Decibel #244 - February 2025 by Red Flag Media

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FEBRUARY 2025 // No. 244

THE HELLACOPTERS YOTH IRIA MASTER BOOT RECORD BEDSORE HARAKIRI FOR THE SKY HEATHEN DEITY SARCATOR CLUSTERFUX MEFITIS

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upfront 10 metal muthas Mom coded

14 mefitis Double trouble

12 low culture Same shit, different year

16 clusterfux Fux it, they’ll do it live

13 kill screen:

18 bedsore They dreamed a dream

master boot record Machine learning

20 abduction Stranger than fiction 22 yoth iria Star light, star blight 24 harakiri for the sky The forest for the trees 26 heathen deity Trvth be told 28 sarcator The new buzz

features

reviews

30 q&a: the hellacopters We’re not exaggerating when we say that main man Nicke Andersson is ready to rock

67 lead review With a pedigree that’s no joke, the Halo Effect return with their red hot sophomore release March of the Unheard

34 exclusive:

the top 21 most anticipated albums of 2025 At least you have these to look forward to

46 the decibel

hall of fame When half of their lineup hauled ass out of town, a rebuilt Fu Manchu souped up their sound to build the 1997 classic The Action Is Go

68 album reviews Records from bands that would like to have a word with Decibel’s social media manager, including Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mörk Gryning and Patriarkh 72 damage ink Running free

Norwegian Wood COVER STORY

COVER AND CONTENTS PHOTOS BY ESTER SEGARRA

Decibel (ISSN 1557-2137) is published monthly by Red Flag Media, Inc., P.O. Box 36818, Philadelphia, PA 19107. Annual subscription price is $34.95. Periodical postage, paid at Philadelphia, PA, and other mailing offices. Submission of manuscripts, illustrations and/or photographs must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materials. Postmaster send changes of address for Decibel to Red Flag Media, P.O. Box 36818, Philadelphia, PA 19107. © 2024 by Red Flag Media, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN 1557-2137 | USPS 023142 Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher is strictly prohibited.

4 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

 He’s a survivor Reifert front-and-center with Gailey manning the kit at Metal & Beer Fest: Denver 2024

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February 2025 [T244] PUBLISHER

Alex Mulcahy

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Albert Mudrian

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Beer Fest, I’m typically in regular contact with the bands scheduled to perform. It’s mostly finalizing schedules, sourcing gear and tidying up other production elements that a concertgoer would never notice if everything is executed correctly. So, receiving a text from Autopsy drummer/vocalist Chris Reifert four days before the latest installment of our Denver Metal & Beer Fest was hardly surprising, but the “URGENT AUTOPSY SITUATION— can you call me?” message it blared was considerably less expected. Moments later, Chris informed me that he’d been experiencing severe left shoulder discomfort for months, but had planned to play through the pain during Autopsy’s headline performance at Metal & Beer Fest. That was until the MRI results he received an hour earlier revealed a significant bone spur in his left shoulder that could potentially sever his rotator cuff if he continued to drum before having it surgically removed. According to Chris’ doctor, such an injury would be a “careerender” at his age. “But I think I might have a solution,” he told me. A couple months prior, Chris mentioned the shoulder issue to Necrot/Mortuous/Vastum drummer Chad Gailey. He suggested that it wouldn’t be a terrible idea if he learned Autopsy’s set “just in case,” even if Chris didn’t really believe he’d have to tag in his Bay Area bash buddy. Chad spent the next several weeks mastering every critical bit of madness that is Autopsy’s landmark Severed Survival debut, but didn’t think much about it until Chris called him and asked, “What are you doing this weekend?” This was Monday night. Chad and the band would hold their first practice together late Tuesday evening, where Chris would sing with Chad behind the kit. This was about 72 hours before showtime, so I tried to prepare a replacement headliner in case Autopsy’s rehearsal was a trainwreck. My only practical option almost immediately fell through, so I went to bed Tuesday night with only Chad as my potential (pagan) savior. I woke up around 2 a.m. to the following message from Chris: “Dude, Chad killed it at practice. Totally badass. We’re officially a go for the show!” On Wednesday morning, we booked last-minute flights for Chad and prepared an announcement about the lineup change. The response was, of course, universally positive. I mean, we’d just added Chad Gailey to Autopsy, which is like adding bourbon to an imperial stout—it’s gonna fuck you up. And to almost no one’s surprise, come showtime, Chris, Chad and the rest of Autopsy fucked everyone up. You can read about it (and the rest of the weekend) in the next issue. Until then, eternal thanks to Chad for answering the call with, “OK! I’ll do it!” albert mudrian, Editor-in-Chief

