death metal

The most aptly titled release of the year so far is almost certainly Howling’s A Beast Conceived — a hellacious sonic amalgamation of Heartwork, Ride the Lightning, and Tom G. Warrior-style sinister riffage fronted by the restless extreme music paragon Vanessa Nocera and brimming with lyrical homages to cult horror movie classics like The Beast…

Plugging a radio show in this day and age seems kinda quaint when you consider that music can be streamed all over the Internet but, with upcoming guest DJs Bill Taylor from Immolation and Esa Linden of Demigod, Metalenema is a special case. Their show’s remit—death and black metal, both classic and contemporary, with “some…

A lot of people were digging Vex’s 2010 debut album, Thanatopsis but even though there was a buzz in the underground surrounding the Texan’s weird genre-splicing take on death metal Memorious still has the capacity to surprise. Looking at the bare facts is misleading; Horror Pain Gore Death Productions are writing the checks, Vex are…

And so begins the relentless stream of new metal releases of 2013. First out of the gate is some tried and true death metal courtesy of Germany’s Defeated Sanity. dB is streaming the second track “Naraka” off upcoming album Passages Into Deformity, due Feb. 5 and available for preorder from Willowtip. The band describes the…

Incantation need no introduction, surely, so let’s keep this brief and to the point. The Pennsylvanian death metal kingpins release their ninth album, Vanquish in Vengeance, on November 27th through Listenable Records. This is Incantation’s first LP since 2006’s sulfurous Primordial Domination, and considering death metal’s new wave of old-schoolers have grown evermore reliant on…

The phrases “Van Drunen” and “side project” will cause more than a little excitement in these parts. The death metal frontman handled vocals on two prestigious entries in Decibel’s Top 100 Death Metal Albums (available here). He also toured with the mighty Bolt Thrower and fronts war-themed badasses Hail Of Bullets. The dude is like…

Since Brooklyn trio Flourishing is releasing the digital version of its latest 3-song EP, Intersubjectivity, via The Path Less Traveled today we figured it would be a good opportunity to give some stuff away to mark the occasion.

If you mention “gallery” and “death metal” in the same sentence we’re probably going to think Gallery of Suicide. Maybe this is a sign of the yawning chasm that exists between extreme metal and art/gallery culture, or maybe it’s just a deeply concerning hardwired word association. But, if you think about it, aside from the…

UK underground champs Dead Beyond Buried are giving their new album, The Dark Era, and that’s pretty cool, right? Everyone likes free stuff. That’s a given. And especially free music. Eight out 10 features with bands at some point touch upon the music industry’s perilous position right over yon great fiscal abyss, into which it’s…

The concept of faith might be diametrically opposed to Marduk’s pitch-black worldview but the Swedish fundamentalists are worthy of yours. Of all the Second Wave black metal bands who still consider their iconoclastic craft a full-time concern, Marduk are the ones who always deliver. They could be accused of lacking a sense of adventure when…

We’re always stoked to get new material from one of the members of our storied Hall Of Fame. Decibel has received an exclusive sneak peek at the new Cryptopsy song “The Golden Square Mile,” from their forthcoming self-titled, self-released LP (due September 14). Cryptopsy also gave us a little more information about the song, which…

Seeing as Florida’s output of death metal has slowed to a trickle as scene veterans spend more time on the road, less time in the studio, or just sweat it out in semi-retirement, you could do worse than check in on Finland’s Gorephilia. Gorephilia’s long-awaited debut LP Embodiment of Death is old-school all right, and…

On the upcoming Carnival of Death tour Florida death metal legends Obituary will shred a “fan-generated” set drawn primarily from the vile trinity of Slowly We Rot, Cause Of Death and The End Complete — including some tracks that have never before been performed live. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to get Obituary vocalist…

“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…

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…

We don’t hear about nearly enough good death metal from the U.K lately. Grind or doom? There are bands aplenty. Death metal? Not nearly enough, although our savvy readers will list every band I’ve forgotten in the comment section. While you are doing that take a minute to stream “Dissolution” from Binah’s Hallucinating in Resurrecture,…

