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For me, black metal begins and ends with two specific high-water marks: Darkthrone’s Transilvanian Hunger and Mayhem’s Freezing Moon. Darkthrone gave us the ultimate hypnotic blizzard, a relentless, lo-fi loop that buries you in three feet of snow and leaves you to freeze. Freezing Moon is a different beast entirely: slow, deliberate, and undeniably evil.…
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If Stephen King tells you a horror film is a cross between The Thing and The Silence of the Lambs, you pay attention. That’s the pitch for The Cycle, the new creature feature from The Head Hunter and V/H/S/Beyond director Jordan Downey. Ahead of its October 23rd premiere, Shudder dropped the official trailer, and it…
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Horror-infused black/death metal collective Thy Sanatorium have announced the official video premiere for I Monster, with the video landing on YouTube this Friday, October 2nd. Taken from the band’s self-titled debut LP, I Monster brings together the anonymous, multinational project’s blend of symphonic metal, gothic darkness and straight-up extreme-metal aggression. Speaking about the track, guitarist…
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Yes, so, okay, right. How do I explain this. This isn’t an easy thing to review. Because Endless Dismal Moan and their mastermind, Chaos 9, were not an easy project to listen to. Hell, if you have heard any of his material, you’ll know that this isn’t music in the way you know music to…
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A few things surprised me when I first sat down and listened to Call by Urisk. First off, they are an atmospheric black metal band with the black metal cranked up to eleven. They are emotionally deep, but possess a suffocation factor so high that you feel like you’ve got a plastic bag pulled tight…
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If A Blaze in the Northern Sky was a declaration of war and Under a Funeral Moon built the brick wall around the scene, Transilvanian Hunger is where Darkthrone elevated pure black metal to a state of absolute, unbreakable perfection. It is also, hands down, my favourite album in the entire genre. Released via Peaceville…
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Portuguese solo project SIGILO is set to release its debut full-length, Gloria ad Inferi, on October 23rd via Alma Mater Records, and the second single, As Cosmic Forces Rise, is out now on streaming platforms. The project is the work of a single mastermind who’s been active in the Portuguese underground since 2014, most notably…
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Director Alison-Eve Hammersley is taking her feature debut to Beyond Fest this October with Erie, a late-nineties found footage piece set during the paranoid run-up to Y2K. Following her shorts Fragile.com and You’ll Only Have Each Other, Hammersley’s first feature gets its first screening on October 1st at the Los Feliz 3 Theatre in Los…
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One of the best parts and, also, one of the worst parts about this job is the Bandcamp trawl. Where I go to the place where seemingly every fucking band in existence has uploaded something, type in Black Metal, and then spend at least an hour a day going through every release I can find,…
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Let’s be honest with ourselves for a minute. We all love black metal. Well, presumably you do if you’ve made it this far. But as a subgenre, black metal is also more bloated with ridiculous, untouchable clichés than almost anything else in heavy music. For a scene that originally built so much of its identity…