Metal 259 Items

Swiss firebrand alchemists Zeal & Ardor are excited to announce forthcoming, self-titled new album!

Hissing and seeping justifiable rage from every pore - yet not an unrelenting musical battering - the 14-track opus was recorded by Marc Obrist and Manuel Gagneux at Hutch Sounds and mixed and mastered by Will Putney at Graphic Nature Audio. All songs were written by the softly spoken, multilingual frontman Gagneux, with some German lyrics intermixed with the English. Gagneux declares, “With the self-titled record, we have arrived at where I imagined this project should sound like. It’s the longest we’ve worked on a single record and I believe it shows. The most important thing for an album of ours to do, is transport you instantly into our mood, our world. Even though this might not be the one you might expect from us, this record certainly delivers on that front. We had time to hone in to what we think makes us interesting and what sounds we would like to explore through this we have found our home. Home is burning. Welcome home.”

Two decades into their journey as ritualistic black metal conjurers, Wolves IN THE Throne Room have emerged from the forest with Primordial Arcana, their most majestic album to date, and their first release via Relapse Records.

Primordial Arcana is the band’s first completely self-contained work: In addition to composition and performance, brothers Aaron and Nathan Weaver alongside guitarist Kody Keyworth handled all aspects of recording, producing and mixing at their own Owl Lodge Studios in the woods of Washington state.

The album’s title is a reference to the band’s ongoing reach back to the most ancient, archetypal energies.

Leadoff track “Mountain Magick” sets the august tone with alpine guitar melodies cresting skyward in triumph. “Spirit of Lightning” returns briefly to the earthly plane as a tribute to the human connections forged in music. Meanwhile, “Primal Chasm (Gift of Fire)” is an explosion of cosmic grandeur, a symphonic rendering of the hermetic maxim As above, so below as envisioned by Keyworth. In fact, Primordial Arcana is the first Wolves IN THE Throne Room record in which Kody was a part of the writing process from the start, so it benefits from his background in cosmic funeral doom.

Always uncompromising, Primordial Arcana sees Wolves IN THE Throne Room stay true to their unique vision. An album born out of the DIY ethos, Primordial Arcana proves to be the band’s most genuine and focused. One of the year’s most ambitious recordings, Primordial Arcana cements Wolves IN THE Throne Room’s legacy as one of US Black Metal’s most daring, unique, and quintessential bands.

"Ablanathanalba" will be even more bluesy, powerful and psychedelic.It will be an album in which we will venture into territories still unexplored by us and will be strengthened by all the experience gained both in terms of song writing and recording techniques. It will be a record that will tell these crazy times.. in which nothing is true anymore but everything is ephemeral and the opposite of itself. We will sink into this madness and return perhaps with something more than when we left.

Uboa’s fifth album Impossible Light almost never made it out of the dark. From its initial conception in 2018, this record went to hell and back, dragging its immensity and too-big-to-hold emotion through the torturous process of translation to sound and returned triumphantly as a full-bodied record in a distinct new style.

Impossible Light begins where Uboa’s 2019 breakout album The Origin Of My Depression left off—and ends somewhere entirely different. The Origin stunned with its methodical use of doom, harsh noise, and ambient soundscapes while documenting a raw, unhindered account of Xandra Metcalfe’s experiences with her transition and her struggles with mental health. Over time The Origin steadily grew a cult-like following which developed into a full-fledged internet community focused around noise, neurodiversity and transness. While Uboa’s signature style of highly polished, cinematic “hypernoise” is front and center in Impossible Light, there is also a daring departure into the genres of industrial metal / rock, setting it apart from any other Uboa release thus far and distinguishing it from other contemporary noise records.

Metcalfe kept the lyrical content of this record as a time capsule of the catastrophic ups and downs and rapidly changing environments within herself and in the world from 2018-2023. Key collaborators include Blood Of A Pomegranate, Otay:onii, Charlie Looker and Haela Hunt-Hendrix of Liturgy. Impossible Light dives fearlessly into queer sexuality, trans embodiment, grief for those who couldn’t make it, solidarity for those facing unimaginable discrimination, the toxic spread of transphobic hatred and misinformation, and the ultimate hope of recovery from trauma and mental anguish. This is a record about the light at the end of the tunnel and the power it takes to keep moving towards it.

