“AMG’s Unsigned Band Rodeö” is a time-honored tradition to showcase the most underground of the underground—the unsigned and unpromoted. This collective review treatment continues to exist to unite our writers in boot or bolster of the bands who remind us that, for better or worse, the metal underground exists as an important part of the global metal scene. The Rodeö rides on.” Does Poland evoke the heated and stinging breeze of the open desert to a lost mind? No? Sunnata likes to think otherwise, or at least it’s their life’s mission to expand on the ideas of exotic scales, eerie harmonizatio ..read more

From the seemingly boundless nightmare realm that is the melting pot of extreme, dissonant black and blackened death metal, Occulta Veritas arises. The creation of Daniele Vergine, guitarist of Noise Trail Immersion, it veers off on its own experimental path with that project as a starting point. Blending post, atmospheric, and the most chaotically inaccessible black metal into an unusual, confrontational whole, Irreducible Fear of the Sublime presents its own challenge. The world the album takes its listener into is one that—perhaps typically, but very appropriately—purports to delve deep int ..read more

The legendary Huck n Roll having sadly departed these pages, it falls to me to pick up the Mountaineer reviewing baton, as the Oakland, California sextet stick to their two-yearly release cycle, returning with Dawn and All That Follows. Across his three reviews (3.5-3.0-3.5), Mountaineer clearly struck a chord with olde man Huck, their brand of reflective, shoegaze-y post-metal / -doom conjuring atmospheres and moods that tickled his fancies. The ‘low’ point in the Californians’ AMG journey being the 3.0/5.01awarded to 2020’s Bloodletting. Having failed, if I may be so bold, to diagnose exactl ..read more

Pleroma is a kaleidoscope of colors and emotions, composed like an odyssey. It showers listeners with haunting arpeggios, winding riffs, and chamber instruments, adorned with a crown of myriad vocal styles both harsh and soothing, male and female – a far-reaching and royally ambitious sum and completion of its divine components. For an act that saturates its assault with all the decadence and bombast of a metal opera, Orgone is deeply entrenched in subtlety and restraint. Songwriting takes front and center, and nary a moment is wasted. It’s an exclamatory manifesto and toppling breeze of compl ..read more

“I am just going outside and may be some time.” These were Lawrence Oates’ last words as he walked into the wild of Antarctica, crippled by frostbite and looking, purportedly, to alleviate his doomed team of the burden of his body. I May Be Some Time, the sophomore album from U.K. trio Million Moons tells the tale of the Terra Nova polar expedition through synth-heavy instrumental post-metal. Relating a story in the absence of lyrics brings with it its own difficulties, but the band had success before; 2022’s A Gap In The Clouds dealt with the chronic progression of dementia, and similarly was ..read more

I approach Julie Christmas from the stepping stone of post-metal. I discovered her through Battle of Mice’s A Day of Nights and her 2016 collaboration with Cult of Luna, not through Made out of Babies or her solo work. Her vocals floored me, oozing emotion and fitting impeccably with the rhythmic styles of both bands. Her proximity to hardcore and noise exposed me to new musical avenues, even as she raised the bar for post-metal. Appearing 14 years after her solo debut The Bad Wife, Ridiculous and Full of Blood was one of my most anticipated releases of 2024. While it may not be the greatest a ..read more

The four seasons are one of the most common motifs in art and music since time immemorial, besides life, love, and death. The annual experience of days stretching and shrinking, heat swelling and dissipating, and trees metamorphosizing are ubiquitous outside of equatorial regions. Alcest’s body of work may not directly reference the seasons often, yet its discography frequently seem to traverse the course of the year. Debut Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde evoked the awakening world of early spring, as the cold withdraws and life creeps back in. Écalles des Lune, on the other hand, was a deep winter ..read more

Well, goodness. It’s been a while since I last sat my ass down to write a review.1 Now, there were Important Reasons for some of this (and other, less AMG-related, reasons for the rest). Unlike me, Aaron Turner is not someone you could accuse of having a shabby work ethic. Best known as the frontman of post-metal legends Isis, Turner has numerous current and past bands, as well as having founded Hydra Head Records and more. He has fronted atmospheric sludge trio Sumac for a decade now and, somewhat remarkably, the band’s line-up has stayed consistent for that period too, with Turner joined by ..read more

When your introduction to a band is a live performance, it can sometimes be misleading regarding their studio sound. Such was my experience with Stasis, the second album from Belgian up-and-comers Hippotraktor. Funky name aside, Hippotraktor’s already bowled me over twice in live settings on two different festivals. What stuck the most from those shows, aside from the fact that they were fucking excellent, was the band’s progressive sludge side, an aggressive ripping and tearing shark to Mastodon’s bigger and blunter white whale. What escaped from my impressions, but became abundantly clear as ..read more

Huntsmen’s 2018 debut American Scrap came out of nowhere. The dark and emotional blend of progressive sludge and Americana knocked me flat and strode right into my year-end list. Evidently, the band wasn’t one to rest on its laurels, because just two years later, Huntsmen demonstrated just how much the Chicagoans had challenged themselves by releasing the bombastic, bloated, bore-a-thon Mandala of Fear. This one was mentioned in my year-end list as well, but as the biggest disappointment. So I approached The Dry Land with a healthy amount of trepidation. Will Huntsmen rise from the ashes like ..read more