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Regarding “I Feel Nothing When You Cry,” the band comments:

A throwaway mantra scraped from the necrotic skin of syndicated television. A lugubrious nod to our favorite commode-crooning diva, one of her most diabolically terse lines. With the sweet, sultry whispers of a legendary New Orleans faerie. This might be as close as we’ll get to a positive, youth crew anthem. ‘This song has nothing original or of value. It’s a steady beat for dancing feet. You got what you wanted, now say the words…’

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The album announcement also comes with a full statement:

They’ve called us anarchists, criminals, foreign meddlers, lunatics, dispossessed, relativists, utilitarians, egoists, passion maximizers, ascetics, negators of everything. Clearly, the “Thou” experiment is never going to appeal to audiences who demand that art rigorously enforce a coherent and righteous worldview. 

And yet, are we not ourselves constrained by our own rigid morality? In those quiet moments of deep contemplation, when the bargains and concessions are thoroughly examined, when we yield before the Judging Eye–what is the summation of our choices? If the unspoiled self beyond the immensity of time were given voice, what pronouncements would be made? What would such an internal audit yield? What undeniable character would be revealed?

This record is for the radicals, the crackpots, the exiles who have escaped the wasteland of capitulation. This record is for the militants and zealots refusing to surrender to comforts, to practicalities, to thirty pieces of silver. And this record is most especially for the weaklings and malingerers, burdened by capricious indulgence, hunched by the deep wounds of compromise, shuffling in limp approximation, desperately reaching back towards integrity and conviction.

– Thou 

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Umbilical will be released across all digital platforms and available in stores May 31st via Sacred Bones. All vinyl editions come with a black 7” featuring the tracks “I Feel Nothing When You Cry” and “Unbidden Guest”, which are also available on CD and digital products. 

Thou Live Dates:

Apr 13: New Orleans, LA – Palestine Benefit at Fred Hampton Free Store
May 04: Providence, RI – AS220
Jul 28: New Orleans, LA – The Broadside (w/ The Body + Dis Fig and Nail Club)
Sep 13-15: Richmond, VA – Persistent Vision Fest
Aug 14: The Zoo – Brisbane, AU *
Aug 15: Mary’s Underground – Sydney, AU *
Aug 16: The Baso – Canberra, AU *
Aug 17: Stay Gold – Melbourne, AU *
Aug 18: Crown & Anchor – Adelaide, AU *
Aug 23: Rolling Stone – Christchurch, NZ *
Aug 24: Meow – Wellington, NZ *
Aug 25: Galatos – Auckland, NZ *

* w/ Full of Hell 

Pairing their immense musicianship–some of vocalist/synthesist Terence Hannum’s, guitarist André Foisy’s, and drummer/electronics performer Steven Hess’ most ambitious performances to date–with a book of art, stories, and even a bibliography (of invented future texts, very cool), End Terrain takes from each Locrian era. With influences dating back to Hannum and Foisy’s days as a duo (over fifteen years ago now, wow) and through their vast discography as a trio with Hess, End Terrain is a cumulation of ideas, sounds, and a decade-plus of camaraderie as now-displaced experimental musicians. The explosive album opener, “Chronoscapes,” leads End Terrain on an intense footing, with large riffs and expansive soundscapes carefully pieced together to craft something larger than life. When paired with an intense video, which can be viewed below, we join the Seer as they remotely view a horrific future of humanoid creatures destroying, well, everything.

Watch “Chronoscapes” below.

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End Terrain releases April 5th via Profound Lore Records.

Negative Mass somehow offers even more range than Mare Crisium’s self-titled debut did [read our interview here] — both guitar and double bass veer further away from the sounds one usually associate with these instruments, and even on the last record that gulf was starkly apparent. This new album finds the duo plunging into sparser and stranger abysses that feel like they could almost have been conjured up from room-sized modular synths and strange homebrewed gadgets rather than a couple of stringed instruments. But, critically, Negative Mass does keep in touch with its acoustic-ish roots, and that grounding and articulation lends an unusual weightiness to the floating, perhaps even playful threads that Oldman and Reichelt weave.

We’re streaming the record here before it releases on Friday — whether your Wednesday calls for deep space oblivion or a soundtrack for intense focus, check it out. Also, if you’re in Chicago, the band is playing a release show this Friday at Cary’s Lounge — more details follow below.

