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Thirteen is generally considered an unlucky number, which is why we’re foisting it upon you, dear reader! Giving is (occasionally) better than receiving, particularly for sadists, i.e., your holly jolly hellraising homeboys at Decibel. So, today only, sign up for a 12-month or 24-month subscription to Decibel and receive one extra issue for FREE. That’s…

Opinions are like assholes: everyone IS one. We’ve noticed that Hollywood tends to spend a lot of time chortling while you spend perfectly good alcohol/meth/falafel money on the anal fissures of their “imagination.” Justin Smith of cinema-grind moguls Graf Orlock occasionally plumbs those depths in Graf Orlock Steadicam Reviews. It seems obvious, yet oft unacknowledged,…

Since the Decibel faithful are about to enter a restful trance of their own thanks to pounds of turkey, pumpkin pie and stuffing (or tofurkey for all our vegan readers) we thought it was the right time to introduce a new track from Bastard Sapling’s Dragged From Our Restless Trance. Streaming below is “Cold Winds…

There’s some indication that nuevo thrash gods Municipal Waste are, to put it mildly, a tad nutty. Case in point, the Richmondians’ near-takeover of the Deciblog. Search for Municipal Waste in our handy dandy search mechanism and not one but FIVE pages turn up. Inside those five pages you’ll find the Waste with long dong…

For 14 years, extreme hate-thunder has rained down from the blighted Czech sky every July, under the Obscene Extreme banner.  In 2013, the organizers are seriously upping the ante, and we here at Decibel get to formally welcome Obscene Extreme America!  It’s in Mexico!  (Yeah, against the protestations of xenophobes all over the United States,…

Before we get to all the details of this amazing giveaway—a free guitar!—from the generous folks at Roadrunner Records and Epiphone, we want to wish Machine Head mainman Robb Flynn a very speedy recovery from his recent hernia surgery. We know he’s anxious to get back out on the road and resume the tour with…

A couple weeks back ANIMAL New York posted a brilliant video entitled PUG DESTROYER featuring pugs taking lead vox on a death metal track. That alone would have been awesome enough, but then along came the actual Pig Destroyer and, as is their wont, the band took things to the next level. The result? A…

Incantation need no introduction, surely, so let’s keep this brief and to the point. The Pennsylvanian death metal kingpins release their ninth album, Vanquish in Vengeance, on November 27th through Listenable Records. This is Incantation’s first LP since 2006’s sulfurous Primordial Domination, and considering death metal’s new wave of old-schoolers have grown evermore reliant on…

Maurice de Jong (aka ‘M’ or ‘Mories’) must’ve lived a tortured life or have continually horrific dreams, ’cause his musical output is absolutely disconcerting. I would point to his insanely prolific (and celebrated) outfit Gnaw Their Tongues (or Cloak of Altering), but this time it’s his near-decade old project De Magia Veterum, an industrial-powered, chaos-inclined…

You know, it’s that time of year. I can’t do a Thanksgiving-themed blog because I’d get really sick of the turkey references and have to punch myself in the beak. INCANTATION are back after six years with Vanquish in Vengeance. It’s brutal, it’s death metal, it’s heavy, there are picked riffs that go into heavier…

Rabid death crew Wretched are on a rockin’ roll.  In March of this year they released their third full-length record in as many years, and they’ve been burning up the road with some seriously badass acts in the months since.  Right now they’re out with Six Feet Under, and they’ve got mucho dates scheduled for…

After much fevered online speculation, we’re finally ready to announce the headliner of Decibel‘s highly-anticipated 100th Issue Celebration Show! Four-time cover stars, Hall of Fame inductees for 2001 classic Jane Doe and constant presence in our Top 40 Albums of the Year feature any time they release an album, the mighty Converge will join Pig…

Regents features current and ex-members of Sleepytime Trio, Maximillian Colby, Frodus, the Exploder, Battery, Combatwoundedveteran, Thursday, United Nations and Decahedron playing the sort of screwy and spazzy post-punk punk rock you’d expect a band featuring current and ex-members of Sleepytime Trio, Maximillian Colby, Frodus, the Exploder, Battery, Combatwoundedveteran, Thursday, United Nations and Decahedron to be…

To celebrate the release of A Map Of All Our Failures, last week My Dying Bride vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe (that’s him in the middle) went through the first half of My Dying Bride’s discography to tell us about an album that he was listening to while writing/recording each LP. As he told us, “They have…

The phrases “Van Drunen” and “side project” will cause more than a little excitement in these parts. The death metal frontman handled vocals on two prestigious entries in Decibel’s Top 100 Death Metal Albums (available here). He also toured with the mighty Bolt Thrower and fronts war-themed badasses Hail Of Bullets. The dude is like…

** In most cases, Decibel features “all the metal that’s fit to print”, but there are times when metal’s meta, so when letters are falling out of the margins and don’t have a home, they go to the Deciblog. The following interview is the full transcript for the Winterfylleth feature in Decibel #98 [available HERE]….

