Doom

Equal parts bluesy sludge and trudging grind, Musket Hawk bring the slow despondency necessary on the most hungover of afternoons. 

30 years of epicus doomicus metallicus means new EP(icus). 

A sneak peek heads-up for the upcoming full-length of hypnotic, unhinging blackened doom from Head of the Demon. 

Frontwoman Sharon Bascovsky dooms you to death in honor of Choosing Death Fest. 

Nightfall‘s big brother may get most of the attention, but Candlemass’ sophomore LP has more than enough potency to sit on its own throne. Ranking the songs by merit is utter madness since it’s a stone cold masterpiece…but that’s never stopped us before!

Stream the title track from the upcoming doom opus from Japan’s Funeral Moth. 

This week, restless doom lords Lycus will release their mesmerizing second full-length, Chasms, and to celebrate, we wanted to give the band a chance to sound off about their year in the run-up to the new album.

The quartet blend crusty tone, thick hum and lingering melancholy melodies perfect for a midnight stroll through a personal cosmic abyss, while also answering the perennial question: “What is Monte McCleery, the bassist from Samothrace, up to these days?”  He’s up to Un, but on guitars and vocals here.

Over the length of their relatively short, yet remarkably productive, career, Reverend Bizarre distinguished themselves as a highly literate and darkly humorous band, and one of the doom metal genre’s most ardent conservationists and crusaders.

Disciples of the deep, rejoice: German funeral doom legends Ahab are mere weeks away from dropping their fourth LP, the monstrous and expansive The Boats of the Glen Carrig. Based on William Hope Hodgson’s 1907 horror novel of the same name, it’s another impressive collection of face-compressing riffs, churning psychedelia and hymns to all that dwells beneath the waves.

To celebrate/wallow in the misery of our exclusive, not-on-any-album My Dying Bride flexi track, as well as their new album Feel the Misery, we would like to revisit a Decibrity playlist from their despair-mongering vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe.

1980 could have been a disaster for Black Sabbath. They had recently parted ways with Ozzy Osbourne, their batshit crazy yet undeniably entertaining frontman, and drummer Bill Ward’s Hemingway-esque boozing was threatening his very ability to play. Instead of accepting their inevitable slide into obscurity, band masterminds Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler knuckled down and wrote eight songs that expressed a variety of new dynamics, textures, and emotions. Oh, and they recruited a little ol’ singer named Ronnie James motherfucking Dio, whose previous work with Elf and Rainbow had already cemented him as one of rock’s premier wailers.

Tad Doyle has preached the Gospel of heaviness for the better part of his life. His seminal band TAD was one of the first out of the gate in Seattle’s grunge movement and one of the earliest bands signed to the legendary Sub Pop label. Although they never achieved the massive crossover success of their…

Metal lover, you’ve been damn lucky this year.  Your listening habits have been well served by the aural atrocities perpetrated globally throughout 2014.  And it all just got sicker. Portland, OR metal collective Barrowlands is a harrowing hybrid of black metal terror, progressive twists and turns, and doomy contemplation with bold, emotive cello.  Their first…

Last year we featured a German drone/doom project called The Cold View, who had, at that point, recorded a five-song suite called Weeping Winter that could successfully leech all heat-potential from a newborn star and leave behind only frozen dust and brittle ash. Luckily for anyone still able to feel positive emotion after listening to Weeping Winter,…

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…

Cemetery picnickers Encoffination rise again next month with their third full-length album, called III – Hear Me, O’ Death (Sing Thou Wretched Choirs).  Says vocalist/string-scather Ghoat of the forthcoming set of grueling, buzzing doom:  “The concept of this record is the glorification of death: an offering to the embodiment of death’s creation, and to sing the…

Check out our exclusive stream below of Toronto psych-metallers Das Rad cleverly embedding a subversive catchiness into the fuzzy, atmospheric doom of “Eye of Baal,” a track off the band’s upcoming debut full-length Radiation. And if you like the Hawkwind-meets-shoegaze-meets-Can vibe, there’s another preview track here.

What a bummer. Summer is officially over. It’s Monday. Our readers who aren’t chronic truants are back in school. Pretty much the only upside is that our managing editor’s beloved New York Jets started the season with a win, a nice start to their inevitable 8-8 finish. With that in mind, how about a little…

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)…

It takes a special band to spend twelve-and-a-half minutes slogging through a freaky-heavy doom bum-out called simply “Darkness,” then decide there’s just more to say on the issue and tuck in for another 14 minutes and call the result “Darkness, Part 2.”  It’s like being lost in a menacing forest devoid of all large predators…

About six months ago, a Salt Lake City, UT band called Gravecode Nebula heaved out its first album, Sempiternal Void, despite the fact that the band has been playing together in some form since 2006.  Fellow Salt Lake slowniks and Decibel faves SubRosa have mentioned GN a couple times when discussing local bands they enjoy,…

Finally, it’s here!  I’m referring to the one weekend every year when even the brightest eyed, bushiest tailed Christian joins our cult of death for 48 hours and worships the treachery of friends, agonizing torture and public humiliation, and the brutal suffocation of a (reportedly) innocent life, just before we all pay lip service to…

Melodic death metal, crust, d-beat, black metal, doom, post-metal . . . It doesn’t really matter how you label Nux Vomica because it’s pretty much impossible to adequately describe their wayfaring sound in terms of genre alone. Yeah we went for crust in this headline, but that was more of a convenient adjective, headline shorthand,…

Chicago’s Indian are presently hauling their blackhearted nihilism across the tarmac of the UK and Europe in support of the Decibel-approved From all Purity. It’s a sick record from disturbed men, maybe more noisy, more off-the-chain than anything they’ve cut to record before, and if your record collection exists primarily to harsh your mellow (which,…

Towers come from Portland, Oregon, and have this awesome sound that’s a strange brew concocted of low-end bass hum and psych-stoner doom, post-punk and krautrock. There is a lot more in there, too. Putatively, it’s metal all right, but with a center so dark and heavy it can pull in all manner of outré influences…

Michael Klassen has never met Daniel Jansson. OK, you’re thinking, why should he? But given that Jansson is the singer in his band, it is kind of weird. Well, unconventional certainly. Klassen plays guitar, bass and provides other instrumentation in Culted, working out of Winnipeg, Canada, with Kevin Stevenson (Drums), Matthew Freisson (guitar/bass/other) and Erik…

What’s the connection between craft beer and metal? We hear this question a lot. Well, specifically, we are asked this question a lot since our craft beer book, The Brewtal Truth Guide to Extreme Beers, was published last November. For people who aren’t necessarily into both things, it’s hard to see the commonalities. On the…

Well folks, it is the holiday season; what with the temperatures falling and nights closing in, and even the walls closing in, too, it’s officially the most miserable time of the year. Respite is in short supply. Hard liquor and pharmaceuticals can only do so much. But, step away from the shotgun, there’s a hefty…

Lycus’ debut was one of the best doom albums to leak long-form misery over 2013. A disconsolate epic, Tempest is an album that was thrown up around the desolate heart of a funeral doom sound so dense that it has its own bleak gravity hauling influences from black and death metal, drone and krautrock into…