Treble's 30 Best Metal Albums of 2022

Recorded/Mixed/Produced by Cloud Rat at The Overlook basement. Mastered by Harris Newman at Grey Market Mastering - greymarketmastering.com Cover art by Jacob van Loon - jacobvanloon.com New CR logo and Threshold title design by Brian Uhl - gentle-mercies.com CTTV

“Our main lyrical concern is just writing about death—not necessarily dying or anything being killed, but shit about dead stuff.” That’s what Undeath guitarist and main lyricist Kyle Beam tells Apple Music when asked about the theme of the band’s second album, *It’s Time…To Rise From the Grave*. Building on the breakout success of their 2020 debut, *Lesions of a Different Kind*, the Rochester, New York-based death metal crew honed their songwriting into a tighter and even more effective verse-chorus-verse format this time out. “We just wanted to take what we had before, make it a bit more concise, a bit more focused, to make sure the songs really stand on their own,” Beam says. The album even has a loose storyline that reads like *Army of Darkness* meets *The Terminator*. “It’s basically about dudes in hell equipping undead soldiers with sick guns,” he offers. Below, he discusses each track. **“Fiend for Corpses”** “We get a lot of comparisons to Cannibal Corpse just because we love them so much. I’d say this is the most Corpse-esque song on the record, so it had to be brutal lyrically. It’s a song about digging up bodies in the cemetery and banging them and eating them. It’s the first track on the record, so we just wanted to set the tone.” **“Defiled Again”** “When you first read the title, it sounds way more brutal than the song actually is. You’re kinda like, ‘Oh, no. Is this a sexual assault song or something?’ I didn’t mean for it to sound like that—I just wanted it to be brutal. The lyrics are just about reading a spooky book in a cemetery. It’s not the main character’s first time reading this book, and every time he reads it, it’s like his mind gets melted by the eldritch truth.” **“Rise From the Grave”** “This one is like the modus operandi of Undeath lyrics. It’s just skeletons with bronze swords and shields and bows and arrows, and they’re fucking clambering over parapets to get your village. It’s the title track, basically.” **“Necrobionics”** “This song gets into the nitty gritty of how the army of the dead is outfitted and equipped in the next track, ‘Enhancing the Dead.’ It was inspired by this game Quake 4, where your character is human in the first part. In the second part, he gets captured by alien forces, and they cut off his arms and legs and attach sick robot arms and legs so you can reload faster and run faster—all kinds of shit. But you don’t even have to be alive for it to work.” **“Enhancing the Dead”** “This one is sort of the overarching story of this conflict. The first lyrics are, ‘Cities of life, now cities of dead, bolstering the undead army,’ because the more people fall, the bigger the army gets—and eventually the whole planet is done. There’s nothing left, so they take off, onto the next planet. When they peace out, the lyric is like, ‘Take this foot beyond this earthly realm,’ or some shit like that.” **“The Funeral Within”** “This one is about going crazy. It’s about the death of oneself on the inside because of all the terrible things you’ve done.” **“Head Splattered in Seven Ways”** “This is about an interrogation. It was really inspired by Cannibal Corpse, too, because they have a track on *Kill* called ‘Five Nails Through the Neck.’ It’s the fifth song on that record, and a couple parts of the song are in five. Ever since I was a kid, I just thought that was the coolest thing. It’s kind of nerdy but brutal at the same time. So, ‘Head Splattered in Seven Ways’ has got seven syllables in the title, the whole song is in seven, and it’s the seventh track on the record.” **“Human Chandelier”** “If Corpse did this one, I like to think it would be about how this guy’s actually going out and killing people, taking their bones, and making them into a chandelier. But it’s actually a tamer track for us, lyrically and musically. Maybe not intensity-wise, but harmony-wise. It’s less grammatically dense and less atonal. It’s about a guy who lives alone in this dark-as-fuck mansion like *Beauty and the Beast*, and he goes to the local cemetery to pick out bones for the human chandelier he’s building. He’s not malicious—he’s just a weirdo.” **“Bone Wrought”** “Most of the riffs on this song are from our bass player, Tommy \[Wall\]. I gave him some direction for the lyrics, but he wrote those as well. I think they’re some of the best lyrics on the record. It talks more about how the army of the dead are forging the weapons they use.” **“Trampled Headstones”** “The lyrics to this one are kind of goofy. It’s about a cemetery cult who eat flesh, but they also eat gravestones. They can’t get all their nutrients just from eating each other, so they eat rock as well. They take bites right out of the headstones.”

