Marissa Martinez-Hoadley is: A. Awesome B. Bandmates with our first ever studio participant Elizabeth Schall C. A bonafide shredder She’s also working to finalize a new Cretin album for release this year. It’s about eight years later than we wanted but it’s a new record so we’ll take it. Please welcome Marissa Martinez-Hoadley the shredder’s…

Any metal critic worth his or her salt listens to hundreds of new albums in any given year. In the past couple years I topped 600 releases heard, while this year’s deliberate paring back – to preserve my sanity – will still see me listen to at least 500. Looking back at the numbers at…

Tweak Bird aren’t really metal, so let’s get that out of the way right now (although they ARE more metal than last week’s track). Still, it’s hard to imagine that readers of this site aren’t into The Flaming Lips, Meat Puppets, or Melvins, if not all of them. Besides, Failure is in the Hall Of…

Italy’s itinerant papal-pounders Hour of Penance are set to return to the Brutal Death Metal ov Protest scene next week with their 6th punishing album.  Regicide will hit stores next week with the same force of conviction and yoke-lightening purpose as Sedition and Paradogma before it.  Hour of Penance hail from the epicenter of that strange mix…

To a music journalist, a publicist can either be a trusted source of the tunes and information we need to get our job done, or an annoying omnipresence in our inboxes, constantly sending mass e-mails with hyperbolic language about shit bands that don’t deserve the publicity in the first place. For a band spending its…

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…

A quick look at the track listing to Vanhelgd’s upcoming album, Relics of Sulphur Salvation, and one might surmise lead Helgder Mattias “Flesh” Frisk has a worm fetish. The word ‘maskätna’ translates loosely to ‘wormy’ and the track title “May the Worms Have Mercy on My Flesh” leaves little to the imagination. Turns out it’s…

Last year we excerpted a couple selections from Lewis Dimmick’s excellent book This Music over at the Metalnomicon.