Label Description: On April 29th, Fiadh is thrilled to collaborate with Burnt Lodge & Veytik on Anchors Plunged Off Helluland. This melodic black metal split bridges oceans and continents, centuries and cultures, and tales of triumph throughout time. While the title track features both artists, Burnt Lodgeโs Side A explores tales of the Beothuk, Taissumanialungmiut, & Tuniit peoplesโ encounters with Viking Sailors and ensuing conflicts. Veytikโs Side B delves into epic sagas of Ancient Greece and The Nuragic Civilization. We are honored to help share this exploration of indigenous history & culture.
Label Description: THE SECOND STUDIO ALBUM FROM THE NORWEGIAN EXTREME METAL PIONEERS, COMPRISING MEMBERS OF ARCTURUS, THORNS, MAYHEM & 1349.
Mortem was originally known as the Norwegian cult band which preceded Arcturus. Formed by Marius Vold & Steinar Sverd Johnsen in 1989, Mortem was one of the first black metal bands to crawl out of the woodwork in Norway, releasing the highly coveted and brutal ‘Slow Death’ demo, with Euronymous & Dead of Mayhem acting as producer and cover artist respectively (whilst also featuring Hellhammer on session drums). After the release of ‘Slow Death’, the band was laid to rest, with members going on to form and feature in acclaimed titans such as Arcturus and Thorns, both of which would become mainstays in the black metal scene and beyond.
It wasnโt until 2019, when Mortemโs studio debut ‘Ravnsvart’ was released, and the magic of old undoubtedly returned with that same spirit and brutality of the original incarnation, whilst injecting new elements to form an opus of ferocious yet atmospheric horror. This was followed soon after by the fully re-recorded and re-worked โSlow Deathโ tracks.
And now Mortem returns with new ode to the dark, โMรธrketidโ. The album presents an expansion and marked progression over the debut, with brooding mid-paced monumental riffs interspersed with periods of hyperspeed black metal. The album presents eight tracks of savage yet eerie and also often epic Black Metal of the highest order, adorned with the indomitable keyboard textures of Sverd, along with Hellhammerโs unmistakable percussive prowess, and the returning vicious snarls of vocalist Marius Vold.
โMรธrketidโ was recorded at Toproom Studio in Norway, by Bรธrge Finnstad & Kevin Kleiven.ย
Ripping forth like a dagger from the flesh of Austin, Texas comes the self-titled debut LP from the lone star stateโs new wreckers of civilization Skeleton. Having plied their black market trade for several years in grime infested underground dungeons and sub-basements, 20 Buck Spin was called forth to issue Skeletonโs first LP, a cataclysmic expansion of the bandโs unhallowed vision venturing well beyond its earlier borders.
Though some might be prone to lazily apply simplistic genre tags to Skeletonโs style, the reality is far more sweeping as the debut LP immediately reveals an excessively sharp metallic-charged juggernaut of severe force and high plains mayhem. War-like hymns for the soldiers of a scorched apocalypse to come, from which a bleak alternate future will emerge.
The 11 tracks comprising โSkeletonโ signal the black dawn of a new breed, and when the final somber strains of โCatacombsโ close out the album, an eerie sense of the end as the beginning lingers like a morbid premonitionโฆ
The second full length from Fathomless started out as an homage to Star Trek villains and anti-heroes. But when it came time to write lyrics the realization dawned that life is imitating art a little too well these days and it morphed into an anti-fascist, anti-theocratic, anti-AI album.
The same lineup from the debut album returns, but this time with some special guests joining. Steve Wiener (Am I in Trouble?, Ashenheart, Eveale, Negative Bliss) contributes the albums only clean vocals in the title track. Josh Turner (Dischordia) contributes backing/additional vocals to “Spectres,” and Alicia Cordisco (Transgressive, Ex-Judicator) contributed a ripping guitar solo in “Intangibles.”
Stylistically this album embraces the Vulcan concept of “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.” While firmly rooted in Black Metal it also draws heavily from Death Metal, Thrash, Punk Rock, Blackgaze, Prog, and Stoner metal.
Fathomless II:Thy Desolation takes a more organic approach to production than the debut album. Mics on loud tube amps, live drums, no VSTs/amp sims, no sample replacement. The result is a wall of sound with a natural “live” feel.
