Pressing Details (2nd Press): 100x yellow/amber Vinyl, 100x grey Vinyl and 300x black Vinyl. All LPs in 180gram, printed heavy innersleeve, heavy cover jacket and this time with A2 Poster and Download Code. Different to the first press is that the Cover and Inner Sleeve are printed on the rough side of the Paper ◯ isn´t just the letter. ◯ is the circle symbol and at the same time the name of this six piece band from the border region (Belgium/Netherlands/Germany) around Aachen (Germany). In summer 2010 ex-members from „Allegorie“, Dancing on Debris“, „Jack the Rocker“ and „Kings of the Day“ got together with the aim to create spheric musical landscapes. The music wants to take the audience on a turbulent journey somewhere between ambient and postrock and sometimes you can guess their musical roots found in punk/hardcore.

Germany‘s ABEST are a band that is pushing the limitations typically associated with post metal with the release of their second full length „Bonds Of Euphoria“. It is an indispotable reaffi rmation of their sound, a masterful stew of metal and hardcore. Undeniably precise and heavy. Produced by Jan Oberg of Hidden Planet Studio (Downfall Of Gaia, Deathrite) „Bonds Of Euphoria“ features guest appearances by longtime friends Ghaliz Haris, Fabian van Beek (Gall) and Michel of the Band Reka. Founded in late 2011, ABEST released their debut full length „Asylum“ in May 2014 via This Charming Man Records. „Asylum“ sounded like a wrecking ball, slowly but steadily hovering towards the torn and rotten walls of civilisation, inspired by early Isis or Neurosis. After playing shows with Hope Drone, Buried At Sea, Svalbard or Red Apollo, the band released a new 12“ EP called „Last“ in June 2016 followed by touring all over central Europe. While „Asylum“ took a more melodic approach on the classic post metal sound, „Last“ sounded raw and less atmospheric, taking a step forward in both songwriting and heavyness. After a several line-up changes, ABEST continue as a three piece, now focusing on a more excessive and precise sound which can be described as brutal yet gloomy post metal. „Bonds Of Euphoria“ was written over the period of one year whilst sharing stages with Sun Worship, Phantom Winter and Reka. For fans of Cult Leader, Dead In The Dirt and Primitive Man.

ABSENT IN BODY make their Relapse Records debut with the terrifying new album Plague God. Featuring current and former members of AMENRA, NEUROSIS, and SEPULTURA, Plague God is bound by the same ideals of unity and fearlessly uncompromising honesty of expression that have driven their respective bands to imperious heights of reverence and groundbreaking sonic deliverance. Plague God is by turns devastating and sublime, drawn from musicians for whom life and art are inextricably bound.Initially the brainchild of AMENRA guitarist Mathieu J. Vandekerckhove, and NEUROSIS vocalist/guitarist Scott Kelly, ABSENT IN BODY formed in 2017. Immediately recognising their kinship, and with AMENRA frontman Colin H. Van Eeckhout brought in on vocals and bass, what emerged is a reflection of the intervening years of turbulence, extending it's scope as it navigates across five stretches of unstable terrain. From the opening Rise From Ruins with Sepultura drummer, Igor Cavelera’s tribal beat emerging from foreboding, near-subsonic oscillations to explode in a tide of corrosive riffs and feral howls, through Sarin’s steadfast, procession-through-purgatory groove, to The Half Rising Man’s matrix of organic/mechanic evolution, it’s an album in constant dialogue between the animalistic, the human and the industrial, and a hunger to distill a truth, something unpolluted from the fray.  Plague God doesn’t just give voice to these moments of truth, but in the band’s deep kinship integral to every claustrophobic judder, every stretch of atmospheric dread and helpless alias assumed, lies a freedom we both forget and attain at our peril.

