Vinili

Blue vinyl

After delivering the triumphant 2023 affirmation that they are "…still fucking I.C.E.!" via 20-year-awaited second album "Ancient Glacial Resurgence", the inimitable battalion strikes immediately again with another shattering full-length of mystical Black Metal savagery.

The third revelation from IMPERIAL CRYSTALLINE ENTOMBMENT is the latest apocalyptic statement from a legion once seemingly cryogenically frozen in time - advancing their legacy in a hostile whirlwind of compulsive new paeans to the ancient anti-God Råvaskieth.

Limited edition of 280 copies on amber vinyl, incl. gatefold cover and download. Co-release with Brilliant Emperor Records.
One of Australia's longest-running and most respected black metal bands, Pestilential Shadows have been building a towering canon of work since 2003. Whereas many of their native land's extreme metal exports either tend toward the chaotic or too clean, the shadowy collective led by founding vocalist / guitarist Balam consistently create compelling swathes of drama and darkness, all-enveloping emotion and regal-yet-gritty grandeur. Truly, Pestilential Shadows are black metal classicism par excellence.

And while the last handful of their albums the past decade-plus have seen sizable gaps between them, Pestilential Shadows strike while the iron's hot with Wretch. Simply and substantially titled, Wretch follows from last year's Devil's Hammer and continues the band's progression / regression toward uglier, gnarlier expanses. Mind you, it's a lateral development rather than a vertical one - the "form" is still BLACK METAL, and its attendant contents are ruminations on death and the beyond - but the fact that Pestilential Shadows can subtly-to-significantly shift their sonic palette whilst conveying their characteristic melancholy and tragedy speaks to the enduring strength of their songwriting. What's more, the album's production is palpably professional, feeling effervescent and crisp even when running through those uglier, gnarlier expanses. If anything, said recording style of Wretch - mastered by Krvna mainman Krvna Vatra, who played on the aforementioned Devil's Hammer, with mixing done by Balam - gives the record a uniquely ethereal aspect, even when the band have kicked into ultraviolent overdrive. Above all, the eight songs that comprise the 49-minute Wretch prove Pestilential Shadows as masters of pacing, doling out the sublime and the profane with equally windswept aplomb. Of especial note is the solemn procession of "Where Sunlight Goes to Die," which features guest choral vocals from Dis Pater of Midnight Odyssey.

As always, totality is key, and thus has Greallach Art been brought back to provide stark & austere cover artwork for Wretch. On the strength of this album alone, Pestilential Shadows continue to assert their position as a classics-minded black metal vanguard.

Recorded and mixed at NEHTRON STUDIOS from March 28th, 2024 to April 24th, 2024.
Mastered by Patrick W. Engel at TEMPLE OF DISHARMONY in March 2025.

180g Vinyl, 20-page booklet, poster, and a designed download card.
Danish black metal force Afsky return with full-length number four simply entitled "Fællesskab", once again delving deep into the bleak, atmospheric realms that have defined their signature sound. Fællesskab reveals their most critical and emotionally charged work to date, a deeply personal voyage into the heart of Nordic black metal, where raw emotion and melodic depth keep reveling in sorrow and longing beauty.

Translating to “Community”, Fællesskab's six tracks weave a strong musical oeuvre within the Afsky canon; their walls of haunting melancholia, interwoven with vital intensity, have never been more powerful. Yet, this new work also sees the band at its sharpest in social criticism, as Ole Luk of Afsky notes:

Fællesskab - Overture to the Downfall.
Here, community is praised like herd animals fleeing responsibility. A parade of moral superiority, where truth is trampled in the name of consensus. Where unity means silence, and doubt is a crime. Six songs of shame disguised as care, of freedom suffocated, and of the solitary few who still dare to question. A chorus of hollow words, where silence screams the loudest. Welcome to the celebration – the curtain hasn’t just risen, it’s been torn away!

The most prominent and significant American death/funeral doom emissaries EVOKEN succeed their 2018 landmark Hypnagogia album with their seventh full-length opus Mendacium set for release on Oct 17. A work that will reveal itself as one of the darkest and most oppressive EVOKEN albums among their unparalleled repertoire.

Where 2018’s Hypnagogia would see the band capture and focus on a more melancholic, tangible, and even more of an accessible sonic design, Mendacium takes that acute shift back to the monumental dirge-like dread and woeful catacombic and disharmonious heaviness reminiscent of the band’s Quietus and Antitheses of Light masterworks. All while still encapsulating the tectonic-shifting nature of their Caress of the Void and Atra Mors releases while venturing more through classic gothic audial textures and even treading a little down experimental mire as well, reminiscing an aura seeping from such luminary artists as Dead Can Dance, Monumentum, and Disembowelment.

To signal this shift in sound harking back to this previous era, the band would recall the services of producer Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal who worked with EVOKEN on their Antithesis of Light and Quietus albums respectively. The result being Mendacium capturing a sepulchral heaviness saturated in ambience with even more of an emphasis on deathlike dread and anguish; an ambience reflecting the depths and catacombs of an ancient cathedral or monastery, ultimately defining Mendacium as EVOKEN’s most powerful sounding album to date.

B2 Purple / Sea Blue Merge

Debut album of Philadelphia unholy metal band after several EP releases

For fans of Vastum, Krypts, Phrenelith, Master, Incantation, Abhorrence, Funebrarum, Disembowelment

A bludgeoning autopsy of death metal, gore and deathgrind, the low-tuned grooves, discordant leads and mid-tempo rumble of Cerebral Rot is evident in tracks like “Spinous Forms Of Mortal Abhorrence” and the title-track while setting the bar for a melted transformation into more ghastly liquified forms. The gargling slime vox of Ian Schwab are dangerously radioactive, summoned straight from the sealed basement of a nuked morgue narrating a splatter-fest of morbid poetry, decomposing flesh, absurd experiments, and gruesome transgression. Each song plays out like a medical examiner’s case file crossed with the fevered ramblings of a psychopath—precise in its anatomical horror and repugnant in its bizarre depravity.

Ristampa contenente l’ormai “mitologico” EP dei PUNGENT STENCH, primordiale band austriaca di DEATH METAL! Il lavoro fu registrato in un solo giorno, il 25 agosto 1988, al Birdsong Studio di Worcester, Inghilterra! Questa versione di “Extreme Deformity” include i 4 i brani originali, con il brano “Rip You Without Care”, perduto da oltre 37 anni, con aggiunta di “Embalmed in Sulphuric Acid”, registrata in un pomeriggio a Vienna con i membri dei Napalm Death e degli Extreme Noise Terror in sala prove e 6 brani dal live del 1988

Cyan / White Marble