When working on material for their eighth album, the members of Canadian noise-rock quadrangle KEN mode ended up writing twice as much as they intended. This creative outpouring left vocalist/guitarist Jesse Matthewson, his brother and drummer Shane, bassist Skot Hamilton, and saxophonist/pianist Kathryn Kerr with a decision to make. “From a writing and story standpoint, we wanted it to all be one big piece,” Jesse tells Apple Music. “But for a band of our size and style, a big double record is a really bad idea. But the material is really good, so we figured we could divide it into two distinct stories that build off of each other.” As a result, *NULL* is the first half of a collection that will be completed by a second album—aptly titled *VOID*—at some point in the future. Below, Jesse discusses each track on *NULL*. **“A Love Letter”** “This was one of the first songs I started writing while I was teaching myself how to do preproduction on a digital audio workstation, so I probably rewrote it six times. When it came time to get the saxophone going, I wanted Kathryn to make a sound like a dying elk, and that’s the sound that you hear in the verses. When we were writing the chorus parts, she whipped out this mildly obscure jazz lead that felt part Miles Davis, part war horn. It sounded so special to me that it really set the stage for how I wanted to utilize saxophone on all our writing.” **“Throw Your Phone in the River”** “I wrote this shortly after George Floyd and the subsequent internet eruption. Obviously, it was a horrible act, but I couldn’t deal with how awful everyone was being to each other during the fallout. I get it—we were all in lockdown and people were freaking out and frantic, but it was fucked up. This song is largely about my inability to help those around me cope with their own mental health problems, because I just couldn’t keep my shit together. I mean, it’s no secret that social media is destroying the fabric of society, and I feel like more people would be better off if they pitched their smartphone in the river. At the same time, we need them for almost everything these days.” **“The Tie”** “I’ve been messing around with synthesizers since 2019, but during lockdown, I really got to experiment a little bit more. Skot and I wrote the bones of this one together, just messing around on my synths, creating a loop and getting together with Kathryn to throw some saxophone on top of it. The lyrics are entirely Skot’s because since he joined, I’ve been attempting to get him to contribute lyrically to the band because he’s a very good writer. You’d have to ask him about the motivation behind it, but I feel like it’s him facing his artistic ego head-on.” **“But They Respect My Tactics”** “This will make me sound like an old man, but you know how the kids say, ‘This one slaps’? I feel like it gets misused a lot, but for me, the riffs on this one slap. Lyrically speaking, it’s very much a commentary on social media and marketing in and of itself, with a mild disappointment in the world. It’s very much an existential circling-the-drain situation where I don’t want to become someone who clings for dear life onto a former version of myself. I get why that happens, but it just seems sad to me.” **“Not My Fault”** “One of the very first lines in the song is about dealing with an unnerving tension in the air. You just want to help get people through it, but it’s all for naught and you have the weight of that crushing you every day. This one was another of the early tracks that I wrote when I was starting to feel comfortable writing all by myself again. When I came up with the first riff in this song, I was just really happy with how catchy it was. Which I know sounds silly when it’s something you wrote yourself, but that’s usually a good sign that you’re onto something.” **“Lost Grip”** “This is another one that I wrote with Skot, and it’s very much a humans-abusing-the-planet song. It’s also a commentary on Western culture and everyone’s obsession with wealth and power and megalomania. It’s very much coming from the perspective of, ‘We deserve this pandemic. We had it coming.’ I can’t help but feel that there’s a lot of people on this earth that, no matter how they spin it, don’t mean well for everyone at all. They’re just trying to sell everyone their agenda. It’s also one of my favorite songs we’ve ever written.” **“The Desperate Search for an Enemy”** “I wrote the bassline for this on a synth and all the drum parts in MIDI without actually playing it, so Shane had to figure out how the hell he was going to apply that to an actual drum kit. Lyrically, it very much goes back to ‘Throw Your Phone in the River,’ about everyone feeling more virtuous than the other side that they’re raging against—and their obsession with making an enemy out of anyone who doesn’t agree with the way they think. I hate to come across as some bullshit centrist, but that’s where most of the world actually is, and I’m getting so tired of watching everyone fight all the time.” **“Unresponsive”** “After I came up with that one riff that’s like total Swans/Black Flag worship, I tried to create dynamics utilizing percussion and my voice alone. My brother has said he feels this is the strongest vocal performance I’ve ever had on any of our records, so I’m happy that he feels that way. Lyrically, it’s about feeling, like, this rise in tension just never gives. I was writing it when there was a storm rolling in that just never seemed like it was going to reach its crescendo. It felt like a metaphor for everything that was going on in the world.”

