Upcoming Metal Releases: 10/29/2023-11/11/2023
Here are the new (and recent) metal releases for October 29th through November 11th. Releases reflect proposed North American scheduling, if available. Expect to see most of these albums on shelves or distros on Fridays.
See something we missed or have any thoughts? Let us know in the comments. Plus, as always, feel free to post your own shopping lists. Happy digging.
Send us your promos (streaming links preferred) to: [email protected]. Do not send us promo material via social media.
10/29/2023-11/4/2023
Green Lung — This Heathen Land | Nuclear Blast | Doom Metal + Stoner Rock | United Kingdom (London, England)
I don’t know if Black Harvest was really what I was looking for from Green Lung, but I can definitely attest that This Heathen Land is it. The band’s combination of fuzzy doom atmosphere and uplifting melodic prowess returns in full force, with vocals boosted a bit in the mix and an incredible focus on the occult tales of their home country.
It’s a very specific take on what could have otherwise been overdone, and there’s nothing more iconically Green Lung than making occult doom metal actually interesting again. This is a landmark record for the band that will probably propel them to even further heights, and I’m ready for more.
–Ted Nubel
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StarGazer — Bound by Spells | Nuclear War Now! Productions | Avant-Garde Black + Death Metal | Australia
This new EP from the Australian pioneers is jam-packed with wonky black/death riffs and unassuming production — feels like a demo tape you’d have hit in 1993 and/or unearthed on YouTube twenty years later.
–Ted Nubel
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Fuming Mouth — Last Day of Sun | Nuclear Blast | Death Metal | United States (Massachusetts)
Death metal hits differently when it comes to folks who have had actually brushes with death—think Chuck Schuldiner’s lyrics in Death—and the new record from Fuming Mouth captures a powerful energy because of such a connection. Vocalist and guitarist Mark Whelan was battling cancer while writing the record, and as such, the music and the lyrics get gross, real, personal, and depraved. A must-listen for all death metal fans.
–Addison Herron-Wheeler
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Ch’ahom — Knots of Abhorence | Sentient Ruin | Black Metal | Germany
Dialling back the crudest excesses of their earlier demos, Ch’ahom make like Erich von Däniken on this bludgeoning full-length debut, which embellishes the band’s habitual fusions of bestial Blasphemy- like war lust and Mesoamerican ritualism with the cavernous cosmic riffage of Timeghoul and Blood Incantation to insinuate an esoteric adjunct to the ancient astronaut mythos.
–Spencer Grady
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Melancholia — Book of Ruination | Brutal Panda Records | Sludge Metal | United States (Bellingham, WA)
Melancholia’s debut album thrives off the emotional proximity between Noah Burns’ drumming and Gage Lindsay’s scorched guitars and vocals. Since there’s no bass, the two must rely on each other to keep tracks together. It sounds laborious in the wretched manner that sludge metal, workmanlike in its roots, excels at.
–Colin Dempsey
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Ild — Kvern | Vendetta Records | Black Metal | Norway (Oslo)
“Skeletal” and “frigid” are common black metal traits Ild possess, and while they don’t employ in mind-bending fashion, they set themselves apart with a grounded approach. Rather than progressing to a specified endpoint, Ild build a ghastly panorama.
–Colin Dempsey
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Mortuary Drape — Black Mirror | Peaceville Records | Black Metal + Heavy Metal | Italy
This classic, ’80’s black metal band is back and better than ever with their latest release, Black Mirror. On this release, they channel melodic interludes, vintage riffing, and modern black metal fury into a solid comeback album.
–Addison Herron-Wheeler
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Carnal Tomb — Embalmed in Decay | Testimony Records | Death Metal | Germany (Berlin)
On their third album, Carnal Tomb present death metal for newcomers. That’s a more impressive accomplishment than it may seem, as it involves honoring the genre’s lineage and roots while honing it into an immediately gratifying experience. Fortunately, Embalmed in Decay is just as entertaining for long-time death metal fans as it is for first-time listeners. Carnal Tomb, with decades of hindsight, have synthesized the style’s traits into a hodge-podge of references and updates that reward those who respect death metal’s history.
–Colin Dempsey
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Xoth — Exogalactic | Dawnbreed Records | Technical Death Metal + Black Metal + Thrash Metal | United States (Seattle, WA)
Exogalactic is a bright, serotonin-filled, and slightly-dangerous record that plays as if Xoth are piecing together their favorite aspects of metal subgenres like they’re building a Lego set. It fortunately never veers too far into its over-the-top concept, but the twin guitar melodies on “Sporecraft Zero,” for example, reveal that Xoth aren’t afraid to flex their musical muscles for entertainment’s sake.
–Colin Dempsey
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Manipulator — Drawing Secret Circles | Independent | Grindcore | United States (New York, NY)
Manipulator’s debut from 2021 was only nine-minutes long, whereas their follow-up Drawing Secret Circles clocks in at a whopping 14-minutes. Jokes aside, their new record displays plenty of growth by toying around with what constitutes a song and investigating the grindcore and death metal intersection.
