Decibel’s Top 5 Cosmic Black Metal Albums

Decibel bestows wisdom in our latest Top 5 Cosmic Black Metal Albums, featuring Kaon, Lumnos, Mesarthim, Offenbarung and Darkspace. Revolutions in celestial death are infinite.

Greeting Immortality, Eucharist’s Markus Johnsson & Daniel Erlandsson Talk Life Eternal

To a small number of people, Eucharist are legends. They were, in effect, part of the new wave of Swedish death metal, where outright brutality was replaced by cleverly designed aggression and insane heaviness was supplanted by unheard of musicality. That Eucharist, for a spell, shared rehearsal space with early incarnations of At the Gates and Dissection should speak volumes. And it does.

“Holy Waters”: Stream New Song From The Clearing Path

Gabriele Gramaglia incorporates a love of Converge-heightened, spastic hardcore heaviness into his anguished odes to the great outdoors.  The percussion and vocal rhythms here really set Gramaglia’s solo project apart from the pack.  The music retains black metal’s otherworldly quality without losing the attention of mere mortals like us.

Tomas Skogsberg Produced These Albums (A Top 5)

Back in the day, the “produced by” byline was a marketing ploy to get heavy metal fans into one band, well, into another. Easy marketing from the ground—a classic record or two—up. Swedish producer Tomas Skogsberg is renowned for his name attachment to several pivotal records throughout the ‘90s before he gave way to fellow…

CONTEST: Win Thergothon’s “Stream from the Heavens” Test Press

If Decibel was worth its weight in ink, paper, and stress—mostly on the shoulders of our beloved EIC Mr. Mudrian—then we’d have some staffers who were there when Thergothon dropped its only long-player Stream from the Heavens like a Cthulhu tentacle on wee Italy-based indie Avantgarde Music. We do have staffers who were there, bought…

Five For Friday: December 15, 2023

And thus we come to the last standard edition of Five For Friday for 2023. The rest of the month will be dedicated to death metal and black metal retrospectives, so look out for that!

Demo:listen: Fetishism

Experimental German black metal outsider Fetishism cast their analog spell of malevolence on this week’s Demo:listen.

Stream New Septic Mind Album

Any fan of majestic extreme doom should make (geological) time to get familiar with Russian label Solitude Productions.  If you like four-minute songs just fine, but your salivary glands kick into overdrive for tracks that leave the eleven-minute mark in the dust, you’re the target market.  It’s easy to get lost in to celestial movements…

Jan Kuhanen & Ismo Toivonen (Unholy) interviewed

What do you make of Second Ring of Power after all these years? It’s getting a second chance at life, so to speak.Jan Kuhanen: All of our albums have been re-released, so Second… is in no way specific. Plus, we have some bonus stuff with all of them except with the first one. Ismo Toivonen:…

SubRosa Interviewed

To quote your bio: “SubRosa comprises the deep thrum that makes up the underlying plasma of our invisible surroundings.” What does that mean?Sarah Pendleton: We are attempting to be the sonic interpreters of that which is intangible. The name SubRosa implies mystery. Something hidden. Do you actively try to keep things a bit obscure? Rebecca…

Katatonia – “Brave Murder Day”

Katatonia’s initial incarnation as a black doom outfit—replete with corpsepaint, weapons, stage names like Lord Seth and Blackheim, and song titles “Without God” and “Palace of Frost”—probably caught as many Darkthrone acolytes off guard as it did followers of England’s doom metal “big three.”