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after "Handed to Execution" Phantom returns from the grave with this faster, heavier, louder, bloodier... EP, TRANSYLVANIAN NIGHTMARE

The debut album by the death-speed ragers PHANTOM.
9 tracks of old school steel. fast, loud and lethal.

ukrainian black metal, featuring members of Silvern and White Ward

Silvern, a black metal band from Ukraine, is set to release their debut album, "Stardust Sermons". Driven by a shared passion for black metal, Silvern decided to self-record and mix the album to achieve a raw and gritty sound. The journey to completing "Stardust Sermons" was challenging, with multiple postponements due to the full-scale aggression from Russia. The band released their first single, "Lorn", on February 22, 2022, just two days before the war began, leading to a hiatus. They made a comeback on June 1, 2023, with their second single, "Still Higher Than Saviour's Star". Following this, Silvern partnered with Vendetta Records to release their debut album. "Stardust Sermons" is a conceptual journey that follows a faceless character from the opening track "Lorn" to the closing track "Still Higher Than Saviour's Star." The album explores how the character's perception of reality shifts through various encounters and challenges. It highlights the duality of human belief, showing that not everything black is truly black, and not everything white is truly white. The album delves into humanity's need for belief and the unknown mysteries of life, capturing interactions with people, nature, religion, science, and the cosmos.

On Crepuscular Dirge For The Blessed Ones, sole mastermind Gabriele Garmaglia continues the Cosmic Putrefaction narrative begun on previous album The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers, wherein the only survivor from an apocalyptic annihilation of a dying planet walks towards its withered horizons. In this next chapter, this character ultimately finds an even more sorrowful truth at the end of his journey, one that shows the empyrean fall of man throughout the metaphysical world and the gods which inhabit it. 
On Crepuscular Dirge For The Blessed Ones, Gramaglia establishes even more his own vision of death metal, this time enriching his multifaceted sound with widened atmospheres and a patina of omnipresent melancholy suggested by distant arpeggios, e-bow guitars and sometimes even synths organically blended with the relentless, ferocious riffs always present in this new effort. To cap off this layered effort, Gramaglia this time relied on drummer Giulio Galati (Nero di Marte, Hideous Divinity) to deliver an extremely powerful and dynamic performance behind the kit. 
Cosmic Putrefaction was formed in 2018 as the death metal sonic incarnation of multi-instrumentalist Gramaglia (also behind The Clearing Path and part of Turris Eburnea and Vertebra Atlantis), who summoned the aforementioned musical entity to re-arrange and complete the unreleased album of his first band Oaken/Throne, which was begun in 2012 but left uncompleted due to the combo disbanding. This became 2019’s At The Threshold Of The Greatest Chasm, which absorbed six-and-a-half tracks taken from the aforementioned unreleased Oaken/Throne album. He later refined his formula through second album The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers, which expanded the death metal roots and multifaceted range of influences Gramaglia has developed throughout the years.

For years one of Finnish black metal's best-kept secrets, in recent times have FORGJORD sprung to prominence among the adventurous as practitioners of a strangely alluring sort of obsidian. Although existing since the mid '90s and patiently parceling out their recordings in an almost-clandestine manner, the upswing in activity began with FORGJORD's third album (and first with WEREWOLF), Uhripuu, in 2017 and was followed by the equally challenging Ilmestykset in 2019, the comparatively more rockin' Laulu kuolemasta a year later, and the draw-everything together Ruumissaarna Pt. 1 in 2022. Among those four full-lengths, the Finnish trio solidified and strengthened their strident aesthetic - malodorous melodicism, hypnotically rendered through a ripped-raw soundfield, making their strangely hummable ruminations on triumph & tragedy sound all the more alien, each album unified yet unique within that aesthetic - and made it all seem effortless. Finally, it seemed that the name FORGJORD was no longer a "secret."

RUTTOKOSMOS were one of the great "what if?"s of Finnish black metal. The band formed sometime in 2003 and released the five-song Ja minä näin kuoleman demo in 2006 and then the six-song Kärsimys demo a year later. Afterward, nothing was heard from RUTTOKOSMOS ever again. Only one member concurrently played in Divina Inferis, and the other two members either disappeared or played pseudonymously in other bands. In 2021, WEREWOLF compiled both demos onto one massive compilation, (re)introducing RUTTOKOSMOS to a newer generation starved for authentic mysticism in black metal, with the cryptic suggestion that a debut album may someday or decade arrive.