Abstracter’s Tomb of Feathers is a bit of a wonder. Unless I’m misinformed, it’s self-produced and self-financed, and was recorded live onto analog equipment in just three days. Ventures like that, when not born out of sheer financial necessity, are frequently more about artistic statements than music itself. It’s the sort of prologue that leads you to expect a bit of a shambles – something you appreciate as much if not more because of where it came from, rather than what it became and are more forgiving of its faults because of its ambition and heart. So it’s a real treat that this is record is far from a mess, but instead, a stunningly cohesive picture of a mad vision. The band draws from sludge, psychedelia and hardcore, like so many of the more exciting metal bands in the last decade or so, to produce three tracks that weave through warped mindscapes like a musical representation of H.P. Lovecraft’s non-Euclidian cities. As the riffs build and layer upon each other, they build a sense of growing and increasingly suffocating isolation, aided by the dense production in creating a constantly oppressive atmosphere. Measures lead by quarter notes give way to measures lead by eighth notes and back again so frequently that one never feels entirely sure what tempo the music is playing at, and that feeling is backed by ferocious, echoing roars which make for an unsettling experience in the vein of the best kind of horror movie. This album feels like insanity, but an artistic portrayal rather than the real thing; one abstracted by metaphor and symbolism, intended to make the listener feel as though they are the disturbed party themselves, and not just feeling the alienating helplessness of witnessing the suffering of someone who is truly disturbed. It’s also just damned good metal. The last five minutes of the excellently titled, To Vomit Crows, contains one of the simplest sections of the album, sounding like one of the best songs Church of Misery never produced, and then drops to half-speed and takes on an aura of unstoppable, abhorrent ingress, the juxtaposition of which is strongly jarring but very satisfying. The final, longest, and strongest track, Ash, is 16 minutes of some of the best progressive doom metal you’ll hear this year, riding a slow dirge through the first half that explodes into waves of sludge like the thick ash of apocalyptic skies. At these moments they touch on what makes a band like Ufomammut so enrapturing, not quite reaching the heights of the Italian titans but coming closer than a debut record has any right to. 

Dark Circles (canada) vs Abstracter (usa). brutals. hc/crust from the north vs blackened death doom from the west. killer! 

Alle Jahre wieder... gibts eine neue Scheibe des Anarcho-Punk Duos aus England. "The cracks start appearing" ist wie gewohnt wütend, kämpferisch und hochpolitisch. Im Vergleich zu den bisherigen Alben ist die neueste Platte mit Abstand die abwechslungsreichste Scheibe der Briten. Die Platte kommt - wie gewohnt - inkl. umfangreichem Booklet mit den Songtexten. 

PRE-ORDER!!!! Out by the 16th of July 2023Pressing Details: all black 180gram Vinyl, 200x red silkscreened B-side, 300x white silkscreened B-side, A2 Poster, LP-sized insert, download code

Pressing Details: 100x gold and 400x black 180gram Vinyl, gold foil on the cover, black flooted Cover, double-sided LP-sized Insert, Downloadcode

Pressing Details: 100x clear with black splatter and 400x black 180gram Vinyl, silver foil on the cover, black flooted Cover, double-sided LP-sized Insert, Download Code

Crust/d-beat/death metal band from Sweden since 2016. This is their fifth and final album. A uncompromising look at the darker aspects of human nature and contemporary social and political issues.Throughout the album, the themes of loss and endings – personal, social, and ecological – are prevalent. With their characteristic uncompromising approach and sensitivity, Adrestia delivers a powerful farewell that forces reflection on the state of the world and the human condition.

Metal / hardcore / d-beat, Sweden vs. Canada! Raw and brutal.

We’re glad to introduce this unholy project coming from the frostbitten lands of Canada. Formed in 2008 by sole member Mike Kirkenbrannsar, Æsahættr’s only recording effort to date was accomplished over two consecutive Winters, using the isolation and beauty of the harsh Canadian season to influence and shape the ultimate realization of the Æsahættr sound. Lyrically, this effort is largely based around the trilogy of novels His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman, touching on the themes of Gnosticism, Atheism, and blacksmithing polar bears prevalent throughout the books. Cold, dark, epic black metal combining the rawness of Ulver’s Nattens Madrigal with some crusty changes of rhythm and atmospheric moments too. Æsahættr’s music will sweep your dark thoughts away & hide them in a cave to chew on your bones. The vocals are living demons, swirling around in a black hole spitting out pure bloodlust. These shrill screams of beautiful agony will have you under their spell. Musically, Æsahættr constructs songs that take the form of endless sonic diseases that someday will infect the whole world so that humanity as we know it will exist no more. While chaos & mayhem can be found in the songs that this band manifests, it’s the rivers of slow-moving sorrow that wash over you before allowing you to fly away and greet emotions that you did not know existed in your noir heart. I’m so into the way the Æsahættr builds on layers of tension to actually create serenity… I have seen the majesty of the nordic wilderness & thought to myself, what battles happened on this hallowed ground? While listening to Æsahættr, I can visualize those exact thoughts again… In order to perform live Æsahættr will be collaborating with the members of Thantifaxath, mysterious cowled wizards of black metal blasphemy hailing from the nearby forest of Toronto.  