Uboa’s fifth album Impossible Light almost never made it out of the dark. From its initial conception in 2018, this record went to hell and back, dragging its immensity and too-big-to-hold emotion through the torturous process of translation to sound and returned triumphantly as a full-bodied record in a distinct new style.

Impossible Light begins where Uboa’s 2019 breakout album The Origin Of My Depression left off—and ends somewhere entirely different. The Origin stunned with its methodical use of doom, harsh noise, and ambient soundscapes while documenting a raw, unhindered account of Xandra Metcalfe’s experiences with her transition and her struggles with mental health. Over time The Origin steadily grew a cult-like following which developed into a full-fledged internet community focused around noise, neurodiversity and transness. While Uboa’s signature style of highly polished, cinematic “hypernoise” is front and center in Impossible Light, there is also a daring departure into the genres of industrial metal / rock, setting it apart from any other Uboa release thus far and distinguishing it from other contemporary noise records.

Metcalfe kept the lyrical content of this record as a time capsule of the catastrophic ups and downs and rapidly changing environments within herself and in the world from 2018-2023. Key collaborators include Blood Of A Pomegranate, Otay:onii, Charlie Looker and Haela Hunt-Hendrix of Liturgy. Impossible Light dives fearlessly into queer sexuality, trans embodiment, grief for those who couldn’t make it, solidarity for those facing unimaginable discrimination, the toxic spread of transphobic hatred and misinformation, and the ultimate hope of recovery from trauma and mental anguish. This is a record about the light at the end of the tunnel and the power it takes to keep moving towards it.

Following their recent addition to the Prosthetic Records roster, multinational cybergrind quartet Thotcrime are set to release their sophomore full length, titled D1g1t4l_dr1ft. With members hailing from Champaign-Urbana, IL, Philadelphia, PA and Nottingham, UK Thotcrime’s prolific output to date has seen the band generate a buzz in online music communities and garner praise from Bandcamp Daily in the publication’s profile on the burgeoning cybergrind movement at large.

Cosmic Key Creations proudly presents the 2023 repress of the deluxe double LP edition for the 3rd album from Gothic doom pioneers Theatre OF Tragedy. The album that cemented the band's status as a household name. This re-issue comes with a 12 panel booklet on LP size containing exclusive liner notes by the producer, previously unpublished pictures and extensive interviews and liner notes. The release includes 4 special bonus tracks. The ultimate edition for a very special and unique album that has stood the test of time... The entire release is mastered for vinyl

Known for the monolithic force of their music and their inventive production techniques, The Body"s albums are benchmarks in the expansion and evolution of heavy music. Tightly packed with deceptively nuanced arrangements and exhilarating, challenging distortion, their compositions are possessed of an unmistakably singular sound. The Crying Out of Things is no exception; a culmination of all that The Body have done before, highlighting their mastery of dynamic and monumental music that pushes toward the unmistakable sound of oblivion. The Body have produced a wealth of groundbreaking collaborations with the likes of Full of Hell, Thou, Uniform, BIG|BRAVE, OAA, and Dis Fig. The duo"s benchmark albums have, over the past 2 decades, changed the perceptions and directions of heavy music. The Crying Out of Things" embrace of noise is a comprehensive display of the multitude of expressions possible with abrasive sound, a skill that The Body have pioneered and refined. "I think for us the key to the way we use noise is, it"s not the only element," says Buford. "You"ve gotta really listen if you"re into noise. But it also has to have dynamics. Where, say, BIG|BRAVE (who have a similar ethos) expresses it in this more intellectual, minimalist way, The Body comes from an instinctual, maximalist way. We"re trying to cover it ALL." The Body stand alone in their ability to connect disparate influences and collaborators into a wholly original, potent and singular work. Alongside producer/engineer Seth Manchester, the duo"s voracious and omnivorous musical appetites have pushed the studio as an instrument into new avenues to conjure profound feelings from the music. The Crying Out of Things cements The Body"s place as a leader of heavy new music, their boundless creativity, their defining ability to convey anguish, created with a visceral clarity to devastating impact.