–Colin Dempsey
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Briqueville — IIII | Pelagic Records | Post-Metal + Rock | Belgium
Briqueville have an interesting aesthetic — perhaps you could call it ‘purposely inefficient brutalism’? Their spaced-out, decoration-free logo (stylized as “B R I Q U E V I L L E”), their new album title eschewing properal Roman numerals for the appealing if incorrect “IIII,” song titles that continuously increment from album to album — it lines up with their industrial-tinged, obfuscated post-rock. Within IIII, gloomy atmosphere weaves tapestries of desolate shade and mystery around impaling riffs, daring listeners to try and grapple with the monstrous, immaterial titans of suffering and struggle that Briqueville have summoned.
–Ted Nubel
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Feminizer — Beneath the Harm | Vita Detestabilis | Depressive Black Metal | United States (Seattle, WA)
Feminizer’s second full-length revisits what made the debut excel: combining passionate, unkempt black metal with some straight-up weirdness. No Cyndi Lauper cover this time (dang), but furious riffing, threads of heartbreaking melody and, at times, an inclination to dig in and jam provide more than enough surprise and awe to go around.
–Ted Nubel
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Cirkeln — The Primitive Covenant | True Cult Records | Melodic Black Metal | Sweden (Stockholm)
From Kaptain Carbon’s track premiere of “Garden of Thorns”:
irkeln has always been interesting to listen to as their take on melodic black with an edge evokes an earlier style of metal championed by artists like Bathory, Vinterland, and even Summoning. “A Garden of Thorns” embraces more of an icy thrash style similar to Immortal for its sound but still retains the same outlook on both music and subject matter. This is less grandiose than previous records, but when contrasted with the same amount of fantasy literature for influence, the result is an even more delightful blend of extreme metal and high dorkery.
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Gozer — The Path Always Leads to the End | Independent | Sludge + Post-Metal | United Kingdom
From Ted Nubel’s full album premiere:
On their new EP, the band experiments with more synthesizers and drone/noise textures, granting even more depth to their wide-open sound, but the dark tonality and walls of crushing heaviness that defined their last album An Endless Static are still very much in play. Gozer’s skill at compression and release causes emotional osmosis, pulling buried pain to the surface.
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Ancient Days — Devil’s Night | Independent | Doom Metal | United States (Indianapolis, IN)
Classic doom always hits different when there’s keyboards involved, and Ancient Days delivers on that front. Truly old-school sounding.
–Ted Nubel
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Devil’s Night — II | Molten Magma | Heavy Metal | United States (Baltimore, MD)
The Baltimore band’s second EP is another quick burst of crunchy, vocal-driven heavy metal. There’s an excellent blend of compelling instrumentals and hooks to make its already brief runtime seem worthy of a few more spins.
–Ted Nubel
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Black Knife — Baby Eater Witch | Wise Blood Records | Black Metal + Punk | United States (Lexington, KY)
From Tom Campagna’s full album premiere:
With track titles like “Evil Sex on Halloween” and “Crawling Through Your Guts To See the Light,” you can see where the debauchery is being highlighted, sometimes in song titles and others in their grotesque lyrical content. This is a heavy metal album by way of evil punk rock which really marries some of this season’s musical styles all in one complete package.
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11/5/2023-11/11/2023
Vastum — Inward to Gethsemane | 20 Buck Spin | Death Metal | United States (Oakland, CA)
It is with much anticipation that this record finally drops. Vastum have been out of the game for a while, and no one quite creates the weird, dissonant death metal we crave quite like they do. Records with so much hype often disappoint, but this one does not. We can’t get enough, so if you already love this band, or are a fan of the newer generation of weird death metal, this is a must-listen.
–Addison Herron-Wheeler
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Left Cross — Upon Desecrated Altars | Profound Lore Records | Death Metal | United States (Richmond, VA)
You can smell the riffs on Upon Desecrated Altars. They’re grimy and moldy, dripping with fat, and fried by the heat of blast beats. They’re not nutritionally complete, but you’ll forget about that as soon as they hit your ear. It’s best to let Left Cross cook alone in the kitchen, otherwise you will get burned.
–Colin Dempsey
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Suffocation — Hymns from the Apocrypha | Nuclear Blast | Brutal + Technical Death Metal | United States (Long Island, NY)
Suffocation returns with new vocalist Ricky Myers at the helm — their first without Frank Mullen, ever. To be honest, it… sounds like Suffocation, broadly speaking, but that’s perhaps a blessing and a curse.
–Ted Nubel
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Trhä — av◊ëlajnt◊ë£ hinnem nihre | Independent | Black Metal | ???
Apparently on a quest to test the limits of most websites’ encoding, av◊ëlajnt◊ë£ hinnem nihre blends Trhä’s whimsical sense of melody with their equally mighty capacity for pure ferocity. This is pretty much a musical interpretation of what it’s like to peer beyond the veil of mortality into strange worlds beyond.
