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The album closes with a Midnight cover that highlights one big difference between Hässlig and some of their peers — they have no interest in melody or dramatics (although the cover highlights that they can nail those when they want). It comes down to intentions: if it’s not raging black metal or raucous, infectious punk riffing, it’s not a part of Apex Predator‘s core vision.

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Apex Predator releases May 3rd via Sentient Ruin,

Murk Rider is everything you don’t expect from black metal, or if you have been listening to black metal for any amount of time, everything you could come to expect. Sure there are tons of traditional aesthetic exemplified by bands just as much as unorthodox. Black metal is less about challenging the old guard as much as it is about bands having the freedom to do whatever they want.  From cover to logo, to themes, Murk Rider have forged their own path and upon footstones such as 30 minute songs, cosmic synth, and now covers of Uriah Heep. The Murk Rider is a new scrapbook which highlights the band’s patchwork of influence. You can preview it right now:

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The Murk Rider is a collection of new material and covers which is mechanically material left over and in production between albums. While this period can easily be a stopgap between albums, Murk Rider has zero reason to do anything else besides what they want. This is why the centerpiece “Go into the Magic Darkness” is around 15 minutes with the closing Berlin school style synth track “The Fires of Creation” around the same time. What lies between is a handful of covers, poetry, and sound collages which are like posters tacked on the walls of a basement bedroom. The covers of Uriah Heep’s “Rainbow Demon” and Sodom’s “Outbreak of Evil” are the best example of showcasing the genealogical roots of this band as progressive hard rock and first wave black metal is the type of aesthetic mashup we have all been secretly wanting. 

Murk Rider is much of a place of escape as it is creation and The Murk Rider is an avatar of collage. It is sometimes a devil, at others a samurai, or even sometimes an interstellar heroine descending from the skies with a giant glowing sword. It is 2024 and listening to black metal can be anything you really want it to be and many times can be everything. You can be spooky if you want to or be a space shaman from some 1980’s VHS tape no one has heard of. Whatever it is, it is done from a place of excitement which lies at the core. I’m glad this band reached out but to be honest we might have already known each other in some past life reading Conan comics surrounded by “water vases” in some smoky garage. I’m glad to have met you again, space travelers. 

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The Murk Rider releases on April 19th. Tapes will be available via Fiadh Productions and digital pre-orders can be found on Murk Rider’s Bandcamp.

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While you’re feeling bad, though, at least you can get some headbanging in. Sundowner pair blues-laced sludge with neck-snapping hardcore punk, delivering chunky emphatic riffs in a blissful dichotomy of both fast and slow. It’s loud, abrasive, and carries itself with no shortage of swing. No matter the state of the world and how terribly your day is going, Sundowner promises one thing: whenever the drummer starts laying into the ride bell, you’re in for a hell of a riff.

The band comments:

This album represents exactly what SUNDOWNER is, straight to the point sludge.

Heavy, bluesy, intoxicated riffs from slow and filthy to hardcore punk speeds.

Lyrically ranging from substance abuse and drugs to serial killings and cults, it’s all around the nastiest side of humanity which reflects the nature of the music perfectly.

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Lysergic Ritual releases April 20th independently and can be pre-ordered on Bandcamp.

Their newest project is a sort of meta-album, Evolution, that looks at humanity’s fate alongside the rise of androids. The first part of this work, the Extinction EP,  is set to release digitally this Tuesday but is streaming a day early.

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On Extinction, the melancholic chords and dismal growls of death/doom metal are not a constant, but instead a gut-punching eventuality that lurks within sweeping instrumental textures. The combination draws up an especially potent atmosphere where quiet, musing exploration often meets stark, uncomfortable truth in dramatic form. Alongside excellent pacing, Extinction outstrips much of its peers by daring to apply unusual, drastic vocal harmonies in combination with emphatic riffs. It’s extremely contemplative, despite its heaviness, and lends real weight to its thought-provoking concept.

The band comments:

The album is based on a musical and thematic concept in three parts. It speaks about the evolution of humanity, the expansion of androids, and their crossed future, around an atmospheric, melancholic and progressive doom metal, playing with influences, sometimes orchestral, sometimes electronic.

As the first part, EXTINCTION unveils a journey of atmospheric doom filled with symphonic and acoustic soundscapes, both epic and intimate. It will take you into the future, questioning how humanity will struggle with mortality in a world where android technology rises. EXTINCTION will be released tomorrow on all digital platforms. As a whole, the album will also be released physically later this fall.

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Extinction releases April 16th via Finisterian Dead End.

