of the track “Season Of The Witch.”…

Semi-rural, semi-suburban Maryland is hardly an obvious spawning ground for gritty black metal.  With Washington D.C. and Baltimore hogging all the attention, and Frederick area bars almost exclusively hosting good-time cover bands of dubious quality, the area’s heavy music scene is pretty damn subdued. Dweller in the Valley drummer/vocalist Dane Olds is a current Frederick,…

Montreal’s kings of noise rock diversity and awesome promo photos, The Great Sabatini (who we have mentioned on this blog previously), have a new album in the starting gate. It’s called Dog Years and you can listen to the whole damn thing below while you read guitarist/vocalist Sean Sabatini discuss the record’s nuts ‘n’ bolts…

When Oli Peters takes his songs about “lucid dreaming, a monster made out of teeth, a king who creates duplicates of himself who then overthrow him, and a guy who feeds himself to his backyard pig” on the road (my favorite part of KSP’s recent profile), he and his Archspire brethren tend to keep the…

Rae Amitay is the vocalist and drummer for Immortal Bird and drums for Thrawsunblat. Follow her on Twitter. I run my fingers along the drum key nestled in my pocket and look out at my band from behind my kit. A quick glance at my ride cymbal notifies me of an impending threat to its…

America’s only monthly extreme music magazine is turning 10, and we’re too pumped up to settle for just one birthday party. On October 18, Decibel is taking Manhattan (and Brooklyn) with two exclusive, blowout concerts. First up at Best Buy Theater in Times Square: the globally renowned axework of Amon Amarth, Sabaton and Vallenfyre (the…

I remember chatting on the phone with Mike Williams about Eyehategod’s follow-up to 2000’s Confederacy of Ruined Lives, how it was going slowly as he was dealing with his incarceration issues, his health, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the difficulty of getting all five members in the same room together. There was no firm…

While everyone else is reporting from that East Coast festival this week, we here at Decibel’s Los Angeles Bureau are lazy and don’t like to go further than 43.5 miles from our home base. Fortunately, on May 17, Scion held their annual Rockfest in Pomona, which is exactly that distance. Sweet! I was there, and…

If you are one of our regular readers chances are you are sweating out a hangover from the long weekend or recovering from your trip to Maryland Deathfest — probably both. To help as you begin the long and painful transition back to reality we have a full album stream of Jar’d Loose’s new album…

It’s not as if Prong ever completely fell off, really, but 2012’s Carved Into Stone nevertheless felt like a return to form in both energy and attack, and now, two years later, comes Ruining Lives, a ferocious, amped, occasionally pretty damn adventurous album that may very well be the band’s best effort since its nineties…