NULL, the band’s brand-new aural abrasion, may be the group’s quintessential statement of mental collapse and despair made sonic, a direct psychological reaction to the collective experience of the last two and a half years. Drawing from not only the desperate noise and industrial sonics of the 80’s and 90’s ala Swans, Einsturzende Neubauten, or even a Nine Inch Nails, the band has mixed in a decidedly more desperate tone to their already pointed metal/hardcore influenced “extreme noise rock” (see Melvins, Today Is The Day meets Converge and Botch), that has become their signature. Featuring 8 new tracks recorded and produced throughout the fall and winter of 2021 by Andrew Schneider, mastered by Carl Saff, with artwork and layouts by the band's longtime collaborator Randy Ortiz. Recorded October 2021 @ Private Ear Recording in Winnipeg, MB, Canada by Andrew Schneider, cello on 'Unresponsive' by Natanielle Felicitas. Guilty Parties: Jesse Matthewson, Shane Matthewson, Scott Hamilton, Kathryn Kerr.

Led by guitarist/vocalist Andrew Lee, RIPPED TO SHREDS emerge from the West Coast underground with their ferocious new album, 劇變 (Jubian). The death metal trailblazers unleash their most fully realized and visceral work yet. Recorded and mixed by Lee in his home studio and mastered by Damian Herring at Subterranean Watchtower, 劇變 (Jubian) proves to be RIPPED TO SHREDS at their most focused and refined. The album bursts wide open with “Violent Compulsion for Conquest,” an elegantly dark, new kind of chainsaw sound teeming with acidic vocals gnashing out lyrics inspired by the Mukden Incident. From its lightning-flash solos to those immensely killer echoing “Ough!”s, this absolute scather, according to Lee, was born to lead. Elsewhere, longtime RIPPED TO SHREDS fans will find the latest chapter of the ongoing ‘Sun Moon Holy Cult’ saga to be its most thrilling episode thus far. One of the album’s most impressive and catchiest tracks,“漢奸 (Racetraitor),” represents that “straight-up melodeath” banger Lee says he’s always wanted to produce while also giving vent to his experience as a minority in America. The charring “Reek of Burning Freedom,” Lee says, is “an anti-war song” that incites to remind its discerning listers of the the United States’ “indiscriminate bombing” campaign waged on North Korea during the Korean War. Chainsaw guitars, relentless drumming, dizzying solos and disgusting growling throughout - 劇變 (Jubian) is undeniably ripping death metal. All of the intensity of power coursing through 劇變 (Jubian) is somehow perfectly captured and rendered by Chinese artist Guang Yang, who also painted the cover of the last RIPPED TO SHREDS album. The statue on the cover is Mazu, the Taiwanese sea goddess. The setting of the painting was inspired by several of the local temples Lee has visited in Taiwan. “I felt like it was important to have something standing in for Chinese people," Lee says."The cultural context and impact of RIPPED TO SHREDS as a Taiwanese-American band cannot be understated; Lee declares that a driving force behind RIPPED TO SHREDS has been “to increase the visibility of ABCs [American-born Chinese] in extreme metal by being very blatantly Chinese.” It’s not about taking over. With 劇變 (Jubian), which translates to ‘upheaval,’ RIPPED TO SHREDS make their intentions clear.

