VJ
I discovered Sallow Moth through last year's Mossbane Lantern, a truly captivating exercise in tech and prog death metal whose complex songwriting set it apart from the genre's overcrowded landscape. It also somehow marked a rebirth for the project, which had limited its activity between 2022 and...
VJ
After a seven-year void, Texas pioneers of brutal death metal, Devourment, have returned with a surprise new 12-minute EP that emphatically proves they haven't diminished an ounce of their purpose: absolute heaviness. The '10s saw the band releasing two albums with fairly different responses from...
VJ
I've known Washington D.C.'s Goetia for a while now and have enjoyed their series of highly regarded EPs from 2023 to 2025, bursting into the underground scene with a sort of boosted ferocity considering a band that barely existed a few years prior. Debut full-length album Mortuary Cult takes...
VJ
After 17 years of anticipation, the dream has finally become reality. Among the countless bands and albums of the "cavernous" death metal movement throughout the 2010s, Funebrarum's first two albums have been endlessly cited as predecessors and essential points of reference. Their 2009...
VJ
There ain't a more entertaining early Carcass-worshipping force in the modern underground than Tokyo-based duo Pharmacist (among the many, a lesser known but totally admirable case is Finland's Galvanizer). The band has been around since 2020 and immediately made impact with the scene through the...
VJ
For me, absence never killed momentum. Despite being active since the late '90s, Chile's Godless released their debut full-length album in 2010, and circle back to studio action 16 years later with the second album, Adversus Parousia, having sparsely released only a handful of EPs and demos in...
VJ
Since the earliest days, Polish black metal has maintained a firm presence in the underground scene and has notably evolved its psychological darkness over the years. What once was an obscure force of paganism and profanity later gauged interest into the avant-garde, the melodic and the...
VJ
I've been really eager to listen to this album from the moment I saw this fantastic front cover: a step further than just encouraging your fans to play MTG during your live show is to adopt the aesthetics of the legendary game. The art of third full-length album No Place of Warmth by Fort Worth,...
VJ
Instances of monumental awe are so rare, that they remain unforgettable. Only at a handful of cases have I had so rapid a transition from analytical to overwhelmed when first listening to an album, one of them being my introduction to Immolation and their 1996 masterpiece, Here In After. For a...
VJ
Devoid of Thought hail from the Lombardy region in Italy, and spent the better part of the last decade honing their powerful self-defining debut record, Outer World Graves (2021). With that album, the band attempted - while not leaving the crater - to handle death metal’s most perplexed branches...
VJ
Following the malignant trilogy of dead roads, dead dreams, and dead souls released by anonymous Swedish (?) project Mylingar between 2016 - 2019, we were left stunned and aghast but also almost forgot about them thereafter. Nearly seven years is a long time to wait, as the band’s return to...
VJ
I came in contact with Guyođ from Austria quite abnormally a few years ago, around the time of their first split release with Lehm and before their debut album, Heart of Thy Abyss, was even on the horizon. The band hit the mark with that album of abyssal doom / death metal and left overall...
VJ
With less alarm and greater eagerness we seize the third full-length album by Milwaukee-based war metal moniker Pig’s Blood, whose first two drops of venom I absorbed with foolish confidence. Seven years after the release of A Flock Slaughtered, and after a sensible transfer to the ghastly...