Known for the monolithic force of their music and their inventive production techniques, The Body"s albums are benchmarks in the expansion and evolution of heavy music. Tightly packed with deceptively nuanced arrangements and exhilarating, challenging distortion, their compositions are possessed of an unmistakably singular sound. The Crying Out of Things is no exception; a culmination of all that The Body have done before, highlighting their mastery of dynamic and monumental music that pushes toward the unmistakable sound of oblivion. The Body have produced a wealth of groundbreaking collaborations with the likes of Full of Hell, Thou, Uniform, BIG|BRAVE, OAA, and Dis Fig. The duo"s benchmark albums have, over the past 2 decades, changed the perceptions and directions of heavy music. The Crying Out of Things" embrace of noise is a comprehensive display of the multitude of expressions possible with abrasive sound, a skill that The Body have pioneered and refined. "I think for us the key to the way we use noise is, it"s not the only element," says Buford. "You"ve gotta really listen if you"re into noise. But it also has to have dynamics. Where, say, BIG|BRAVE (who have a similar ethos) expresses it in this more intellectual, minimalist way, The Body comes from an instinctual, maximalist way. We"re trying to cover it ALL." The Body stand alone in their ability to connect disparate influences and collaborators into a wholly original, potent and singular work. Alongside producer/engineer Seth Manchester, the duo"s voracious and omnivorous musical appetites have pushed the studio as an instrument into new avenues to conjure profound feelings from the music. The Crying Out of Things cements The Body"s place as a leader of heavy new music, their boundless creativity, their defining ability to convey anguish, created with a visceral clarity to devastating impact.

Over the course of two decades The Body, Lee Buford and Chip King, have consistently challenged assumptions and defied categorization, redefining what it means to be a heavy band. On I've Seen All I Need To See, they test the boundaries of the studio to explore the extremes and microtonality of distortion to find its maximal impact. Their most incisively bleak, a towering monolith of noise, album to date Buford's booming, resolute drums paired with King's obliterated guitar and howl. Course, bristling distortion contorts every instrument, with samples of spoken word, cymbals, toms and King's already noxious tone emerging from layers of feedback. The recording studio remains indelible to The Body's creative process. Together with engineer Seth Manchester of Machines With Magnets, they capture the complexities of distorted sound in stunning detail. The clarity and the cacophony exceed anything they've created before, morphing desolate, festering soundscapes into an exhilarating sonic universe. Buford often lays the framework for songs from the drums up, mirroring hip hop production. I've Seen All I Need To See trades out 808s and The Body's self- sampling for live instruments with a focus on expanding mutations of sound from more limited sources. The results are remarkably rich textural bombardments. Throughout, The Body deliver oppressive noise with potent lucidity, replicating the overwhelming sound of their live performances in revelatory detail. I've Seen All I Need To See demonstrates not only The Body's fearless spirit and vicious edge, but their intellectual musical heft through its explorations of distorted sound and the power of distorted sounds' interplay. Composer Roger Johnson said "Noise is power, but is generally represented as negative, chaotic, dangerous, violent, when it comes... from those marginalized from power. Noise is also an expression of freedom, a 'liberation of sound.'" The Body are sound liberators capable of mining and extracting remarkable details from the most manipulated and distorted sound sources. I've Seen All I Need To See is a groundbreaking work and an ecstatic listen, whether seen as a testament to catharsis in oblivion, an opus of inexorable dread or a wholly liberating adventure.

