#experimental-metal

#experimental-metal

It was always more rough and violent, says Destruction vocalist and bassist Marcel Schmier Schirmer of Germany's initial approach to thrash. We never tried to be the best musicians we tried to write songs that punched hard. On English heavy metal albums, it was always the first song on the album and the first song on the second side of the vinyl that were the fastest tracks.

I was too embarrassed to sing in my apartment, he says on a video call. But my roommate at the time was dating the preacher's daughter, and had keys to the church across the street. In the dead of night, the madcap bassist and singer took his recording equipment to the empty church, set up on the podium, and first sang his anti-war song Too Many Puppies.

Fenriz describes Pre-Historic Metal as 'a loose term,' stating, 'just figure it's our VIBE, our take on things and it's more a statement that we use old style to create something new.' He emphasizes their identity as metal with 'very loud guitars' and characterizes the music as 'frightfully barbaric but not without finesse.'

Recorded between Berlin and Baltimore, Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! is the experimental rockers' first album to feature vocals, and follows 2022's Comradely Objects. It builds out Horse Lords' core lineup of Owen Gardner, Max Eilbacher, Sam Haberman, and Andrew Bernstein with bass clarinetist Madison Greenstone, trombonist Weston Olencki, and vocalists Nina Guo and Evelyn Saylor.

It started out as an album full of death metal songs with speed and aggression. Then Chris had the brilliant idea to keep half of those death metal songs and add some groovier songs in the vein of the early SIX FEET UNDER material.

Take a visionary duo inspired by hip-hop and renowned for ceding control to their software and performing in total darkness, who have inspired haywire mutations of electronic music that seek to dissolve any remaining boundaries between our emotions and the machines we use to express them. Boil it down to just one musician and an acoustic guitar to reveal the durability of this cryptic, futuristic sound.

I had a huge hernia, and for it to be repaired, I had to endure a 6 inch incision in my groin. This unfortunately was not keyhole surgery. I have a very weak abdominal wall, which at being 57 yrs old this year, is not going to improve. If I continue to perform and shout/scream as I do with Godflesh, then I am at high risk for more hernias, and blowing out my abdominal wall entirely.

Tim Zha is looking for the soul in the machine. While some might hear Auto-Tune as masking a singer's humanity, the London-based artist filters his vocals to highlight technology's inseparability with our notions of self. This is ground well-trodden by Afrofuturist techno pioneers, Atlanta trappers, and PC Music hyperpoppers; for Zha, Auto-Tune represents what he calls the "coincidence of human subjectivity and the networked machine system."

Paradessence draws its title from a portmanteau of "paradoxical" and "essence," coined by author Alex Shakar. Per Visible Cloaks, the word embodies the oppositional-but-coexisting concepts they're trying to explore with the new album. "Instead of creating pieces that function horizontally as environments, we wanted to conceptualize them as living material changing in space, continually in flux," Doran shared in a press statement.

Take the title of The Spiritual Sound as a kind of syllabus, and you'll find a heady list of musical reference points that Agriculture aim to exalt. The jarring intros of black metal songs that make you feel like a portal to Hell has opened inside your headphones. The sound design on later Scott Walker arrangements meant to conjure a Biblical plague. The slow, majestic build of post-rock epics that hold back their climax for maximum transcendence.

The vibe and feel of this new one is almost addictive. We couldn't be happier with how it came out and we can't wait for everyone to hear it! This album takes what we've done on the last couple of records and truly brings it to a new level. The material stays true to our roots, but also goes into some new territory at times, being somewhat ambitious, but taking nods from even our earliest moments.

KAVARI's music sears like a controlled fire, destroying the underbrush to make room for the new. That was literally true of the Glasgow-based producer's 2025 EP Only Pleasure in Flame, a collection of slash-and-burn field recordings that sucked the air right out of your ears. The Scottish sea air has produced a number of maverick electronic musicians- Rustie, SOPHIE, Hudson Mohawke, Proc Fiskal-and in recent years, KAVARI's prolific, sound design-forward work is arguing the case for her induction into the pantheon.

Exodus with Rob Dukes is a whole 'nother beast. "3111" marks the vocalist's return to the fold after last appearing on an album in 2010, and what a return it is. On a song that's about narco killings in Juarez, Dukes gives a sufficiently menacing performance that's startlingly unhinged. The other members of Exodus said Dukes gave "the performance of his life" on the band's upcoming album

"Many found the music offensive, the dancing objectionable, and the popularity of both with young people verging on a mental health crisis." So writes music historian Susan C. Cook about ragtime, the heavily syncopated ancestor of jazz that arose in the late 1800s. Like all things, ragtime's subversiveness faded over time, and, a century later, the works of Scott Joplin and other practitioners had been relegated to carnivals and fairs, their jaunty piano melodies now evoking quaint notions of old-timey fun.

The trek is routed around Napalm Death's festival appearances at Welcome to Rockville (May 7th), Sonic Temple (May 14th), and Maryland Deathfest (May 20th). Headlining dates run from May 8th in Tampa, Florida, through June 14th in Vancouver, with Deadguy supporting select shows from May 11th through May 23th, and Primitive Man opening certain dates between May 21st and June 14th.

Green-House will release new album Hinterlands on March 20. The Los Angeles duo of Olive Ardizoni and Michael Flanagan has left their longtime home of Leaving to sign with Ghostly for the follow-up to A Host for All Kinds of Life. Listen to a new song from the record, "Farewell, Little Island," below, and scroll down for the album art.

I bought the nima CDthe one with the clear lenticular case that could wiggle the cybernetic album art designed by artist Cam de Leonwhen I was 12 years old at a long-forgotten record store in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where I grew up. I was, at that time, on whatever level of consciousness is associated with being in middle school and sitting at the lunch table that hosted Magic: The Gathering gameslevel one, I guess.

"Certainty" is certainly one of the best songs by Black Veil Brides to date. Forget that this is the same band from their 2010 debut album We Stitch These Wounds, because this doesn't sound anything like that, nor is it remotely screamo. Rather, we get high caliber melodic metalcore with some nice alt-rock inflections via the clean singing of vocalist Andy Biersack. He sounds equally strong during the harsh, chuggy parts here, as well.

I've just given a keynote presentation at Lines of Flight: Improvisation, Hope and Refuge, a conference hosted by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. I'd been invited to talk about my performance research with D&aacutelava, a cross-genre project that is influenced by animist, Slavic cosmology and a land-based folk song tradition that has been in my family for generations.