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Negative Mass releases February 2nd and will be available pay-what-you-want on Bandcamp.

The band will be playing a release show at Cary’s Lounge (2251 W Devon Ave, Chicago IL) on Friday, February 2nd with Clay Condon and Keith Wakefield. Show starts at 8PM, 21+. No cover.

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So what’s the big deal? Well, Master’s Murmur isn’t strictly a black metal record. Note that this is not an improbable event–just look at how Laster or Furia continually reinvent themselves.

But that isn’t to say that Yellow Eyes is shunning the style, which makes Master’s Murmur all the more exciting. Sure, the first blast beat might not turn up until a good 13 minutes of the album has elapsed, but it drops in such an organic way that fans and newcomers alike should feel in safe hands as the band takes you on a tour of what we’ll call “adjacent” music.

Take “Anywhere Out Of The World” from Dead Can Dance’s 1987 album Within The Realm Of A Dying Sun. No rock instrumentation to be heard, clean singing, and yet we have an atmosphere remarkably close to what would become familiar sonics for black metal over the next decade. As such, you can find a lot of extreme metal fans also moving in post-industrial, neoclassical, and darkwave circles. We could take Master’s Murmur as a love letter to these equally leftfield genres that often tread similar ground despite disparate motivations and methods.

Opener “Old Acclivity Dream” couldn’t be a better mission statement. An air raid siren of woodwinds blaring out of harmony, thrumming bass, then guitar noise verging on power electronics, before a haunting melodic theme surfaces out of the cacophony. The transition into the self-titled track could go entirely unnoticed, and here we begin to see Yellow Eyes employing textures from dungeon synth, neofolk, and even Tolkien-esque landscapes.

Yet Yellow Eyes’ identity remains. Will hasn’t suddenly turned into Dead Can Dance mastermind Brendan Perry, keeping hold of his venomous bark in spite of the music’s less obvious aggression. Nor has the band shirked what makes it distinct–the Skarstads’ guitars still writhe and intertwine into the uncanny, only this time round much of it is drenched in reverb and delay instead of distortion. Underneath, the murky power chords and bass move much slower, evoking the spirit of drone and doom.

Meanwhile, percussion is purposefully sparse, first reminding us of its presence on “Winter is Looking” with a thumping bass drum punctuating the track’s dirge-like qualities. Then, as the synth line reaches a climax, Rekevics’ telltale fills smash the relative tranquility and dive into a blast beat for the first “black metal” moment of Master’s Murmur, while a strummed acoustic guitar and piano guide the piece to its conclusion.

“Irrlicht” is borderline ritual music where the realms of dungeon synth and drone collide effortlessly, and a disembodied voice casts spells through the smoke of a sorcerer’s cauldron. “When Jackie’s Lamps Have Showed” snaps from dark ambient into a swirling madness of acoustic guitars and bells. Bells are a recurring theme in Yellow Eyes’ work, whether they come from field recordings or it’s the sound of the guitars themselves as on “Old Alpine Pang” from Immersion Trench Reverie. Old habits die hard, and “The Ritual is Gone” sees Rekevics’ savage blasts return for an ecstatic melding of ambient, noise, black metal, and, yes, more bells, underpinned by church organ-like synth.

The whole album oozes a sense of the occult and folk horror, whether it’s the incantations of the lyrics, the bleating of sheep (or goats) in the next field over on “Gold Door to Blindness,” or the cover art of a faceless hooded figure among crops. All this could hint at what’s to come from Yellow Eyes next because, as you may or may not be pleased to know, Master’s Murmur is one in a pair of companion albums. Per the band, it is “the first of two complementary releases conjoined in spirit, a surreal, sinister industrial folk prelude to an upcoming full-band LP” in 2024.

With Master’s Murmur already displaying Yellow Eyes at their most confident, experimental, and discerning, we cannot wait to hear what follows.

–Richard Currie

The thing is, for this author at least, Furia has not once sounded the same. They first hit the radar with Martwa polska jesień (Dead Polish autumn) in 2007, which was being passed around solely on the strength of its conventionality. Yes, it was powerful black metal from a country with a storied history in the genre, but there wasn’t much there that stood out as different at the time, aside from the occasional lengthy and clean instrumental passage.