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To order by phone: 1.215.625.9850 (10 a.m. – 5 p.m. EST) To order by fax: 1.215.625.9967 To order online: www.decibelmagazine.com Decibel (ISSN 1557-2137) is published monthly by Red Flag Media, Inc., P.O. Box 36818, Philadelphia, PA 19107. Annual subscription price is $34.95. Periodical postage, paid at Philadelphia, PA, and other mailing offices. Submission of manuscripts, illustrations and/or photographs must be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. The publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materials. Postmaster send changes of address for Decibel to Red Flag Media, P.O. Box 36818, Philadelphia PA 19107. Copyright ©2024 by Red Flag Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher is strictly prohibited. PRINTED IN USA

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READER OF THE

MONTH Filth, there’s another band, the White Horse, who’ve been working hard to get out and play shows and promote themselves. If you like country, bluegrass and cover bands, Shelby has that covered.

Dennis Mullinax Shelby, NC

Tell us about Shelby. It seems like a pretty small town, but we did find one deathcore band called Filth from there. Is there more to the local metal scene than that?

Shelby is a pretty small town. If I’m not mistaken, the population is less than 25,000. This city became Shelby after Colonel Isaac Shelby, a war hero from the American Revolution. This area was huge in textiles and cotton during the 1930s. As far as metal, Shelby hasn’t had a huge metal scene. There are metalheads here; just not many metal bands. Besides

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Our admittedly spotty records indicate that you’ve been a subscriber since issue No. 29. Thank you for the longtime support and congratulations on avoiding a subscription during our “metalcore years.” Was that what prevented you from signing up sooner, or were there other factors?

new music without just retreating to the comfort of records released in the ’80s?

As metal has progressed and evolved, I’ve felt it’s important to be open-minded enough to want to check out new music. At 55, I just didn’t want to be that cranky old dude who complains that everything was better in the ’80s.

I have almost every issue of the magazine that I’d usually pick up if I were stopping by a Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million. I even still have the “legendary, world-famous” Trivium cover! Eventually I just decided to plunk down the cash and subscribe.

Wardruna is the cover artist of this month’s issue. Are you down with that kind of metaladjacent ambient/world scene?

You’re a seasoned old-school metal fan. How have you managed to maintain an interest in

Absolutely! I feel it’s important to listen to artists in this style. It’s like exploring new or former worlds that you never knew existed!

ChuckBB.com / Instagram: @chuckbb_art

NOW SLAYING Wonder what Decibel world HQ has been rocking for the past month? Well, here are the records that we spun most while we also permanently retired from touring.

Because not all of us were spawned in the darkest recesses of hell

This Month’s Mutha: Carol Gallegos Mutha of Will Lindsay of Indian and Primal Code

Tell us a little about yourself.

I am a semi-retired educator. I also volunteer with animal rescue and at a local prison that trains service dogs for veterans along with my husband, who is a retired veteran. We enjoy some travel, and we enjoy all our animals as well. Will is an avid reader and history buff. As a retired educator, we have to guess you had a hand in shaping those interests?

Yes, Will learned to read when he was very young, and quickly advanced in that area. Even before he could read, we read to him nightly and had a home full of books. He was constantly reading throughout the years, and he still travels with multiple books! We’re told you bought Will his first acoustic guitar at age 14. Do the two of you have any overlap in your musical tastes?

I really never learned to play the guitar, but I did play violin for many years, so I was happy when he showed interest in an instrument and even happier when, in high school, the band teacher insisted that he learn to read music. As much of a reader as he is, he didn’t see the need to learn to read music, but I think it has helped him a lot to expand his musical abilities and interests. I loved playing music, but I just got too busy and didn’t keep it up. I love that he has continued to pursue his passion for music, but it really all started when his grandfather gave him an old acoustic guitar even before I gave him the

new one. While we offered to get him lessons, he declined and taught himself to play the guitar and other stringed instruments. Even a cursory glance online reveals that Will is unapologetically opinionated. Is this a trait that runs in your family?

It most certainly is. While I have toned it down a touch in some situations, I’m confident that I modeled to stand up for what’s right and speak your mind when warranted. His siblings share that same trait, making for some interesting holiday conversations when not everyone is in agreement. [Laughs] Your son has been a major part of the extreme music underground for well over two decades. Can you pick a favorite of his projects?

I would have to say Indian mainly because he moved across the country to be in that band and really enjoyed it. While it’s not music I love to listen to, I loved seeing his videos and seeing him do something that really fulfilled him in a way the previous bands had not up until that time.