Guest appearances: Steve Wiener (Am I in Trouble?, Ashenheart, Eveale, Negative Bliss)- Clean vocals on “Thy Desolation” Josh Turner (Dischordia) – Additional vocals on “Spectres” Alicia Cordisco (Transgressive, Ex-Judicator) – Guitar solo on “Intangibles”
All music and lyrics by Tyler Blake Produced, engineered, mixed, and mastered by Tyler Blake
Recorded at ToneTrip Studios and Fathomless Studios Reamping at ToneTrip Studios by Tyler Blake and Jon Reid
โOn a fateful stormy night you receive a panicked phone message from your eccentric and mysterious neighbor Dr. Krick stammering that something terrible has happened and he must flee, begging you to watch over his infant daughter Amanda in his absence. After arriving at the monolithic lighthouse, you learn more about the doctor’s work – Krickโs research navigates the treacherous and unexplored territory of reducing the linear distance between planets and creating a proximity point by focusing electricity across a Fresnel lens, thus harnessing the electrical power stored in lightning to generate a portal to parallel universes. Before you have a chance to admire the vastness and complexity of the laboratory equipment, Amanda is snatched from her cradle by a dark ethereal creature and taken to a distant land in another dimension. Determined to rescue both Amanda and Krick, you follow them through the portal and into a strange world filled with sophisticated machines and bizarre architectures, a world once flourished but now largely destroyed, rendered nearly uninhabitable through the Dark Being’s malicious actions.โ
โThe Dark Beingโ is a journey through fantastic and harrowing cosmic realms. From torpid starfields to turbulent seas, from sunken submarines to a volcanic fortress, The Dark Being cascades through time & space as a veritable rollercoaster of sound & emotion. Intended to be perceived in its entirety, The Dark Being represents only one iteration of many possible journeys the listener can take as endless and infinite existential probabilities swirl around us at any given instance in time.
A world of thanks and gratitude to Brian Min for his masterful score to Lighthouse: The Dark Being, which on many occasions was the sole reason for this albumโs continuation. Minโs compositions enthralled and captivated my young mind when I first played the game and were largely the reason I even considered this project in the first place.
Album mastered by Dan Paoletti, support their music here: apostrophebeats.bandcamp.com
Synth work/dark ambience on track 4 composed by Luciform, support them here: luciform.bandcamp.com/releases soundcloud.com/luciform
Album art by 0ceanfloor, support them here: twitter.com/0ceansfloor
And finally, a huge thanks to everybody else who contributed physically or emotionally to this project, you all mean so much to me. And biggest thanks to my prince Kodie โค
Thereโs a kind of quiet violence in how music is consumed todayโflattened into background noise, sonic perfume fed into algorithms, sold as lifestyle. Itโs entertainment as anesthesia. Sound without the weight. The Spiritual Sound, the new full-length from Los Angelesโbased band Agriculture, stands as a pointed refusal of this condition. This is not a playlist. This is not a vibe. It is a demand.
Across its runtime, The Spiritual Sound traces a narrative arc through extremes: searing, sky-cracking catharsis on side A; a slow-burning, devotional undercurrent on side B. The album is largely a fusing of the visions of its two principal songwriters, Dan Meyer and Leah Levinson: distinct voices, deeply complementary.
Dan writes like someone clawing toward the divine through noise, channeling Zen Buddhism, historical collapse, ecstatic grief. Leahโs songs move differently: grounded in queer history and AIDS-era literature, amid the suffocating fog of the present, they carry the weight of survival as daily ritual. Her writing asks how to honor queer community and collective struggle without turning it into identity branding or personal mythmaking: how to stay honest, how to stay present. Though distinct, their voices converge in a singular spiritual grammarโone that defines the totality of The Spiritual Sound, not as separate parts, but as one unified expression.
Agricultureโs formation mirrors this duality. What began as a loose collaboration between Kern Haug and Dan Meyer in the Los Angeles noise scene evolved into a shared pursuit of the sublime through heavy music. With the additions of Richard Chowenhill and Leah Levinson, the project solidified into the bandโs current form. The ecstatic black metal foundation was laid on 2022โs The Circle Chant, expanded into something more precise and far-reaching on their 2023 self-titled full-length, and deepened further with 2024โs Living Is Easy: a record that embraced devotional intensity and radiant heaviness in equal measure.
Agricultureโs writing process is built on dismantling and revision of self. Dan and Leah bring songs to the band and then allow them to be pulled apart and rebuilt communally: reshaped through conflict, repetition, and deep trust. Richard adds guitar melodies and solos, and Kern constructs rhythms which are sometimes familiar but often unconventional. Finally, with Richard producing, the final form of each song is realized through intense collaborative work in the studio. Although a time consuming and ego-frustrating process, this allows the band to find the spirit of the songs not through inspiration, but through persistence.
Yet, even in its most ambitious moments, The Spiritual Sound remains rooted in the ordinary and in the day-to-day relationships between the people who made it. Gas station snacks. Inside jokes. Sleeping on floors. Playing shows in rooms that smell like mildew. The spirit here isnโt abstract, it’s live. This is spiritual music that starts with imperfect gear and a long-in-the-tooth tour van.