For their second album, Devil Master fashioned a mirror of their 2019 debut, *Satan Spits on Children of Light*. “Everything from the title to the instrumental in the middle of the album is a mirrored opposite,” guitarist and primary songwriter Darkest Prince of All Rebellion tells Apple Music. With a reconfigured lineup that sees new drummer and keyboardist Festering Terror in Deepest Catacomb (aka Chris Ulsh, formerly of Power Trip) joining the band while vocalist Disembody Through Unparalleled Pleasure takes on bass duties, Devil Master set out to create a more immersive experience with their signature blend of black metal, goth, and Japanese hardcore influences. In keeping with the band’s ritual magic practices, they finished recording *Ecstasies of Never Ending Night* on Walpurgis Night. “The way the release date worked out, the album comes out almost exactly a year later,” Darkest Prince points out. “The magician doesn’t believe in coincidences.” Below, he discusses some key tracks. **“Ecstasies…”** “Because we lost our touring keyboard player, this album is more guitar-oriented than the last one. We wanted to establish that with the opening track and this beautiful guitar melody.” **“Enamoured in the Throes of Death”** “This was written by our bassist and vocalist Disembody Through Unparalleled Pleasure, and it’s one of my favorite songs on the album. It fits the mirror pattern because he wrote the song after the instrumental that opens the last album, ‘Nightmares in the Human Collapse,’ and this is the only song he wrote for this album, just like that was the only song he wrote on that album.” **“Golgotha’s Cruel Song”** “Golgotha is where Christ was crucified, and the name means ‘place of skulls.’ I just imagine the skulls crying out for a crucifixion. It’s an anti-Christian song in the sense that we feel Christianity is the real death cult.” **“The Vigour of Evil”** “This is a song about fucking. I think we should leave it at that.” **“Abyss in Vision”** “This is the first song on side two of the vinyl, and just like the first track on side two of the last album, it’s a death-rock song.” **“Acid Black Mass”** “I wrote and demoed this song and the next one on K2 spice. Now that it’s illegal, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone try it. It’s killed more people than anything at this point. But I think this is a crazy-sounding song, and that’s why.” **“Funerary Gyre of Dreams & Madness”** “I got the word ‘gyre’ from the opening line of ‘The Second Coming’ by W. B. Yeats, and I like it because it means ‘vortex.’ We thought it would be funny to give the most elaborate black-metal title to the most punk song on the album.” **“Never Ending Night”** “We wanted the last track to be a goth dance song that you never want to end, like Trisomie 21’s ‘The Last Song.’ I also took inspiration from Selda Bağcan and Atabay Cargulyyew. Along with ‘Enamoured,’ it’s my favorite on the album.”

‘HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE is a sonic exploration of the ways that subjects under late capitalism are constrained and set in motion via the various structures that uphold stratification and oppression in urban contexts. It is inspired by brutalist, postmodern and utilitarian architectural structures that are found throughout post-industrial cities, hauntological in nature, being designed to provide for the populace through affordable housing but ultimately cost-cutting exercises and unfit for purpose. The term hostile architecture refers to design elements in social spaces that deter the public from using the object for means unintended by the designer, e.g. anti-homeless spikes, which the album presents as emblematic of a foundational contempt for the poor and working class, an exemplification of a status quo fortified in concrete. The album invites the listener to explore the dissonance of these contradictions in their own circumstances and perhaps consider possibilities for a world beyond what Mark Fisher called “Capitalist Realism.”’ Tragic Heroin Video: youtu.be/XBNY-l3NT9s

Body Prophecy Releasing on LP / CD / DIGITAL July 29th 2022 1. A History of Drowning 2. Violent Mechanix 3. Floating in Nothing 4. Incubate 5. Hermetix 6. Wolverine Dreams 7. Body World 8. Sold Me Sad 9. Last Curse 10. Dowsing 11. Incubate (Justin K. Broadrick Remix) With the release of Black Magnet’s debut album ‘Hallucination Scene’ in 2020 a new Industrial Metal power emerged from the unlikely landscape of Oklahoma City. After anxiously waiting out the pandemic Black Magnet returned to the road in late 2021 and now drop ‘Body Prophecy’ the second full length burst of machine driven mayhem and electronic deviance. On ‘Body Prophecy’ mastermind James Hammontree welds the frenetic vitality of post-punk and metal energy with driving synthetic club beats, factory force physicality and alluringly stark melodic pulses. Tracks like ‘Floating in Nothing’ and ‘Violent Mechanix’ feature both intensely catchy hooks and hammering brutal noise. ‘Sold Me Sad’ is a quietly deranged lullaby that takes an atmospheric turn. The throbbing drug-addled lurch of the Manson / Reznor-esque ‘Incubate’ is, at the end of the album, treated to a completely re-imagined and extended club style remix by scene legend Justin K. Broadrick (Godflesh, Zonal, etc). For all its harsher, scraping atmospheres and pummeling aggression ‘Body Prophecy’ always remains an eminently tight, memorable album molded for the stage and constructed to keep bodies in motion and listeners transfixed.