Since Brooklyn trio Flourishing is releasing the digital version of its latest 3-song EP, Intersubjectivity, via The Path Less Traveled today we figured it would be a good opportunity to give some stuff away to mark the occasion.

The forthcoming What Are You Doing Here: A Black Woman’s Life and Liberation in Heavy Metal is such an exquisitely rendered, inspiring melange of memoir, cultural criticism, extreme music history, and fiery, righteous polemic it only seemed natural to offer up some Deci-space to author Laina Dawes for a list of five albums the spurred…

On November 16th, Savannah sludge/metal/psych/punk/other band Kylesa will release From the Vaults Vol. 1 through Season of Mist. It’s been two years since the release of Spiral Shadow, and given you’ll will have to wait until the spring for a follow-up, those of you jonesing for a fix of heavy-and-trippy should check out this out….

France’s Hell Militia have been kicking (unfortunate) Euro ass since the early aughts, so it stands to reason there’s a “sizeable” contingent of believers into the group’s three full-length albums, the most recent of which is Jacob’s Ladder on the Season of Mist label. “Jacob’s Ladder reveals the inner side of Hell Militia,” says the…

Welcome to The Lazarus Pit, a biweekly look at should-be classic metal records that don’t get nearly enough love; stuff that’s essential listening that you’ve probably never heard of; stuff that we’re too lazy to track down the band members to do a Hall Of Fame for. This week, we have, by special request of…

Because every day another band records another song.  Because 83% of those songs are unlistenable and you can’t be bothered to sift through the dreck.  Because metal is about not giving a shit and waking your own personal storm.  Because music is universal, expression is boundless, and even indie labels (whatever that means these days)…

In the boundless quest to distinguish one’s band from metal’s ever-growing pack, comes another new sub-genre, given birth by Vancouver’s Auroch. Referring to themselves as “Lovecraftian death metal,” the trio is set to release their debut full-length From Forgotten Worlds via Poland’s Hellthrasher Productions. The band’s debut, which follows a spate of five demos that…

We’ve been lucky enough to have the likes of Shane Embury, Greg Mackintosh and Anders Nyström tell us about records that related in some way to each of their bands’ studio albums. This time around, Aaron Stainthorpe (that’s him on the far right) combed through My Dying Bride’s discography (including the quintet’s eleventh and latest,…

How instrumental was the faux-documentary/film The Hellstrom Chronicle to the making of Insects?v.03/170: The film wasn’t that essential on our musical concept, but it surely influenced the overall lyrical concept on Insects. Its abysmal mood and the menacing close-ups of actually small creatures give a special kind of impression which helped to form pictures in…

We offer this as more of a geographic reference than a musical one, but if you’re curious about the origins of Troubled Horse, you need look no further than the the same Swedish town, Orebro, that spawned both Graveyard and Witchcraft, who coincidentally have new albums just out or on the way. The Witchcraft connection…

The long-awaited follow-up to Look What I Did’s fantastic 2010 everything-and-the-kitchen-sink kaleidoscope of smart-as-fuck chaos metal Atlas Drugged is nearly upon us and if the below exclusive stream from the larger “epic rock opera” entitled Zanzibar III is any indication these Nashville boys continue to raise virtually every aspect of their game — musical, lyrical…

According to those gentle, God-fearin’ souls at Studylight.org, Maveth—transliterated from Old Testament Hebrew and translated into English—is defined as: “death, dying, Death (personified), realm of the dead; death; death by violence (as a penalty); state of death, place of death” . . . And my, how that is apt, because Finland’s Maveth are pretty much…

The quote, “This is a good place to start where we left off”, seems appropriate for death metal outfit General Surgery. The first new material since 2009’s Corpus In Extremis: Analysing Necrocriticism effort, Like An Ever Flying Limb—yes, that’s a nod to Hall of Famers Dismember—follows in the gory, early Carcass-like footsteps of General Surgery’s…

Last year, we waged war on Christmas with possibly our most infamous flexi disc to date: Agoraphobic Nosebleed‘s 11-tracks-in-four-minutes Make a Joyful Noise. Well, the unkind grinders are back to stuff your frozen corpse with even more holiday cheer! For their second-annual Decibel holiday flexi, ANb have concentrated all their good tidings into one epic,…