Antichrist - Forbidden World (2011) 🇸🇪 | High Roller Records

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One of the best modern-day approaches to an old worn-out genre, beaten to death with bad production and style and a swath of copycats who have totally missed the fucking point. Not Antichrist from Sweden though, these guys understand the sound of the 80’s and shove it up your ass. Sodomy through sonic annihilation!

It’s like the first time I heard ‘Show No Mercy’ front to back—The sheer amount of force and ferocity blew me away. This is primitive thrash that taps into that same well, do yourself a kindness and listen to this in full.

Antichrist - Forbidden World (bandcamp)

Fōr - The Life Feeding Flame (2021)

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The Life Feeding Flame is an album that has tremendous output sonically, in that its energy is vigorous and full of weight behind it. Seriously this album has an elemental power running through it, like it's been forged through magma rather than written and performed. I don't know how to make sense of that but in the same way bands like Hate Forest, Bølzer and Irkallian Oracle capture and exude a formidable energy, this album manages to do something similar.

It's a potent and ferocious bid at fusing funeral doom and death/black metal, and maybe that's where the source of its strength lies… In its ability to use the slow and heavy moments with the bolstered through a dense and cavernous atmosphere of driven guitars (with a surprising amount of melody behind them) and though the album lingers somewhere between mid-tempo and plodding it's an unrelenting and vicious ritual of the feral side of metal.

Fōr - The Life Feeding Flame (bandcamp)

Reveal! - Doppelherz (2021)

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Here's an album that is absolutely refusing to be pigeon-holed by arm-chair bloggers and critics alike, a giant fuck you to those of us who feel a compulsion to tie everything down with one of our genre packages—Sweden's Reveal! are one of the rare groups impure and brazen enough to traverse a rarely contested musical swath of influences running the gamut of everything declared under the banner of "Extreme Metal".

Doppelherz is a colourful mosaic of sounds both old and new, borrowed and invented, frenetic and calculated.—Throughout its entirety, creaky cathedral chords reminiscent of Negative Plane and Funereal Presence can be heard, which is not entirely uncommon, but definitely dubious when it's pressed up against something that sounds like early speed/heavy metal a la Mercyful Fate or disoriented black metal and thrash riffs in the vein of Obliteration or Spirit Possession… But somehow these guys fucking pull it off with gusto!

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I'll spare the multitude of comparisons and say this, it feels like this record shouldn't work. Like there's a little too much going on and too many things being pulled and implemented for it to even feel cohesive, but there's just enough structure and swagger to make it work. And I'll be the first to admit, not having this album in my last years top albums of 2021 was an impermissible misstep, but as it usually goes with very late releases in the year, I overlooked and under-appreciated Doppelherz when it dropped mid December.

Reveal! - Doppelherz (bandcamp)

Det Eviga Leendet - Reverence (2022)

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The sophomore release by Sweden's hidden treasure, Det Eviga Leendet, came out a few days ago through the impenetrable forces that are Amor Fati and Mystískaos and the result is a potent blast of cold and unwavering black metal. The overall sound is cloaked in a dizzying atmosphere of reverb and transient gain, which is only compounded by a drape of layered guitars that weave in and out of inspired riffs and whirring chords as if it were trying to find the sonic equivalent to hypnosis—Another hallmark of success on Reverence is the way the drums sound, in the way that they are played and in the way that they're mixed, a compelling barrage of dynamic fills and blasts that have great interplay between a wall of tone and timbre.

Det Eviga Leendet - Reverence (bandcamp)

Verminous - The Unholy Communion (2013)

A full decade has passed since Verminous put out anything since their debut Impious Sacrilege (which fucks your mother… Don't worry, she loves it), but here we finally are roughly 3,650 days later with new material under the title The Unholy Communion.


Straight up death metal from Sweden, no gimmickry or cheap tricks to be found here, instead we have romping ass fucking riffs, drums that have more fills than a phone-book and a festering spew of vocals. Without scruples, this is one of the best traditional sounding death metal albums I've heard all year, it has all my laurels and admiration… And once I'm finished over playing Hordes - II I'll probably spin this quite a bit.

This album further augments my infatuation for graveyards, kinda like Misfits did back in the day.

Verminous - The Unholy Communion

Murmurs - Fædd Úr Eldi (2012)

If Murmurs had a spirit animal, it would be a rabid wolverine. A wolverine that was birthed in a pool of toxic sludge giving it a hideously mutated body… forever neglected and cast aside by the wild. Murmurs is definitely neglected, releasing 4 demos in the span of three years until a year later they unleashed their debut Fædd Úr Eldi, to which you never really hear about.
 
The album rages on through its entirety with no scruples or halt, blistering black metal that explores ample vocal techniques, all of which are pretty fucking bleak and harrowing! The snare, toms and kick need to have just a little bit more oomph to them, it almost becomes lost in the mix, even though I dig the cavernous chaos it beholds.

Fædd Úr Eldi (Zippyshare)

Insane - Endless Execution

Fucking dude, this sounds like Gorilla Biscuits and Nuclear Assault from the good ol' 80's. They have been backed by Fenriz, which is the underground musical equivalent to winning the lottery. These dudes better take that momentum boost and bring us a fucking LP soon!

I'm going to contact the band to see if they are willing to give me a link of the demo to post up on here for you fine mongrels to enjoy. Of course they will…