–Ted Nubel
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Plague Rider — Intensities | Transcending Obscurity Records | Technical Death Metal | United Kingdom
It’s been a decade since UK’s Plague Rider released their self-titled debut album. The ensuing years have seen them metamorphosise into something truly engaging, with Intensities ramping up the band’s previous levels of experimentation and complexity in a corrosive series of manias chock-full of FX-mangled vox and post-Azagthothian atonal eruptions, rivalling the labyrinthine abstractions of transatlantic peers such as Artificial Brain and Pyrrhon. If old blighty has produced a superior dose of metal extremism in 2023, this scribe has yet to hear it.
–Spencer Grady
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Autarkh — Emergent | Season of Mist | Industrial Metal | Netherlands (Tilburg)
For a band known for remixing their own music and reimagining their own creations, we expect Autarkh to keep digging deeper, and they certainly have on this release. It’s definitely a bit noodly, but if you’re good with progression meets experimentation, this release will likely be for you.
–Addison Herron-Wheeler
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Horsewhip — Consume and Burn | Iodine Recordings | Metalcore | United States (Tampa Bay, FL)
Good metalcore (or metallic hardcore, if you’re picky about genres) is hard to define but obvious when heard. Horsewhip fit that description (else we wouldn’t include them here), but it’s still tricky to pin down why their energy–which is more like a sledgehammer pummeling a nail than a corrosive force–is so intoxicating, or why their interludes, such as the one that concludes “Plague Machine,” are tasteful rather than rote. At the end of the day, there isn’t a science behind it, and if there’s any genre that’s more feeling than fact, it’s metalcore.
–Colin Dempsey
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Pyrolatrus — Inveterate | Gilead Media | Death Metal + Black Metal | United States (Brooklyn, NY)
The copy on Pyrolatrus’ Bandcamp reads, “Extreme Metal from Brooklyn.” It’s the simplest way to accurately describe them because their genre varies between tracks. Pyrolatrus commit to whatever style they’re performing, whether that’s old school death metal on “Divination of the Relic Wind” or epic black metal on “Slave of the State.” There isn’t much transference between the styles so Inveterate plays like a jam session, albeit a focused and precise one. It’s true that Pyrolatrus have yet to establish an identity, but they perform so adeptly that it doesn’t matter.
–Colin Dempsey
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Totenmesse — Fiktionlust | Pagan Records | Black Metal | Poland
The sharp, piercing black metal on offer here is vastly at odds with the whimsical, yet off-putting bizarrity of the cover art, but it does somehow feel right: Fiktionlust‘s impassioned rage and delirious heights convey a similar sense of spellbinding insanity.
–Ted Nubel
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Aglo — Build Fear | Brilliant Emperor Records | Death + Doom Metal | Australia
From Ted Nubel’s full album premiere:
To put it briefly, it feels like a filthed-up space western with murderous alien worlds and dingy starships stocked with surly operators. Nasty drum fills hit like hastily-aimed laser barrages replete with collateral damage, and each riff cuts with a snarling edge ready to hew through the staunchest hull.
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Hanging Moss — Autumn Journeys & Reflections | Fiadh Prod | Folk + Ambient | United States (Denver, CO)
Though it’s an LP re-release from Fiadh Productions coming a decade after its original cassette run via Klangwald Produktionen, Autumn Journeys & Reflections is still worth your time. For those unaware, Hanging Moon is one of Paul Riedl’s (Blood Incantation) side projects and it plays exactly how its title implies; a low-stakes afternoon jaunt through fall’s red and orange hues. It’s a reprieve from the foreboding overtones metal-adjacent folk usually carries, instead acting as a vehicle for Riedl’s curiosity into loop tapes.
–Colin Dempsey
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Ufomammut — Crookhead | Supernatural Cat | Stoner + Doom Metal | Italy
Essentially serving as an appetizer for another upcoming full-length, Ufomammut leaves a mark on the tail end of the year with their signature hazy hypnotism, blending groovy stomps and weird samples into a smooth trip.
–Ted Nubel
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Receiver — Whispers of Lore | Gates of Hell Records | Epic Heavy Metal | Cyprus
From Tom Campagna’s full album premiere:
Whispers of Lore features soaring guitars, galloping drums and some powerful vocals courtesy of front woman Nikoletta Kyprianou, giving the whole album the sound of epic warfare. It straddles the line with what might be considered power metal but never fully crosses over to that either.
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Acid Throne — Kingdom’s Death | Trepanation Recordings | Doom Metal + Black Metal + Death Metal | United Kingdom (Norwich)
Doom metal is reliable chewy and savory, though it occasionally lacks the edge of its subgenre brethren. Norwich’s Acid Throne rectify that by adding black metal tremolo-picking and humongous death metal growls to doom’s patented riffs. As a result, Kingdom’s Death scratches an itch that lays deeper than the skin’s surface and requires more force to satisfy.
–Colin Dempsey
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