12" with screenprinted b-side (containing a special feature, just try to find out...) and a 32 pages A4 booklet (sheet music)

RESTOCKED!!! Beautiful, calm, almost folk-like moments go hand in hand with tremolo-driven, unrelenting melodic Black Metal. Why yes, this is amazing. A very enjoyable album, not easy to pick a favourite track. Comes with a 24 page booklet with all the lyrics, in danish and Spot UV print on cover

This is the third album from Danish one-man black metal band Afsky. Following on from 2018’s Sorg, 2020’s Ofte Jeg Drømmer Mig Død, and 2022’s I Stilhed, Om Hundrede År contains 43 minutes of new material and is eagerly anticipated by many fans of atmospheric black metal.Tastefully mixing together elements of the folk, depressive, second wave, and atmospheric black metal styles into an emotive whole, Om Hundrede År is an engaging and affecting work. Blending its various influences into a slice of evocative black metal that somehow doesn’t feel restricted to its parent styles, despite obviously being of the genre, this is an album that is really something quite special. Om Hundrede År is a textured release, frequently crafting immersive atmosphere through melancholic acoustic elements, moody blackened worldbuilding, and rich melodic presence. It’s an affecting journey into light and dark, effortlessly treating its black metal as if it was more than just a vessel for negative energies. The artist behind Afsky paints with a full palette and is adept and creating music with potent impact, both initially and over time as the music seeps into your heart.The songs have strong compositional structure and form. Blackened dynamics and atmospheric depth are understood at a masterful level, and their goals – always emotion-led – are achieved at the highest level.Afsky’s third album is a roaring success. Om Hundrede År contains a world of blackened soundscapes to explore, all in such a concise and efficient running time. Don’t miss out on this if you’re at all partial to the style. Essential listening.

RESTOCKED!!! For those who may be new to Afsky, it is the solo project of Ole Luk, who is also a member of the Danish black metal band Solbrud. Fittingly, the name he chose for this project means “disgust” or “detest” in Danish, though as you’ll discover, the emotional resonance of the music embraces other powerful feelings as wellUnmistakably, the seven songs on Sorg plumb the dark waters of depressive black metal, yet Afsky does that in ways that often prove mesmerizing. The songs are built around evocative, memorable melodies that wear their strong emotions on their sleeves, some disturbing and some beautiful. The power ebbs and flows, and in the crescendos of intensity, Ole Luk uses his searing, acid-bathed voice to burn their messages into your brain like a red hot brand. As we all know, there are different stages of grief. Sometimes it is a somber remorse, and sometimes it becomes indistinguishable from rage. Afsky moves throughout this range across Sorg.And so, for example, the slow, strummed, reverberating chords that begin the opening track “Jeg bærer deres lig” seem melancholy in a wistful way, as if channeling a remembrance of something longed for rather than regretted. But the music begins to alternate, becoming much heavier and darker but also erupting in blasting torrents, the melody elevating like a flame.The follow-on track, “Skær“, is a high-intensity experience right from the start, with an agonized guitar melody providing the prelude to a storm of thundering double-bass drums and boiling, tension-filled riffing. The music is deliriously wretched but also glorious in its desolation, the melodies rising and falling in waves like the wind-driven waters across a cold, black, pine-rimmed lake. Even in an interlude within the song, when a truly dismal, distorted solo guitar moans in agony, desolation reigns… but this song too proves to be mesmerizing.And across the other five songs on the album, Afsky continues to bring to the fore changing experiences of loss, longing, cauterizing emotional pain, and beleaguered perseverance. The music can be slow and stately one moment, and rampantly ferocious the next, almost majestic in its bleakness in some passages, and completely unhinged in others. What doesn’t change is the intense feeling and engrossing appeal of the songs’ melodic cores, which integrate some folk and doom inspirations as well as the traditions of classic black metal. Ole Luk has explained Afsky and its evolution in this way: “Afsky was never meant to be a live band, more like an outlet for unused musical pieces, song lyrics and poems. I don’t like people telling me what to do, and how to do things, it kills all creativity. Afsky is the personal space where I can do what I like, which is also what makes the project very personal to me. It’s like I found the perfect place to combine my music,  craftsmanship, photography and so on, giving it all a higher purpose. That’s also the reason why I at first, didn’t care if it only stayed that way, without any live gigs. Some requests in Denmark finally made me put up a band”. (No Clean Singing)

RESTOCKED!!!!"born out of frustation or pure boredom afterlife kids will deliever you with their own brew of angst laden 90's worshipping hardcore with a tip of good old mosh. no tough guy images, no rockstar shit, no fashion ... just songs that they need to play. coming from diy bands such as henry fonda, eyedestroyed, jane hoe, call me betty, theory joe, a bit of braindead & the mustard chronicles, these 4 nerds know their shit and play it well. this reminds of the wave of brutal 90s bands from germany ( loxiran , linsay , abyss , aclys , lebensreform ... ) without being a copycat." 

3rd LP from this amazing band. Agnosy is a crust punk band based in London, UK.