Agriculture doesnโt offer salvation. The Spiritual Sound isnโt a map out of the fire. What it offers instead is presence: a confrontation with the moment, however unbearable, however divine. It insists that meaning is still possible, even in a world hell-bent on reducing everything to content, and where suffering itself can be conducive to recovery. As the Buddhist saying goes โthe only way out is in.โ
When the founder of Chinese Zen, Bodhidharma, was asked by the emperor of China โWhat is the true meaning of the holy truth?โ He replied, โVast emptiness. Nothing holy.โ This is not background music. This is not for vibe. The Spiritual Sound is music that asks.ย
Dan Meyer – Guitar, Vocals Leah B. Levinson – Bass, Vocals Richard Chowenhill – Guitar Kern Haug – Drums
Emma Ruth Rundle – Guest Vocals on The Reply
Music by: Daniel Meyer-OโKeeffe, Leah B. Levinson, Richard Chowenhill, Kern Haug Lyrics by: Daniel Meyer-OโKeeffe, Leah B. Levinson
Produced by: Richard Chowenhill, Daniel Meyer-OโKeeffe, Leah B. Levinson, Kern Haug
Recording Engineer: Adam Hirsch on My Garden, Flea, The Weight, Serenity, The Reply Colin Knight on Micah (5:15am), Bodhidharma, Hallelujah Richard Chowenhill on all tracks
Additional Recording Engineer: A.L.N. on The Reply
Mix Engineer: Richard Chowenhill
Mastering Engineer: Richard Chowenhill
Art Direction by Leah B. Levinson & Daniel Meyer-OโKeeffe Cover Design by Leah B. Levinson Photography by Olivia Crumm Layout by Suzanne Yeremyan
Memorial continues the path opened by Sacrifice. After the burning, there is stillness. Time spent among what remains. Ashes settle, memory lingers, and the question is no longer how to begin again, but what can finally be released.
The record moves through remembrance toward letting go and acceptance โ a quiet reconciliation with what cannot be carried further. It speaks from a single, unpersonified voice: a shared human state shaped by loss, exhaustion, love, and the fragile will to endure.
At its center stands a forest hut: not a physical place, but a retreat of the mind. A solitary structure in the woods, an escape from the collapsing outer world, where everything decays, familiar bonds loosen, and people drift apart and return changed. The hut becomes a memorial itself โ an obelisk in the forest, a burial site for former lives, a place one returns to alone to contemplate what remains.
Inside, memory becomes both refuge and weight. What was meant to be forgotten stays. What was meant to last dissolves. Grief softens into stillness.
Unlike Sacrifice, Memorial offers a different kind of rebirth. Rebirth here is indistinct โ a quieter transformation found in letting go rather than becoming. Only in its final moments does movement return: a fragile renewal, like thawed water finding its way to a river.
Memorial is dedicated to more than one loss. It holds space for the dead, for love that has outlived itself, for time that cannot be returned, for friends forced to flee, and for selves left behind. Its meaning remains open, shifting with each return โ a structure in the forest, unchanged, waiting.
Information about vinyl and CD editions will be available very soon; as usual, they will be released via Avantgarde Music.ย
Music – Andrey Novozhilov and Tim Yusupov Screwdriver solo on track โWhen the Ashes Grow Coldโ – Artem Selyugin of Show Me A Dinosaur, Somn, hopeyouwell Sound – Mikhail Kurochkin Artwork – Margot Makletsova
State Dependent Memory is Unmotherโs second album. We wanted to reflect the isolation a large metropolis can impose on you, at times torturing and at times redeeming. This was our effort to capture the feeling of being lost inside a vast, busy, and suffocating urban landscape.
Vocals: V. Guitar: Azoso Guitar/Bass: Declwa
Drums recorded by Krzysztof Klingbein Additional Vocals by Venla on Modern Dystopia & State Dependent Memory
Mixed by Angeliki Mourgela Mastered by Roland Rodas at Cavern of Echoes mastering Artwork by Rania Tsigarida
Frozen Bloom is our fourth album where we took some different routes compositionally(sic). Two of four tracks are traditionally storm-like blackgaze passages and another two are leaning towards more meditative drone experience.
It is about unfulfilled dreams. About how we sacrifice everything today for some abstract โtomorrowโ which may never come. But tomorrow and yesterday donโt exist โ only this very moment of static contemplation.
When winter is just starting to fade and give some space for a springโs first steps, when first life starts to reappear and the very early flowers peek through the thawing soil a sudden shift in temperature can leave them petrified and frozen back again like being punished by the Queen of Fields. This statuesque dead beauty, being infinitely alive and dead at the same time is Frozen Bloom.
We got a chance to collaborate with A. Lunn (appearing courtesy of Bindrune records) who kindly agreed to record an electric guitar solo as well as acoustic parts and choral parts on Frozen Bloom I
Recording, mixing and mastering by Mihail Kurochkin Cover art by Daniel Teisakowski (@daniel_tskwsk) Guest electric guitar, acoustic guitar, square neck resonator guitar and choral vocals – A. Lunn (Appearing courtesy of Bindrune recordings) Physical release via Avantgarde music Cassette release by Slowsnow records
Music For The Rest Of Us 