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Yet going from 2016 to Huta Luna, due out October 10^th on Polish powerhouse Pagan Records, couldn’t be more of a step change, and a pretty exciting one at that. You see, where Księżyc milczy luty plodded about in abject misery, Furia’s first full-length in seven years is practically shorn of all negative emotions – and absolutely fucking furious to boot [read our interview with Furia here].

Not furious in the sense of anger specifically – we reckon that would count as a negative emotion – but in the playing. The majority of songs on Huta Luna clock in under four minutes and might average around 3:20. Coincidentally, the length of a good pop song. We count this as a wise decision because, frankly, we’d be astounded if any band could maintain this level of assault on the senses for the length of extreme metal’s more meandering passages.

While Furia’s fury manifests in the blistering blast beats and fret-defying guitars, the music itself speaks a different language, one of triumph and, dare we say, even joy. Speaking for myself here, but black metal that moves the listener to raise a fist, not in violence but in appreciation of life for all its absurdity, the highs and the rock-bottoms, is why I still find myself listening to it. Much in the same way that a death metal song describing graphic atrocities against the human body has me twerking in the kitchen.

Huta Luna feels as though Furia has jammed the fuck out of their Finnish counterparts in Havukruunu and thought they could not only play faster, but also much harder and looser. This means Furia’s new album could fall under what we would tentatively describe as “adventure metal” – black metal that venerates the spirit of adventure, swords, fantasy, horseback fighting, touching grass, and so on.

But the truth is that’s probably the “nekrofolk” talking – how the band would prefer to describe their music – rather than anything of strict thematic relevance. Though this term might cast you in mind of Furia’s utterly degenerate compatriots Dead Raven Choir, Huta Luna instead seems intent on conquering and overcoming life’s personal and social tribulations instead of dwelling on the filth of humanity. But nor is this Moonsorrow’s pomp and synthesizer cheese. It’s earthy, vital, and relatable, touching down somewhere in the no-man’s-land between early Liturgy and later Graveland.

The opener, “Zamawianie trzecie” (Third Order), kicks off with a blast of feedback, a brief moment of spoken word, then a snap of the fingers – and it is totally balls to the wall from there for the next half hour. There isn’t a shred of pessimism, hopelessness, apathy, or any of these things we find so commonly expressed in black metal. Just raw ecstasy.

Huta Luna simply doesn’t let up. Where Furia’s previous album seemed concerned with the low end, they now seem transfixed on high frequencies, traveling the length of the neck in seconds to bring a glistening, psychedelic edge to proceedings.

Take “Swawola niewola” (who knew there was such a catchy way to say “Free-spirited bondage” on Earth?), which drenches high notes in delay and reverb to create this swirling kaleidoscope of true grit. Don’t forget to join in the gang chant of the song’s title, though. Also scream “Na koń!” (On horse!) repeatedly for the next track, once again feeding into that “adventure metal” paradigm we described, which harbors an almost Western atmosphere in the way the guitars wobble. Mount up, and ride into battle against whatever personal demons you wish to run down.

Furia’s infectious melodies and breakneck pace continue unabated for eight tracks until “Gore!” eventually trips over its galloping rhythms and breaks through into… a half-hour ambient drone track?

This is a major surprise for an already left-field album. If you like your black metal fearlessly inverting expectations, it’s a guaranteed fuck on the first date. It’s almost incomprehensible how we got here compared to where Furia has come from, yet here we are, and it’s very, very good.

—Richard Currie

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Huta Luna is out now via Pagan Records.

Nothing Will Belong to Us is a work of space and echoes. Silence–or something close to it–is an equal contributor to Mouth Wound‘s new album as much as the unsettling analogue synthesizers and sparse instrumental layers that glide and scrape against project mastermind Trine Paaschburg’s voice. It’s the lulls and quiet in this album that provokes the most tension, uneasy truces that always collapse back into new, fascinating, and sometimes frightening soundscapes.

Paaschburg wields her vocals as a texture and as a lead instrument: though lyrics feature heavily in the album, they’re always veiled behind droning backing. It’s as if Paaschburg is shrouded, a comparison that resonates with the album’s haunting atmosphere. It’s not all suspense and anticipation, though: distorted screams, still eerily distant from the listener, blend with harsher synthesizer textures to fuel cathartic peaks across the album. When experienced as a single, continuous listen, Nothing Will Belong To Us feels like the soundtrack to a dark, brooding horror film that manages to unsettle its audience in new, unfamiliar ways. That said, fear is not the objective here as much as simply disrupting perception. It’s an evocative, discomforting experience that resonates with the deep, silent corners of our brains.

