Tomorrow’s Rain is an interesting beast. The Israeli six-piece treads between doom and gothic metal, and made a splash with their debut Hollow in part because of the sheer number of guest musicians who participated in the album. Now, four years later, the band returns with their sophomore full-length, Ovdan (“Loss”), an album with a deeply personal backstory. This was recorded after vocalist and founding member Yishai Swartz suffered a heart attack severe enough to warrant open heart surgery. The result is a noticeable shift in sound for Tomorrow’s Rain, but one still grounded in the band’s fo ..read more

I’ve been listening to My Dying Bride’s entire discography, including this new one, nonstop for a good two weeks straight. It’s begun to affect my daily life. A couple nights ago, after putting the Cherdlet to bed, my wife asked me what I’d like to do with the rest of our evening and without thinking I said, “Drink deep of your neck chalice.” While she was still quietly processing this, I complimented her on the whiteness of her breasts. She decided she wanted to watch “one of her shows” instead and bid me good night. I spent the next hour impulse-shopping online for candelabras and a fainting ..read more

The life of the unpaid, overworked metal reviewer is not an easy one. The reviewing collective at AMG lurches from one new release to the next, errors and n00bs strewn in our wake. But what if, once in a while, the collective paused to take stock and consider the discography of those bands that shaped many a taste? What if multiple aspects of the AMG collective personality shared with the slavering masses their personal rankings of that discography, and what if the rest of the personality used a Google sheet some kind of dark magic to produce an official guide to, and an all-around definitive ..read more

Sludge is a genre naturally able to bridge and wholly fill the gap between a rage that stretches towards hardcore, and a more pensive and somber emotionality more at home in doom, or post-metal. Therefore, when faced with Subterraen’s label of “Atmospheric Post-Sludge,” I knew this shapeshifting propensity would be amplified, particularly in the latter direction. Unfamiliar with the group before now, they instantly won me over ideologically with their ongoing theme that began with debut Rotten Human Kingdom. This theme, examination of the human condition from the perspective of our destruction ..read more

There are several things in life that I will always turn to when I need something comfortable and reliable. Fair to Midland, The Good Place, scrambled eggs with toast and jam, and my favorite black denim jacket are but a smattering of those things which I consistently return to that make me feel safe and happy. Nothing about them needs to change even if they aren’t perfect; they will always click for me. For some, stoner doom is that comfort item, that thing that gets all the love just for being what it is. I imagine this is partly why the style largely hasn’t needed to evolve very much throug ..read more

If I had a dollar for every time I blindly picked some doom-tinged death metal from the Promo Wheel of Suffering and walked away with almost straight Incantation worship, I’d have…(math sounds)…OK, I’d only have enough for a donut and coffee from the Speedway up the street, but that’s a lot when you rarely review death metal. With the arrival of The Illusion of Time1 by New York’s Funeral Leech, I now have enough to play a scratch-off ticket while I drink my coffee. I’m not complaining. Incantation are my personal favorite OSDM outfit, and it’s probably no coincidence that I can detect whiffs ..read more

Back in 2022, a tongue-in-cheek project by members of Reverend Bizarre and Electric Wizard was introduced to the world. Going by the name Friends of Hell (a not-so-subtle call out to Witchfinder General’s sophomore opus), they played classic 80s doom in the vein of Pentagram, Saint Vitus, and of course, Witchfinder General. It was a loving homage to a specific era and sound and the somewhat goofy, overblown delivery was balanced out by slick riffs and the one-of-a-kind vocals of Albert Witchfinder (Reverend Bizarre). It was entertaining but it wasn’t a must-hear kind of article. 2024 sees Frie ..read more

My experience in the doomier side of death metal is skewed. While many of the olde drank deep of the greats in the canon of Incantation, Asphyx, or diSEMBOWELMENT, my first experiences in the low and slow were Saturnus, Swallow the Sun, and Evoken’s more contemporary fare.1 One classic album that did speak to me in hushed whispers through its grimy and thickly menacing approach to death metal was Winter’s sole 1990 LP Into Darkness. A similar harbinger of the sound like many of the above, it relied more on death metal than doom, utilizing the latter only to bring out the sickness with each mov ..read more

Like so many things doomy, Hamferð doesn’t move quickly. Back in ’18,1 these Faroese doomsters—fronted by my golden-voiced arch-nemesis and all around begrudging ‘friend o’ the blog’ Jón Aldará—released their second album Támsins likam. The album was my Record o’ the Month and would go on to be my Record o’ the Year because it was an incredible accomplishment of dour and sinister, but simultaneously fragile, funeral doom. But Evst—the band’s debut full-length2—was released in 2013, so already then, Támsins likam was 5 years in the making. At an Orphaned Land-esque speed, Hamferð has plodded b ..read more

On the advent of the release of Nightmare Utopia, Hecatoncheir posted a series of poetry and stories attached to each of the forthcoming songs on social media. The journey begins by following a dark silhouette, each installment describes surreal and dreamlike landscapes, strange characters, and objects—with monolithic importance attached in the strange way that dreams do. In the latter tracks, ever-vigilant eyes watch from the stars and assume a more horrific face as they emerge from the darkness as the cruel pelagic and empyrean deities and monsters among Lovecraft’s multitudes. Hecatoncheir ..read more