AGRIMONIA returns with their fourth album release, and second for Southern Lord. Awaken arrives ten years since the release of their first album, and AGRIMONIA has evolved notably over that period. Their sound has always been dense, immersive, ambitious even, and on Awaken, the band has evolved their prog-infused form of expansive metal into something energetic, dynamic, and powerful. On Awaken, the band digs deep into their subconscious, trying to get an elevated state of mind, to connect the mind with sound and to find the combination of notes and melodies that evolves into a feeling or mood. AGRIMONIA channels the bittersweet aspects of life, and breathe air into thoughts that cannot easily be put into words. About Awaken the band comments, "We are thrilled to see the release of our fourth album Awaken. We are very proud of the outcome and feel that the album is our most dynamic and vital yet, and contains more of everything that is AGRIMONIA. Awaken is the soundtrack to our existence, and I hope other people can feel that way too." Awaken was produced by AGRIMONIA, and mixed and mastered by Henrik Udd who also worked on the previous recording Rites of Separation, then under the Studio Fredman banner but now under his own name, Henrik Udd Recording Studios. 

Endlich eine neuer output der Göteborger Crusties. Diese 2xLP wird mit Sicherheit für Aufsehen sorgen und einen der oberen Plätze in euren Tops einnehmen. Atmosphärische & düstere Vermengungen von Death- und Black Metal mit Doom getränkt und kleinen Einsprängseln von Crust ergeben ein wunderbares Gebräu von dem man nicht mehr weg kommt nachdem man es zum ersten Mal probiert hat. Die Gitarrenrange reicht dabei von verstörender Härte und Schwere bis hin zu gloomy Akkustiksektionen die durch düstere Elemente eine Atmosphäre erzeugen der man sich einfach nicht enziehen kann oder will.

4 new tracks by french masters of dirty sludge! AGUIRRE take up new songs and just as on their demo they reek of darkness and agony. It's so present it's half painful to listen to it, but that's also what draws me in. It's like staring down a bottomless abyss of all that is evil, sensing it, as the complete black allows you to see nothing - and liking it. They haven't changed a whole lot from their previous releases, it's still the minimalist angst with the lonely guitar tunes alternated with thundering heaviness, as with the whispering and roaring vocals - all executed in a real slow pace. It hurts, and I love the pain. This album is releases as Vinyl + MP3 ...with printed inner bag!

Neue Split Scheibe mit den allseits bekannten AGUIRRE aus Frankriech, die über die Jahre mit qualitativ hochwertigen Releases sich einen guten Ruf innerhalb der Szene erspielt haben. GUEVNNA sind relativ neu, kommen aus Japan und bestehen aus ex-Mitglieden der legendären COFFINS! Zu hören gibts es einen langen und fiesen Doom-Brecher!

The debut recording of AKRASIA now finally on vinyl. A cataclysmic and massive crust-monster from Planet Oslo, Norway, that sounds like it's made out of bits and pieces of AMEBIX and VENOM with HAWKWIND's "Space Ritual" and heaps of KILLING JOKE in the mix. A huge monolith of black vinyl and eight tracks of "space-crust" if you might say so. Includes digital download.

Pressing Details: 200x yellow/brown mixed Vinyl, 200x black/white Vinyl, 600x black Vinyl I came across Alaskan because of their affiliation with other Ottawa post metal / sludge bands. Let’s face it: many similar bands have arisen on the Ottawa metal scene in the last few years: Buried Inside, Goetia, Biipiigwan, Collider, etc. Not so far away, whether you are in Montreal or in Toronto, dozens of other bands can be added to that list. The genre established by AmenRa, Fall Of Efrafa, Neurosis, Isis or Cult of Luna is now a saturated market, but I think Alaskan stands on top of the most recent bands food chain. The quality of their music and their dedication help the guys from Alaskan stand out of the crowd. They are in a kind of Cult of Luna-esque dark mood, with almost simple guitar chords that create this loud wall of sound you expect from such a band. Alaskan went epic on most of their songs: they added atmospheric passages and intro, in proportions that help blending the songs together and bringing the listener throughout their livesets without any difficulty. For any three-piece band, there’s always a challenge about song structure, because of the absence of a lead guitar or additional instruments. Alaskan masters perfectly this, and while you can hear perfectly every instrument on the album, you don’t have the impression that something is missing. “Noises” were added here and there in the background, and this aspect of the production makes me want to go back to the album from time to time just for its “layers” quality. Another thing that I mentioned previously is the musician’s dedication to their band. They are serious in their approach, and have one new release every year. Moreover, they have followed the steps of fellows Buried Inside and toured intensively abroad. Live, Alaskan delivers a solid performance and the live set lives to its promises. While I agree that Alaskan might not be 100% original, I didn’t expect an experimental band either. The band knows how to compose songs that “feels” dark and heavy, and they can easily compare with other bands like Amen Ra. So listen to your friend: Alaskan is without a doubt worth to check out.