Stream the whole thing here before it releases on the 27th.

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Trine adds:

Nothing Will Belong To Us Is the result of gathering material of the last two years from live sets and field recordings merged with structured ideas. I wanted to explore the properties of harmonics and noise, to pit it against melodic elements and the possibilities of the expanded voice.

To me, the album is related to existential unease and desire. It is a balancing act between an inherent drive to find meaning, and the hope that its absence can either be seen as perpetual possibility or has to be accepted on its own in some way.

It is not a deliberate concept, it is more of an attempt to express whatever occurs naturally between those stages.

I think there is a lot of potential in the feeling of absence/ ‘nothing’. And it belongs to us interchangeably in the form of anger, grief, contentment, calm or quiet desperation.

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Nothing Will Belong to Us will release April 27th via Brucia Records.

The secret ingredient is time: wisdom passed down over centuries through vineyards, bakeries, and doom metal artists. Doom in particular has an almost symbiotic relationship with the clock; how many other musical genres are defined not by notes played or techniques used, but by the speed at which they’re unleashed? In a great doom song, time becomes an additional unseen band member, gradually pulling us towards its core, and turning glacially on its course.

Convention often dictates that doom starts slowly and continues apace, but BIG|BRAVE have never been one for convention, and on their new album Nature Morte they harness their maturity as pre eminent time manipulators to subvert genre tropes and test the elasticity of their musical heritage. This approach begins instantly, as in right away—the album roars into life with no ambiguous wall of feedback, and no looped phrases as Robin Wattie, Mathieu Ball, and Tasy Hudson pick up their instruments one by one.

Instead, all three players launch into “Carvers, Farriers and Knaves” simultaneously and urgently: the resulting song plunges us straight into the album’s themes of decay and unease, and holds us there for its duration. It’s an incredible experiment; BIG|BRAVE have spent so many years conducting our attention through waves of suspense and release. It’s cathartic to hear them bolt violently out of the gate and keep going until they’re completely breathless.

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The first three of the album’s six songs feel cohesively angry and enormous, among them “My Hope Renders Me A Fool,” a piece that recalls Ball’s album of single take instrumental recordings Amplified Guitar, which was released last year. In fact, it’s possible to partially trace the genealogy of Nature Morte through the projects the band have undertaken between it and 2021’s Vital, with Wattie stating that the structures and stories of the folk songs interpreted on the band’s collaboration with The Body, Leaving None But Small Birds, informed the writing process for this album, as she sought to create stories with a similar delicate balance of intimacy and universality.

Her voice remains the key to that thematic unease in the instantly recognisable sound of BIG|BRAVE, power and pain in one, simultaneously able to navigate the static of the band’s instrumentation, and contradict it with a turn of phrase or unexpected melody.

If the first section of the album delivers a taught, tense exercise in sustained volume, the second uses time to different ends entirely, with a structure that begins by stretching time to its absolute limit, holding it there, and then watches the carnage created when it violently snaps back on release. That stretching takes the form of “The Fable Of Subjugation,” an almost entirely deconstructed BIG|BRAVE song, in which every element the band has built their confidence and career wielding gets an opportunity to stand at the fore, be rearranged, then replayed, and make way. It feels like a testament to the individual strength and ability of the members of a band in which nothing is superfluous, which is to say that without those elements that “The Fable Of Subjugation” puts under the spotlight, there is no BIG|BRAVE. If we consider this to be the album’s side B, it’s in polar opposition to the tempestuous opening of side A.

Then comes the snap, “A Parable Of The Trusting” features lyrics that spill out over musical phrases as though there otherwise might not be enough time to convey the song’s meaning, which seems to be deeply personal and confrontational from Wattie’s standpoint—even beyond the words it’s there in her voice, you get the sense that this was not an easy song to create.

Musically, the song stomps and hoofs its way to a huge, bombastic climax, a fitting mirror to the album’s opening. The subsequent and final part of the album acts musically and lyrically as something of a companion piece to “A Parable Of The Trusting” and a coda to the whole experience, a deep breath and a moment’s pause to survey the damage done over the course of the album.