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Billed by the band as “666% fuzz” — mathematically improbable, but from these dudes I believe it — Supersonic Megafauna Collision combines tasty, rather fuzzy riffs with intriguing lead playing that never outstays its welcome. It’s titanic doom metal, but laced with no small amount of hallucinogens — the layers to the album are liable to entrap and enspell listeners.  For one thing, there’s enough reverb on vocalist/guitarist Chris Babalis Jr ‘s far-flung delivery to sink into, forever. Beyond that, the underlying riffs rumble through the low-end without burying any details or getting too complex, but they’re still catchy and able to be amplified into something absolutely monolithic when combined with everything else going on. It’s not that other bands don’t do that, but Acid Mammoth is particularly skilled at using a limited toolset to freshen up even the most knuckle-dragging riffs out there — snappy bursts of double bass, bizarre lead harmonies, nothing is off limit as long as it rocks. Supersonic Megafauna Collision isn’t aiming to reinvent any facets of the genre, instead conquering the existing pillars of doom metal and gathering them all under one enormous hoof. 

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Supersonic Megafauna Collision releases April 5th via Heavy Psych Sounds.

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There’s a lot to dig into musically, with each of the three songs on Candles Burn navigating vastly different paths, but the commonality is how the two instruments resonate with each other. Weinroth-Browne’s playing acts as a rich, textured voice that weaves in and out of Blake’s combined rhythm-and-melody structure, his playing cascading between low and high notes with hypnotic intricacy. If you’re already familiar with Blake’s catalog, this collaboration offers an intriguing twist, and if not, this is a great starting point.

Blake states:

This is a record that I have wanted to make for some time now. I liked the idea of mixing progressive rock and classical music together and found this to be the perfect opportunity. Seeing as though both Raphael and I play progressive music in bands, I thought that pairing with him could be ideal. His playing was perfect and took this music to a new level. I am very excited for people to hear this album.

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Candles Burn releases April 5th via 7D Media.

It’s barely 10 minutes long, so it’s not a marathon by any means, but each listen massaged the EP’s patterns into my brain until the disparate tracks that migrate between black metal, screamo, and noise became seamless. While Cave Moth have dabbled with various types of extreme subgenres, this is their first foray into black metal, though it’s not typical by any means. 

Opening tracks “In Memory Eternal” and “In Memoria Aeterna” marry tremolo picking with scratchy tones and heart-on-the-sleeve vocals, blurring the line between black metal and screamo. In isolation, both genres are quite different, but Cave Moth find their overlapping features. In Memory Eternal’s lynchpin is Sweet Creem, a Knoxville-based singer whose cleans are true to screamo’s (and punk music as a whole) ethos, as defined by Kurt Cobain: “As sloppy as you want. As long as it’s good and it has passion.” 

She also supplied Cave Moth with the samples and field recordings that slice between tracks and vocalize In Memory Eternal’s thought process, which, in guitarist/vocalist Daniel Quinn’s words, is the “existentialist imagery about the personal connections we had to those we loved and lost.” Listen to the EP in full before Cave Moth self-releases it this Friday.  

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In Memory Eternal can be pre-ordered here. 

There’s a little more metallic edge here than one might initially expect, but also a lot of sing-along catchiness. Saltpig is a different beast from what occult rock usually sounds like in large part due to the band’s chops. Alessandrini melds heavy rock groove with monstrous fills, and on top of crafting especially hypnotic riffs, Davis delivers a vocal performance that’s simply not often matched in the genre while still slotting in with a gritty, horror-obsessed atmosphere.

Having successfully self-released on digital and cassette earlier this year, the band has signed up with Heavy Psych Sounds for a full physical release in May. Ahead of that, we’re premiering a new music video for the opening track, “Satan’s War,” which provides a blood-red backdrop of vintage horror dread for the song. Watch below:

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Saltpig releases via Heavy Psych Sounds on May 31st and CD/LP can be pre-ordered here.

This death-dealing groove is especially evident on the band’s new single “Conduit of Pain,” which we’re premiering today with a lyric video — it’s a snappy midpoint between OSDM and the genre’s more technically influenced later evolutions that keeps invigorating riffs as a focal point. As the band explains below, real-life misery fuels this nightmarish ripper.

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Vocalist Karl Schmidt explains “Conduit of Pain” as follows:

The lyrics are about the time I got a concussion when I was tripping on mushrooms and had to go to the emergency room in an ambulance while tripping on mushrooms. It was the most horrific experience I have ever been through. That was the first time in my life I woke up in a hospital without any recollection of why I was there.

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Sentience Revoked releases June 21st via Redefining Darkness Records.