Panopticon

Get to you know your Decibel Metal & Beer Fest breweries. We interview the Austin Lunn-led Hammerheart Brewing Company. 

Death metal legends Immolation get their first Decibel cover. Grab a copy here. 

Hear a brand new Panopticon track recorded especially for the Decibel Flexi Series. 

Black metal favorites Panopticon record a crushing, nearly seven-minute epic for the Decibel Flexi Series. If you want one, you’ll need a deluxe Decibel subscription by December 20. 

Sleep and Agoraphobic Nosebleed headline the first-annual two-day celebration of extreme metal and craft beer presented by Unibroue

Find out what makes the man behind some of today’s best woodsy black metal releases tick with this profile of Bindrune Recordings.

Autumn Eternal
So… winter isn’t coming?
dB Rating: 9/10

Staying true to this breakneck creative pace, Austin Lunn is mere weeks away from dropping Panopticon’s sixth LP, the enthralling and resonant Autumn Eternal. The album is a thematic companion to his two previous LPs, but musically, it eschews the “blackened bluegrass” approach in favor of emotionally charged, mournfully melodic black metal (think Winterfylleth meets early Katatonia). We talked to Lunn about creating Autumn Eternal, taking inspiration from nature and being a musician in the often-disheartening environment of the digital age.

Rather than planting our flag in one fertile corner of the extreme musical universe, Decibel has always enjoyed scrambling back and forth along the continuum, from the dingiest anti-production muckfests (found in our recent Top 100 Black Metal Albums special issue) to the most gorgeous prog explorations (such as Jeff Wagner’s super-mellow Cynic piece in the current…

Any time we receive a note promising music that “marries traditional coal mining songs with harsh, expansive black metal” we’re intrigued. And Panopticon’s “Kentucky” is sort of the metal equivalent of a William Faulkner novel: dense, multifacted but also soulful. The album, due in June from Handmade Birds/Pagan Flames, touches on the difficulty and despair…