Albert Mudrian : e d i t o r i n c h i e f  Sarcator, Swarming Angels & Flies  Mammoth Grinder, Undying Spectral Resonance  Oasis, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?  YOB, Our Raw Heart  Earthburner, Permanent Dawn ---------------------------------Patty Moran : c u s t o m e r s e r v i c e  Front 242, No Comment  Cabaret Voltaire, Hai!  Clan of Xymox, Medusa  The Cure, Songs of a Lost World  Godflesh, Slavestate ---------------------------------James Lewis : a d s a l e s  An Autumn, Ethereal  Vader, Litany  Dreadnought, The Endless  Master Boot Record, Hardwarez  Glacial Tomb, Lightless Expanse ---------------------------------Mike Wohlberg : a r t d i r e c t o r  The Mountain Goats, Jenny From Thebes  The Mountain Goats, The Sunset Tree  Master Boot Record, Hardwarez  Defeated Sanity, Chronicles of Lunacy  Mother of Graves, The Periapt of Absence

GUEST SLAYER

---------------------------------Tyler Affinito : EA RTH B U RNER/ GLORY H OLE GU ILLOTINE

 Torture, Enduring Freedom  Crippling Alcoholism, With Love from a Padded Room  Eyehategod, Dopesick  Kendrick Lamar, GNX  Big Black, Atomizer

What’s something most people would never suspect about Will?

Years ago, he was in contact with a band for hire that would play different kinds of music for different venues. He played the banjo while performing with band in Singapore, this time playing Irish folk music! It was his first time playing that instrument in a band. —ANDREW BONAZELLI PHOTO BY

10 : F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 5 : D E C I B E L

COREY SORIA

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VirtuaVerse [ T H E TA D I V I S I O N / B L O O D M U S I C ]

Fuck Off Everyone Who Says, “Heavy New Year!” e’ve reached the end of

another year and, boy, it was a fucking stinker. Just in the back half we learned that collectively America has completely lost all connection to rational thought, civil discourse and critical thinking by elevating one of the worst, most useless pieces of shit ever to near ubiquitous status. Of course, I’m speaking of the Hawk Tuah girl, the single worst fucking thing to happen to this country in 2024. The memes, the endless fucking discussion on how this girl spits on a dick somehow being the pinnacle of American achievement, and the fact that she’s now a “relevant” cultural figure just shows how far we’ve fallen. “Relevant” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that last sentence. What else happened this year? Let’s turn to my favorite subject: myself. I had a shitty year where I left a company I actually (mostly) enjoyed after it started to fall apart and joined another company where I have not enjoyed more than maybe seven minutes of my time. This has caused me to start smoking again, but the job is considered “stable” and they said yes to my requirements, so fuck me, I guess. I also tried therapy for a few months, but ended up losing my insurance when I went to my new job, which they didn’t tell me about, and just qualified for it again a few weeks ago. Therapy was about as useful as “spit on that thang” bumper stickers are funny, but I don’t blame her. She was a social worker because mental health help is stretched so goddamn thin, that’s what I had to work with. She wasn’t really prepared for the joy that is Neill Jameson in his mid-40s. Multiple YouTube videos were made about me this year, either focused on what a piece of shit I am or how much my music sucks. In every single case I noticed a spike in merch sales, so thanks everyone, and please continue to keep my dick in your mouth going into 2025—it’s Krieg’s 30th anniversary and there’s a lot being 12 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

planned, with actual contracts and shit, like I’m a real boy. I had to publicly bully a label into releasing a record they agreed to release years prior, and then got called out by a website (who’s asked me to write for them in the past) for aligning with said label because they released questionable bands. All this for a record I didn’t actually set the deal for, but carried the ball to get the fucking thing released. I also had a split with Withdrawal released and they embarrassed me by blowing our side out of the water, which I’ll never forgive them for. Seriously, their side is amazing. Right now, I’m writing various year-end lists, as per tradition, and I’m just turgid with anticipation of people telling me I’m promoting sketchy bands or commie bands or whatever talking point we’re going on now. Meanwhile most of these assholes turn the other cheek whenever a band they like gets caught fucking a minor or possessing child porn or a laundry list of things you shouldn’t use your penis for. But hey, I’m the bad guy. New Inquisition album, everyone! I just realized I have no idea if this is being published in ’24 or ’25, but I do know it’s going to be a historical document of when we were still allowed to write about something other than praising a government run by celebrities and some asshole who had a worm in his head that too many of you think has your best interest at heart. It’s been 10 years since I took over this column, which is the longest I’ve held a consecutive position anywhere. I’d like to think a lot has changed over that time, certainly in the musical landscape and how we’ve all basically had to become our own merchants. Or how I keep wanting to write about the dangers of AI, but that keeps changing so quickly none of my jokes will stick. Or how the industry itself is different. But I keep using the same cummy references to illicit giggles from strangers on the toilet (in person or in this column), so I guess the more things change. Happy New Year.