When Cave In released their 2019 album, *Final Transmission*, many thought it might be just that. The band’s beloved friend and bassist, Caleb Scofield, had passed suddenly during the recording’s early stages, and it seemed—understandably—that heartbreak might prevent them from carrying on. Instead, vocalist/guitarist Steve Brodsky, drummer J.R. Conners, and guitarist/vocalist Adam McGrath enlisted their old friend and Converge/Old Man Gloom/Doomriders member Nate Newton to help them play benefit shows for Scofield’s family. In doing so, they breathed new life into Cave In and soon wrote an album that combines the band’s killer metallic hardcore and breathtaking space-rock eras with new and exciting musical forays. The result is *Heavy Pendulum*, Cave In’s first album recorded by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou since their 1998 classic, *Until Your Heart Stops*. Below, Brodsky discusses each track. **“New Reality”** “A song about the new reality of Cave In without Caleb on this earthly plane. The verse riff was something he wrote years ago during the *White Silence* days. I always remembered it, and ‘New Reality’ seemed like a good opportunity to give it a home. There’s mention of the Old Man of the Mountain, the face of New Hampshire, \[where Caleb is from\]. Even after its collapse, it’s still part of the state imagery. I thought this was a beautiful way to illustrate how we keep Caleb in our memory.” **“Blood Spiller”** “We’re all fans of Nate‘s band Channel from his pre-Converge days. This one goes there musically—channeling Channel with a member of the band. Lyrically, this relates to the heated political nature of 2020, but it’s not as direct as, for instance, the song ‘Searchers of Hell.’ This song is also a call to action against anyone in your life who throws around their weight in a way that’s disruptive or destructive to your well-being—basically, bullies and assholes who need to be confronted on their bullshit.” **“Floating Skulls”** “Musically, this one had a pretty wild trajectory. It was originally in a different key, different tuning, different time signature, with wildly different lyrics. It took several trial runs before we got into Deep Purple’s *Burn* territory and it finally started to click. Lyrically, this is probably one of the more lighthearted songs on the record. I had a whole concept for a music video using helium balloons printed with skulls attached to headless mannequins...could be a cool stage prop, actually.” **“Heavy Pendulum”** “This is the first song that materialized as a full band demo when writing the album. We demoed it remotely at a time during lockdown when people still didn’t feel comfortable getting together in a room. If AC/DC had jumped on the ’90s grunge bandwagon, they may have pulled this one out of the ether before we got it. Kurt thinks it sounds kinda like ‘Fever Dog,’ which is fine with me because who doesn’t like *Almost Famous*?” **“Pendulambient”** “J.R. took to the song ‘Heavy Pendulum’ so much, he insisted that we make it the title of the record. This Interlude takes the five dominant notes from that song and spins them into a kaleidoscopic foundation created by J.R. in his German synth lab man cave. Most of the overdubs are from the original remote demo recording, either flipped backwards or made into some audio mutation. I think it’s a nice return to the vibe of having segues between songs like we did on the *Until Your Heart Stops* album.” **“Careless Offering”** “I wrote this on an acoustic guitar, which I guess officially makes it a protest song. During the George Floyd protests, I was seeing people with significant reach on social media use these platforms to encourage excess violence, and I felt this was the last thing we needed. Their words were like careless offerings to an already fucked-up situation, just being thrown like raw meat to people for the sole purpose of creating destruction. On a lighter note, one of the bands that Cave In fully embraced as an influence on this album is Into Another, and here it really shows in the whole spacey midsection of the song—that’s totally us worshiping the *Ignaurus* album.” **“Blinded by a Blaze”** “Out of the five or six songs from my initial burst of writing, ‘Blinded by a Blaze’ was the one that got everyone in the band equally hyped. Later on, Nate wrote the heavy, chugging bridge part and Adam came up with the artificial harmonic guitar line that sounds kind of like the music you might hear coming from an ice cream truck on Mars. In just eight lines, I did my best to capture a picture of driving along the Pacific Coast Highway at golden hour several years ago, and what it felt like to share that moment with someone I was in love with at the