I Shall Die Here / Earth Triumphant is an expanded edition of the fourth full-length album by The Body, first released to widespread acclaim, and terror, in 2014. Sharing their moribund vision with Bobby Krlic, aka The Haxan Cloak, the tried and true sound of The Body is shred to pieces on I Shall Die Here, mutilated by process and re-animated in a spectral state by the collaboration. This double album set is expanded with the previously unreleased Earth Triumphant, a full-length companion album that would become I Shall Die Here, showcasing The Body's brutality in its most primal form. With both albums revisited by The Body and Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets and remastered by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios, this is the definitive edition of a shocking classic of unbridled bleakness and innovation. Formed by drummer Lee Buford and guitarist Chip King in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1999, The Body soon relocated to Providence, Rhode Island. The duo remained in Providence for a decade before moving west to their current home of Portland, Oregon. Their debut self-titled album (Moganano, 2003) and on the widely-acclaimed, classification curtailing of All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood (At A Loss, 2011) readied the band for even more experimentations. The employment of the Assembly of Light Choir's classical chorales on All the Waters, alongside more industrial music techniques such as vocal sampling and drum programming, prompted RVNG to inquire with King and Buford which darker corners of the electronic universe they were presumably interested in exploring. The undertaking of I Shall Die Here was aided by Seth Manchester and Keith Souza, The Body's long standing engineer and creative collaborator, and noted producer Bobby Krlic. Krlic's own work as The Haxan Cloak struck a similarly despairing chord to The Body with the celebrated Excavation (Tri Angle, 2013), itself a minimalist evocation of the afterlife. I Shall Die Here shares similar nether space with the morbidly deviating darkness of Excavation, but remains sculpturally frozen in a sort of earthen purgatory. The Body's musical approach, engraved by Buford's colossal beats and King's mad howl and bass-bladed guitar dirge, became something even more terrifying with Krlic's post-mortem ambiences serving as both baseline and outer limit. I Shall Die Here sonically serrates the remains of metal's already unidentifiable corpse and splays it amid tormented voices in shadow. This expanded edition gives us a window into the creation of a classic with the inclusion of its in utero twin, Earth Triumphant. Recorded as a nearly finished album by Buford and King before The Haxan Cloak's transformation, it stands as a raw statement of intent, the original DNA for what would soon mutate into something wholly new. Fans of I Shall Die Here will find familiar sonic fragments in a more primitive state - like seeing an out-of-context photograph of a family member taken well before you knew them - but the album stands on its own in its minimalist brutality, a natural bridge to what The Body was soon to become. The Body's I Shall Die Here / Earth Triumphant will be released in digital and vinyl formats on June 30, 2023. On behalf of The Body, The Haxan Cloak, and RVNG Intl., a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit Intransitive, an organization that works to advance the cause of Trans liberation in Arkansas through art, education, advocacy, organizing and culture in order to create effective systemic change and on-the-ground impact.

The debut self-titled album by emerging East Coast chaos-mongering warnoise terrorists Sulfuric Hatred (formed by vocalist Alexander Jones of Undeath, guitarist / bassist Liam McMahon of Vile Ritual, and Sam Shereck of Stabbed, Exsanguinated, Bowel Erosion, Blame God, ex-Pink Mass, ex-Reeking Aura etc.) brings a new meaning and purpose to the concept of dehumanizing music and of its forced transmutation into a weapon. Bringing the listener to their knees to surrender, succumb and dissolve before the omnipotency and immensity of absolute armageddon, across its eleven tracks and thirty four minutes of musical terrorism, Sulfuric Hatred experiment on human senses the limits and effects of complete audial insanity. Black metal, grindcore, and death metal in this context can be used as nothing more than simplistic references for the sake of generalization, as the actual and true fabric really materializing this abomination is something that can hardly be associated to music and which is actually closer to pure noise, to other forms of experimental sensorial warfare or to abstract idealizations of pure terror. An underlying contradiction that can not be overlooked defines this senseless display of audial savagery: where in most bands and subgenera of extreme music an antihuman aspect is sought out musically, in the case of Sulfuric Hatred, the formula of bass, guitar, drums and vocals is actually the last human thing standing. The incessant carpet-bombing blasting, the ear-splitting screams, and the mangled, chaotic guitar carnage, in the chaos-torn world of Sulfuric Hatred are nothing but the last shred of humanity left. Everything else being engulfed and devoured in this blown out, noise-broken abomination, is the embodiment of absolute, abstract, and conceptual antihuman bedlam.

Limited "Bloody Kuru" Colored Vinyl.Formed in 2007 in the Dolomite Alps region of Italy with a deep admiration for their native country's hardcore punk luminaries in La Quiete and Raein, as well as eighties and nineties cult heroes in Negazione, Wretched and Indigesti. STORMO's steady rise from unassuming beginnings has been one of consistently stirring song writing.Having amassed over 400 shows across Europe and the UK - including support slots to Converge, Full of Hell and La Dispute, as well as appearances at Fluff Fest - STORMO's next chapter sees the band fully come of age.Lyrically, Endocannibalismo was written entirely in the band's native tongue; partly as a byproduct of the albums nocturnal and instinctive writing process and partly in honour of their history as a band. Recorded and mixed by Giulio Favero (Zu) for mixing before being placed in the hands of Giovanni Versari at La Maesta for mastering,Endocannibalismo's 11 tracks possess a crystalline clarity to service STORMO's surging blastbeats, spiralling rhythms and noise punk cacophony, whilst staying true to the each songs deep seated primal nature.Seeking to tie together the whole process visually, STORMO took to artificialintelligence when creating Endocannibalismo's art. Utilising specific prompts, the AI render was put through stages of mutation before culminating in its final form. A haunting graphic representation of living beings in a state of constant death and rebirth.