[This article is also available in Spanish. Please scroll down for Spanish text.//Este artículo también está disponible en español. Desplácese hacia abajo para ver el texto en español.] … It’s around this time of year that I take the Uaral albums from the top shelf. It’s hard to listen to this type of music nowadays; such raw and over the top emotion was something I could absorb when Sounds of Pain… (Sonidos de Dolor…) was released in 2005. Now that I’m what could be considered an adult, this extreme and agonic form of folk music, classical music, and doom metal is an overwhelming and beautifu ..read more

Crafting a full-length album can happen in a lot of different ways. Sometimes, it’s just some good songs put in an order that makes sense. At other times, an album is a carefully-layered journey built to evoke specific themes and designed to tell an essential story. Neither approach is necessarily better, but Polish black/folk metal pagans Varmia follow the latter path on their new album Nie nas widzę, out today, and the result is something exceptional. Nie nas widzę renders ancient Baltic spiritual traditions as an elemental suite, breaking a story of nature’s progression into four movements ..read more

It was to one of America’s most famed geologists, William B. Rogers, that we owe the first recorded description of the Kanawha black flint of Virginia. Though brief, his assessment of the chert, summed up with the words “…a most valuable key rock in the greatly thickened deposit of the region” draws a frighteningly accurate parallel to Nechochwen, a West Virginian band who led the indigenous and frontier-themed black metal movement that we see thriving today. In the seven long years since the band released their groundbreaking third record Heart of Akamon, black metal bands who openly bear th ..read more

Viking metal–something I don’t cover very often, but it doesn’t mean I don’t love it all the same. Sweden’s Månegarm have, over the past thirty years, presented an evolving mix of black metal, folk metal, and, of course, viking metal to communicate their love of Swedish history and folk tales, and they’ve been a consistently good band while doing so. Many expect the Viking sound to be, I don’t know, commercialized and oddly happy, but Månegarm communicate their historic tales with a morose air of tragedy, setting traditional folk melodies to a deeper, darker backdrop. We spoke with vocalist E ..read more

I have no qualms admitting that Falls of Rauros‘ previous outing Patterns in Mythology was one of my favorite 2019 albums. It was as vibrant as a black metal record could be while still being considered black metal, and effortlessly captured the beauty of the Atlantic Northeast–more specifically, the band’s scenic coastal hometown of Portland, Maine. We’re premiering a new single “Poverty Hymn” below, a track that made me more sure than ever that their upcoming album Key to a Vanishing Future will be one of my favorite releases of this year too. … Key To A Vanishing Future by Falls of Rauros ..read more

Epigone commands respect. On their newest album, Wilderun play with a court marshall’s authority, astute intentionality, and a concretely-defined vision, crafting an album that is hyperbolic in sound and mighty enough to earn hyperbolic praise. There’s also an “Everything In Its Right Place” interpretation, which is vaster than what’s to be expected from a Radiohead cover. Yet it illustrates Wilderun’s wide-reaching cartography on Epigone. The record is a world to live in, a place to breathe in and explore. It has the same appeal as getting wrapped up in a book and being unable to set it down ..read more

The last time we spoke with Dornenreich, the possibility of a new album was there, but far in the future. Now, two and half years later, that future possibility becomes an expressionistic reality. The long-running project of Austrian multi-instrumentalist Eviga, the once-black metal Dornenreich has gone through many twists and turns throughout its library of a discography. Drawing from the “dark metal” minimalism found on Durch den Traum and Hexenwind and the band’s more recent, but distant neofolk excursions like on In Luft geritzt and their most recent album, 2014’s Freiheit, upcoming album ..read more

It’s difficult to categorize Colorado’s The Flight of Sleipnir — some go as far as to describe them as “stoner metal,” which is… far off — but the overarching sentiment remains the same: this band are masters of their own singular craft. Blending elements of black metal, neofolk, and doom metal with weapons-grade atmospherics, The Flight of Sleipnir avoids the usual trappings of “folky and/or doomed black metal” just as much as they avoid the pitfalls of their peers’ stoner-and-post-rock-isms. To this band, it isn’t about sounding like a specific genre, rather it’s the outcome, and the five y ..read more