If this feels like an investigation into Nature Morte’s structure and sequencing as much as the music contained within it, it’s because both elements are essential to understanding what makes the work unique in BIG|BRAVE’s catalog. Here, their mastery of time has leapt from the bounds of individual songs and runs wild over the entire album, and crucially, this is why it can successfully weave through such extremes of maximalism and minimalism, taking routes through drone and folk.

They have always been able to create gut wrenching doom anthems, but on Nature Morte, BIG|BRAVE look at the big picture and pull into focus the scale of the stories they’re capable of telling.

–Luke Jackson

Nature Morte released February 24 via Thrill Jockey Records.

The last time we heard from Dutch death metal weirdos Cryptae, they were busy figuring out how to disintegrate death metal into noise dust via pure genre dismantling. Now, on new album Capsule, we find this bizarre duo both embracing and completely denying death metal with a uniquely progressive character. On “Salt,” the duo of guitarist Kees Peerdeman and prolific drummer René Aquarius (Dead Neanderthals, Plague Organ et al) embrace their love of ’80s synthesizer music (primarily the Berlin School) in conjunction with their most traditional death metal to date. The result is dizzying, almost too much for me to handle before my morning coffee, but enthralling all the same. Cryptae has done it again–completely turned the tables on death metal and made something weird and new. Listen to “Salt” ahead of Capsule‘s release date below.

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Capsule releases November 18th via Sentient Ruin Laboratories with vinyl in 2023.

Liturgy surprised their fans today with the release of a new EP, As the Blood of God Bursts the Veins of Time. Within two tracks, the EP revels in both exultant black metal and glitchy folk as well as continuing the band’s maximalist inclinations.

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When Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix introduced the concept of “transcendental black metal” to the world over a decade ago, she was immediately met with derision from the more purist factions of the black metal fandom. During that time, the genre was going through something of a metamorphosis–hardcore and indie enthusiasts were integrating themselves within the community, mainstream publications were putting their weight behind certain bands, and newfound scenes were sprouting up all over–so disgruntled paritioners of the black metal orthodoxy did what they could to villify any act that dared to openly challenge the style’s hallowed ethos.

To the critics’ credit, despite both of Liturgy’s albums at the time–2009’s Renihilation and 2011’s Aesthethica–being quite good, their departure from conventional black metal sonics was tenuous at best, certainly nothing to be titled as resplendently as transcendental. Then, in 2019, Liturgy released H.A.Q.Q. and rewrote the narrative; it was a record that more closely aligned with the nomer Hunt-Hendrix had hailed the band under those many years before. While 2020’s Origin of the Alimonies was more a pivot into abstract and orchestral black metal-adjacent soundscapes, the band’s newest EP As The Blood of the God Bursts the Veins of Time is the spiritual successor to H.A.Q.Q.‘s regal compositions and a perpetuation of Liturgy’s ceaseless evolutionary process.

Hunt-Hendrix knows how to pack a song without the end result feeling cluttered. “93696” is an extremely dense track that often finds itself alternating between a myriad of stylistic diversions. Black metal sections are melodic and well-adorned with (literal) bells and whistles, broken up by moments of stuttering electronics and then elongated by blown-out post-hardcore guitars. On paper that all may sound scattered, but the song is held together by Hunt-Hendrix’s exuberance which manifests aurally in the song’s closing minutes as her penchant for classical excursions frames the track in beautiful and bombastic orchestrations.

On the other hand, “संसार” is a much softer number, but not necessarily more subdued. Though it begins as a quaint folk tune, it’s quickly warped by digital manipulation, Hunt-Hendrix’s howls overtaken by sputtering modulations and robotic backing vocals. Despite its complete absence of black metal, it’s a song that feels like it encapsulates what Liturgy is more than any other in their discography.

The two songs on As the Blood of God Bursts the Veins of Time serve as purest distillations of Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix’s artistic ambition yet. She is a musician who is always reaching for something greater, and if her music with Liturgy hasn’t grasped true transcendence yet, it’s well on its way to doing so.

“93696” is also an alternate version of the title track of Liturgy’s upcoming album of the same name, due March 24 via Thrill Jockey.

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As the Blood of God Bursts the Veins of Time releases today via Thrill Jockey Records.