NWOBHM

The New Wave of British Heavy Metal wasn’t a movement. Until it was a movement. Early on, bands—mostly categorized as hard rock—merely created music the only way they knew how.

The NWOBHM band’s original guitarist will join them for two shows in Los Angeles and Phoenix on their upcoming tour.  

Evil Invaders‘ “Raising Hell” is a speed-drenched, retro tune. 

Diamond Head
>Heady Topper
dB rating: 8/10

Friday is for flying rodents. Or NWOBHM supergroups featuring members of Municipal Waste, Volture, and D.R.I. — your choice. 

The Diamond Head frontman chats about the band’s new album.

By the time 1983 rolled around, those bands participating within the loose construct known as the New Wave of British Heavy Metal had become well aware that there was more to their scene and sound than playing time-tested and amped-up blues-based riffs in the back rooms of pubs or moldy rehearsal rooms.

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…

Gore House Productions is known for their embrace of some of the most depraved death metal on the planet. The bulk of their catalog would be considered NSFW. But gore-hound-in-chief Carlos Matt is launching a sister label called Funeral Noise Records that aims to embrace different and, dare we say, more accessible metal. Decibel got…

“A lot has been written and said about me through the years — most of it bad, some of it untrue.” That’s the opening of the 2010 Paul Di’Anno biography The Beast, which reads more like a gritty LA noir novel than a musical memoir. If you were to read the book — a combination…

Candles?  Flowing hair?  Human bones?  Leather?  Bullet belts?  A moustache?  Song titles like “Shocker” and “Possessed by Heavy Metal”?  We all know what this leads to… Vancouver rollickers Spell used to be called Stryker, and under that earlier name the trio released an EP and a split full of trad-heavy love.  Next month, they’ve enlisted…

In 1985, a kid by the name of Tommy Memzercardo released “The Innocent, The Forsaken, The Guilty”, an off-kilter fantasy/epic metal EP featuring Bill Ward on drums. Back then, the former Black Sabbath drummer couldn’t be credited for legal reasons, while Memzercardo was a mystery all of his own, calling himself The Mezmerist and playing…

That Satan were one of the most slept-on bands of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal because of their name is a cruel irony. For a genre that adopted the devil as chief muse and aesthetic patriarch, Satan should have fitted right in; acceptance should have been instant. But while Satan, too, were a…

Live Evil Festival 2013 will take place on October 18th-20th at the Highbury Garage, London, with two UK exclusive shows from reformed NWOBHM elders SATAN and Ohio slayers MIDNIGHT already confirmed. With bands picked on the condition that they’ve featured in Fenriz of Darkthrone’s Band of the Week blog, Live Evil is resolutely, 100% fundamentally…

English N.W.O.B.H.M./doom elders Pagan Altar will release remastered EP The Time Lord through Shadow Kingdom Records on 11 September 2012. Having previously only available limited vinyl runs, The Time Lord has hitherto harder to find than a taxi on New Year’s Eve, a pint of unicorn milk, etc… This is the first time it has…

According to the wholly democratic, incorruptible and failsafe Decibel End of Year Poll, In Solitude’s superlative The World. The Flesh. The Devil. was officially the fourth-best album of 2011. (Yeah, in reality it was probably like the third best, but that doesn’t matter, not really. The thing is not to sleep on it.) The coltish…

Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog. Well, once in a while, on Wednesday morning, a Decibel staffer or special guest will take to the Deciblog to bitch and moan at length as to why everybody’s full of shit and said dud…

Y’know, despite being erudite professionals here at the Deciblog every now and then there’s an interview that spirals out of control and onto matters unrelated to, well, anything that it was supposed to relate to like that phonecall to Steve Asheim about a Deicide tour turns into a fullblown dialogue concerning the merits of cheeseburgers…