Skaphos – The Descent (Self-Released)
Tag Archives: black metal
Fathomless – II: Thy Desolation (Self-Released)
Label Description:
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.
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.
Tyler Blake – Bass, Keys/Synths, Theremin, Backing Vocals
Kyle Clark – Vocals
Clayton Eckert – Guitars
Josh Fallin – Drums, Guitars
Jon Reid – Guitars
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
Artwork by Holy Forest Design
greyfleshtethered – The Dark Being (Self-Released)
Label Description:
“On 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 – Krick’s 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.”
“The Dark Being” 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 album’s continuation. Min’s 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
Thanks to Krrrrrrk for the awesome promotional video, support them here:
http://www.instagram.com/krrrrrrk/
twitter.com/Krrrrrrk
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 ❤
Agriculture – The Spiritual Sound (The Flenser)
Label Description:
There’s a kind of quiet violence in how music is consumed today—flattened into background noise, sonic perfume fed into algorithms, sold as lifestyle. It’s entertainment as anesthesia. Sound without the weight. The Spiritual Sound, the new full-length from Los Angeles–based 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. Leah’s 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 grammar—one that defines the totality of The Spiritual Sound, not as separate parts, but as one unified expression.
Agriculture’s 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 band’s current form. The ecstatic black metal foundation was laid on 2022’s The Circle Chant, expanded into something more precise and far-reaching on their 2023 self-titled full-length, and deepened further with 2024’s Living Is Easy: a record that embraced devotional intensity and radiant heaviness in equal measure.
Agriculture’s 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 isn’t abstract, it’s live. This is spiritual music that starts with imperfect gear and a long-in-the-tooth tour van.
Agriculture doesn’t offer salvation. The Spiritual Sound isn’t 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 “the only way out is in.”
When the founder of Chinese Zen, Bodhidharma, was asked by the emperor of China “What is the true meaning of the holy truth?” He replied, “Vast emptiness. Nothing holy.” This is not background music. This is not for vibe. The Spiritual Sound is music that asks.
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. Leah’s 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 grammar—one that defines the totality of The Spiritual Sound, not as separate parts, but as one unified expression.
Agriculture’s 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 band’s current form. The ecstatic black metal foundation was laid on 2022’s The Circle Chant, expanded into something more precise and far-reaching on their 2023 self-titled full-length, and deepened further with 2024’s Living Is Easy: a record that embraced devotional intensity and radiant heaviness in equal measure.
Agriculture’s 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 isn’t abstract, it’s live. This is spiritual music that starts with imperfect gear and a long-in-the-tooth tour van.
Agriculture doesn’t offer salvation. The Spiritual Sound isn’t 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 “the only way out is in.”
When the founder of Chinese Zen, Bodhidharma, was asked by the emperor of China “What is the true meaning of the holy truth?” He replied, “Vast emptiness. Nothing holy.” This is not background music. This is not for vibe. The Spiritual Sound is music that asks.
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-O’Keeffe, Leah B. Levinson, Richard Chowenhill, Kern Haug
Lyrics by: Daniel Meyer-O’Keeffe, Leah B. Levinson
Produced by: Richard Chowenhill, Daniel Meyer-O’Keeffe, 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-O’Keeffe
Cover Design by Leah B. Levinson
Photography by Olivia Crumm
Layout by Suzanne Yeremyan
Olhava – Memorial (Avantgarde Music)
Label Description:
Stream the album on all platforms: band.link/olhava2026
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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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.
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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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.
Music – Andrey Novozhilov and Tim Yusupov
Screwdriver solo on track “When the Ashes Grow Cold” – Artem Selyugin of Show Me A Dinosaur, Somn, hopeyouwell
Sound – Mikhail Kurochkin
Artwork – Margot Makletsova
Unmother – State Dependent Memory (Fiadh Productions)
Label Description:
State Dependent Memory is Unmother’s 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
Olhava – Frozen Bloom (Avantgarde Music)
Label Description:
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 “tomorrow” which may never come. But tomorrow and yesterday don’t exist – only this very moment of static contemplation.
When winter is just starting to fade and give some space for a spring’s 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
One Of Nine – Dawn Of The Iron (Profound Lore Records)
Label Description:
Long have I listened to the songs of the Southron tongues, and low have I seen flung the banners of empires now unmoored in the tide of history.
I have traced the bloodlines of kings to the very marrow, weighed every rune that once lit the high towers.
And yet, this I cannot name.
They are the Nine. Shrouded, innominate, but ever present,
they descend across these lands like grave mist over the battle strewn dead.
Their song is the unmaking of the world. All hear the black melody dimly in the silence of Night’s shadow, as if faint voices behind the heavy door were singing to thee, beckoning to thee…
They are as crawling thunder before the Iron Shadow, Warlords and Heralds of the Hungering King.
A piercing chorus of rusted shrieking, a cloying dread of which none can find refuge, they carry not banners but the grim auspices of Doom.
Do not seek them.
Do not name them.
The Nine have risen.
Their song is heard through the door.
Cover art by Ted Nasmith.
Featuring:
Hulder as Tear Maiden
M. as Lord of All
Langon as Loremaster
S. as Luthien
Noise Trail Immersion – Tutta la Morte in un solo punto (I, Voidhanger Records)
Label Description:
NOISE TRAIL IMMERSION are back on the scene with “Tutta La Morte In Un Solo Punto,” a visceral and uncompromising album that wants to get straight to the listeners’ stomachs rather than their heads, channeling all the pain, chaos and inscrutability that characterize the depths of the human soul into extremely chaotic and short tracks.
A new turning point in the musical journey of NOISE TRAIL IMMERSION, “Tutta la Morte in un solo punto” transfigures the spiritual component added by “Curia” (2021) to the Italian band’s music, in some ways resuming the cavernous, furious and desperate approach of “Symbology of Shelter” (2018), but without its more nihilistic component.
The idea was to express a deep suffering, even violent and furious, but still an integral part of a cathartic vision, which sees the human experience at its center, in a continuous dialogue and clash between matter and spirit.
Musically, the research focuses on condensing the climaxes of the tracks in specific moments, in which intricate but memorable guitar riffs take center stage, with refined harmonies and continuous interlocking, suspended in a perpetual tension between dissonances… more
All music and lyrics by Noise Trail Immersion
Recorded, mixed and mastered by Andrea Fusini at Fusix Studio
Cover artwork by Bodyhaters
Visual design by Francesco Gemelli
SPRING – FORTH (Vivarium Sounds)
Label Description:
Vocals and Guitar: Laura Rintoul
Synth and Engineering : Isobel McKenna
Songs 1,3,5 written by Laura
Songs 2,4 written by Laura and Isobel
Recorded on 4 track and digitised by Isobel and Laura
Mixed and Mastered by Robert Dallas Gray
Photography taken by Isobel at an abandoned house near Kuusamo Lentoasema summer 2012
Vivarium Sounds 17
Music For The Rest Of Us 