It’s competition time, folks, and courtesy of the good folk at Metal Blade we have a selection of swag to give away, on the condition that you A) answer the question correctly and B) are lucky enough to be drawn out of our moth-balled and dandruff-flecked Six Feet Under beanie. Now, we were going to…

UK-based death-heads, consider this your rallying cry for what will not only be one of the summer’s most gnarly nights of death metal, but a crucial fundraiser for former Decapitated vocalist, Adrian “Covan” Kowanek. Decapitated, Hades Lab, Dead Beyond Buried and Ted Maul tear up the Camden Underworld’s dilapidated bowel on 29 June 2012. Doors…

Speaking to Terrorizer frontman Anthony “Wolf” Rezhawk just before comeback LP Hordes of Zombies dropped, there was a lot that needed thrashing out. Firstly, there was the prospect of the Californian grind crew getting back together again after founding member Jesse Pintado’s death in 2006. Also, drummer Pete “Commando” Sandoval’s well-publicized back trouble, which has…

Dr. Vivek Venkatesh’s office at Concordia University in Montreal is almost certainly unique in the world of academia. There probably aren’t many professors out there, for instance, who mix and match All Pigs Must Die prints and Latin salsa posters or keep vinyl collections as close at hand as research materials. And if any Decibel…

Those of you who instinctively sniff the wind for the freshest über-brutal death metal should be familiar with Hour of Penance by now. Maybe you’ve been feeling a weird kinda tingle through your core mosh-muscle groups in anticipation of the imminent release of the Italians’ fifth album, Sedition. Hour of Penance have got themselves a…

Ten years ago death metal pioneer Chuck Schuldiner lost his battle with cancer. As the fervor surrounding recent Death and Control Denied reissues clearly demonstrates, the man’s legacy has only continued to grow in the intervening years. There are several great remembrances floating around today — I particularly recommend NPR’s “Death is Never Finished” and…

Encoffination do well to sound like they’ve been in the ground long before recording. A two-piece, drummer/duo located on opposite sides of the coast in Atlanta and San Diego respectively, their interpretation of death metal is begrudging of tempo and chokes the throat and nostrils with a real cloying miasmatic aesthetic. Guitarist/vocalist Ghoat insists it’s…

Morbid Angel recently invited Decibel to the set of the band’s upcoming video for “Existo Vulgore.” We didn’t spot any strange winged demonic creatures skulking about, alas, but it was a good time nonetheless and during the drive from Morbid HQ in Tampa to Seminole’s Studio 75 David Vincent graciously answered our questions, riffing on…

Morbid Angel are playing a shopping mall tonight. It’s OK, though, ‘cos it’s not like they are opening it, or performing exclusively for the switching on of the festive lights. That sorta shit’s demeaning and they’ve already had a tough year of it. There weren’t too many organs of record with their ass in the…

Dragged into Sunlight are one of the most exciting things to happen to the UK underground metal scene since Anaal Nathrakh started experimenting with black metal’s forbidden fruits and spitting the pips through a particle accelerator. Mixing elements of doom, black and death metal with a horrible, uncodified ritualistic live/visual aesthetic, Dragged into Sunlight genuinely…

When Bastard Priest dropped the five-track Merciless Insane Death demo through Zombie Ritual Tapes in 2008, the duo left an almighty crater for all crusty death-heads to fall into and over each other. Genre veterans spent days nursing the shell-shock associated when detonating explosive underground death metal finds. It was a bitch, for a week…

Denial Fiend could be considered an all-star death metal crew but that’s kinda disengenious when it’s more a case of seasoned offenders stitched together by previous convictions and a jonesing for horror movies and punk. Since forming in 2006, Denial Fiend have been part of the new old-school death metal revival much in the same…

Surveying the Apocalyptic Necromancy track listing it is pretty clear those with an actual fear of gore might have their gag reflexes tested a bit by the latest fetid offerings from Goreaphobia — see, for example, “Rust Worms and the Noxious Fevers They Bring,” “Shroud of the Hyena,” or “Void of the Larva Queen.” Thus,…

After the initial self-reproach for having never heard of Kansas death metal cryptids, Troglodyte, it was kinda OK that their 1990 Florida sound had kept itself a mystery, scrawled somewhere on a Post-It on whoever is covering Fox Mulder’s desk these days. Like, the only people who know about this sort of shit are the…