time.” **“Amaranthine”** “One night at rehearsal, Nate turned on his bass amp and the main parts for this song seemed to just fly out of him. At some point, Caleb’s wife, Jen, gifted us a notebook that belonged to Caleb. It contained lyrics, writings, and drawings that she felt could be of some use to us. Lyrics to a song called ‘Amaranthine’ really stood out, and we didn’t recognize them to be associated with any music that Caleb had written. Combining his lyrics with the first bit of music that Nate ever wrote for the band made a really cool concoction.” **“Searchers of Hell”** “The main riff was inspired by a song from the first *Between or Beyond the Black Forest* compilation, which is a bunch of European off-the-grid jazz-fusion shit recorded in the ’70s. Aside from ‘Amaranthine,’ I think this is the only other song conceived entirely in the full-band stage of making demos for the album. Lyrically, I was inspired by some of the coded language being used by people with power in the world of politics addressing others through the media. The lines ‘You’re dropping a bombshell/You wish each other well’ is a specific example of this. I guess the takeaway here is that we should always question what the media is telling us, but also what the media is selling us.” **“Nightmare Eyes”** “Leading up to the summer of 2019, I was, like most Tool fans, anxious for the release of *Fear Inoculum*. I was so excited for a new album that I literally dreamed I was hearing it one night. I rarely dream about music, so when I woke up, the feeling of this really struck me. I grabbed an acoustic guitar and made a quick recording of the song I heard in my dream, transposed to the best of my ability. It took 10,000 days, but I finally combed through every song on every Tool album, trying to find some likeness to my recording from the night before. Thankfully, I came up empty-handed and realized it was fair game. So, thank you, Tool, for gifting me—in serotonin form—the best song you never wrote.” **“Days of Nothing”** “I think Adam was inspired to create this shortly after the Cave In/Old Man Gloom tour in 2020, which ended about a month before the pandemic hit. He came up with a bunch of cool segues for the band to use. When it came to sequencing the record, I felt that we needed a good palate cleanser after the sonic rubble left by the ending of ‘Nightmare Eyes,’ and this did the trick. It’s also the only track on the album recorded entirely outside of God City \[Studios\] and mixed by someone other than Kurt. If I remember correctly, the song title references the fact that our calendars were essentially wiped clean at the height of the pandemic.” **“Waiting for Love”** “The sound at the beginning of this track spawns from one of my favorite effects pedals ever—the DOD Envelope Filter. The use of this pedal dates back to bands that me and J.R. were in even before the formation of Cave In, so hearing it on a Cave In album is a nice little nostalgic trip for us. Maybe if Van Halen had successfully gone grunge in the ’90s, they would’ve done something like this. The song is meant to be comforting for anyone searching for love and coming up short. Remember that you’re not alone, and it might just be a matter of time.” **“Reckoning”** “I believe this to be one of Adam’s finest moments as both a songwriter and a vocalist. He and I have been doing acoustic/electric duo shows for a number of years, and it’s pretty thoughtful of him to construct a song that works especially well in that setting. The way we recorded the lead guitar part was inspired by ‘Torn by the Fox of the Crescent Moon,’ a song from what is easily my favorite Earth album. Overall, the production on this song was necessitated by the fact that J.R. was dealing with an issue with one of his wrists, so we had to make do with a drummer functioning at less than 100 percent. In hindsight, I think it’s pretty unique because of it. Lyrically, I think Adam really hit the nail on the head when it comes to accepting grief after losing someone close to you and doing our best to manage it.” **“Wavering Angel”** “We knew this would be the closing track on the record, so we made no bones about song length or pulling any punches when it came to throwing everything into the pot from all songs previous to it in the sequence. Led Zeppelin has ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ so this one’s our ‘Stairway to Methuen,’ the town in Massachusetts where me, J.R., and Adam grew up. I tried my best to be honest about wading through trenches of heartbreak while reaching for a song to guide me along. Sometimes that song has wings, and if you just hold on tightly enough, you can let yourself fly. I hope that feeling inspires others in a time of need.”

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept. Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut LP. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over 40 minute runtime, God’s Country displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.

SpiritWorld DEATHWESTERN

SUMERLANDS have returned from the astral plane with their hotly anticipated new album, Dreamkiller. The Ultimate Sin inspired haze of the first album has been turbocharged with bigger hooks, Jan Hammer worthy synths, and forays into Badlands gone doom! But although doom crackles at the edges of Dreamkiller, this is metal forged with the melodrama of the Scorpions, the emotional heft of Foreigner, and Dokken with an extra dose of depression. In the driver’s seat is critically acclaimed producer, engineer and guitarist Arthur Rizk, who polished these 8 metallic gems at Philadelphia’s Redwood Studios. Coming off of recent production credits with Kreator, Soulfly, and Show Me The Body, Rizk needs no introduction. His past work behind the boards with Power Trip, Sacred Reich, Ghostemane and many others have blown minds for over a decade, while SUMERLANDS fulfills his dream of melancholic chug. The band’s alchemy is on full display as bassist Brad Raub (Eternal Champion, Leather) smirks behind his P-Bass while drummer Justion DeTore (Innumerable Forms, Dream Unending) stares you dead in the face, swinging. New vocalist Brendan Radigan (Magic Circle, Stone Dagger) sings of lost souls in a world gone mad in his confident Graham Bonnet meets Ray Gillen wail. Rizk and guitarist John Powers keep their “Strats only” policy intact while wheeling in the full Marshall stacks to douse the record in glorious solos (witness the album closing duel of “Death to Mercy”). Galloping lead single “Dreamkiller” is an uptempo tour de force with an instrumental break to make Brian May blush and that festival worthy chorus. Make no mistake, Dreamkiller is a triumph of traditional heavy metal fuel!

There’s a real sense of loss on Brooklyn experimental black metalists Scarcity’s debut album Aveilut, an inescapable presence of the realities of death. Multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-Myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble since Branca’s passing) wrote “Aveilut” while processing the sudden deaths of two people close to him, tracked it while caught in Beijing’s first lockdown of 2020, and finished it while surrounded by the overwhelming plague visuals of New York’s early COVID peak. Back in Brooklyn, vocalist Doug Moore (of Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) soon found himself in the midst of an equally bleak lockdown experience — living next to a funeral home when New York City was America’s COVID epicenter. From conception through development, tangible death surrounded Aveilut. The result of such a profound closeness with death is the grief-stricken Aveilut, which takes its name from the Hebrew word for mourning. 72-note octaves, alternate tunings, psychoacoustic phenomena andmacro-phrases embody the hugeness of loss, the inexplicable space of death’s void that Randall-Myers faced both on a personal and existential scale. Together with Moore’s gripping vocal delivery and stark lyrics, the album takes the form of a hyperobject, an entity with such vastness and reach that it’s difficult for the human mind to comprehend. Consisting of one 45-minute composition, the music is black metal roughly in the vein of Jute Gyte, Krallice, Mare Cognitum, and Ehnahre – with hefty doses of post-Branca microtonal guitar abuse, and a cinematic scope that draws on Randall-Myers’ work with orchestras. Aveilut’s mathematical abstraction and lyrical focus on the greatness of the void breed raw emotion, attempting to represent a catastrophe, the vastness and inevitability of things outside our control; as well as a direct expression of grief, a kind of requiem. Though born of Randall-Myers and Moore’s intense intimacy with absence, Aveilut is an attempt to present a harrowing universal representation of death’s true form.

From the depths of the Adirondack wilderness comes Blackbraid, a solo Native American black metal project as raw and powerful as the mountains from whence it came...

=== ORDER NOW === EU store: metalodyssey.8merch.com US store: metalodyssey.8merch.us DIGIPACK CD (incl. Bandcamp Digital Download and Streaming) • Limited to 200 copies • 6-Panel Digipack with lyrics 12"LP VINYL - Out October 2022 (incl. Bandcamp Digital Download and Streaming) • Ltd 200 • 140gr. black vinyl • 350gr. sleeve, 3mm spine • 2-page insert • Black inner sleeve • Outer plastic sleeve ________________________ Talented Italian singer and multi-instrumentalist, Andrea Bruzzone debuts with the avant-garde metal project BEKOR QILISH and an album, "Throes Of Death From The Dreamed Nihilism," already particularly mature, complex and layered. It is no coincidence that some special guests - recognized masters of the most technical, progressive and experimental extreme metal - have accepted to participate in the recordings: from Colin Marston (KRALLICE, GORGUTS) and Gabriele Gramaglia (COSMIC PUTREFACTION, VERTEBRA ATLANTIS), who contribute with their typical mind-bending guitar solos, to Romain Goulon (SADIST, NECROPHAGIST) and Eugene Ryabchenko (FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE), authors of superlative performances on drums. Short but full of contents and inventiveness, BEKOR QILISH's "Throes Of Death From The Dreamed Nihilism" is a veritable whirlwind of oblique riffs and complex rhythms that often dilute metal violence into ethereal and hypnotic melodies; an album that expertly blends the most bizarre and intellectual extreme metal with cosmic-inspired atmospheric sounds, imagining the eerie alien landscapes depicted in the beautiful cover painting by Strx.