VICTOR LOVE OF

MASTER BOOT RECORD ON FINDING THE SOUL IN THE NEW MACHINE

crawled across the digital wall of its own section of the internet’s basement (i.e., Twitter) reads the project’s primary directive: “100% Synthesized, 100% Dehumanized.” Since its self-actualization in 2016 during the creation of the point-and-click adventure game VirtuaVerse, Italy’s Master Boot Record has crafted Commodore 64- and Amiga 500-powered tracks with this mindset. As the tale goes, a computer enchanted by Nordic runes magically gained the power to independently generate music. Its origins, officially beginning with 2016’s self-released C:\Fixmbr, were shrouded in mystery and interviews were seemingly scarce. The man was left out of the equation, letting the self-defined computer metal speak for itself. Demand for live performances became too alluring and Master Boot Record began hitting stages throughout North America and Europe in earnest starting in 2022. Though the identity of the program’s mastermind was never a secret, a flesh-andblood face was now openly seen pushing the buttons. Even 2024’s Hardwarez, which incorporated live guitars alongside its programmed beats, proved that humanity could not be kept out of the system’s

KILL SCREEN 051

Humans are the only ones that can understand error, and that error as a beauty and not as an error only.

KELLY SCHILLING DREADNOUGHT

WE CAN BE BETTER HUMANS WITH AI, BUT IT STILL NEEDS US.

processes forever. This is just a fraction of our conversation with Victor Love, the man behind the machine. While gaming is discussed in greater detail in our full transcript online, nothing felt more appropriate for a print medium than the necessity of biology to technology. With Master Boot Record, there really seems to be an emphasis on the dehumanization of the music. You literally have in your Twitter bio “100% Synthesized, 100% Dehumanized.” But in 2022, Master Boot Record started playing live and you kind of can’t help but bring some of the humanity back into the music.

Everybody was asking for live shows, so I had to figure out how to create the live show for Master Boot Record, find the right person to do it, how to do it and so on. But especially with the new album—which is not 100 percent synthesized and dehumanized anymore, because there are guitars—this is a sort of conceptual opposition to AI, or the way that people want to see AI in this time. The concept is that we can do great things with the help of machines, but they still need us to shine. The machine is improving what the human can do, but it still needs the human part. Why? Because the humans are the only ones that can understand error, and that error as a beauty and not as an

error only. We can be better humans with AI, but it still needs us. If you listen to AI music, for example, it’s basically a statistical approximation of music. It’s not real music. There is no concept behind it. There is no vision. There is no story. There is no narrative. Instead, it is humans that are adding all this to a project because a music project is not only about the music—it’s a concept. It’s a visual concept; it’s the message that you have together with the music. I doubt that AI can figure out something like this by itself. You can tell it, “Do some synthesized metal,” and maybe it makes something that sounds like synthesized metal. But it stays there, confined to a statistical approximation. There is not all the other stuff around. If you go to my website, there is a lot of stuff to discover. I have a BBS, I have an ERC server. I do the streams while I’m composing the music. We do live shows. There are videos, live videos, conceptual videos, a lot of stuff. It’s a lot of things all together that creates a musical project that has a precise identity. Maybe in the future there can be artists that can be helped by AI to create these things. But there will always be the human creating them for real. Unless you are a lamer and you just make some random music [laughs] and you put it on Spotify—which there are a lot of. But that’s a different thing.

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MEFITIS

Oakland melodic black metal duo delivers a deathly duology

efitis’ third studio album, The Skorian // The Greyleer, comprises two sets of songs, thematically linked yet operating on two different planes. In old money, it’s a Side A/Side B deal. Tying it all together is this concept of “Skoria,” which was inspired by Turkka G. Rantanen’s cover art for the California duo’s 2018 single “Widdrim Hymn” and first expressed on the final track of 2019’s Emberdawn. ¶ “This is a barren, bereft landscape and a canvas for our ideas to take form,” explains Vatha, who shares vocals, guitars and bass alongside cocollaborator Pendath, the latter playing drums, too. “I would say it exists tangentially to our world, and shares most of the same elements and ‘rules.’ Its reason for being is not so much that I enjoy world-building, but that it allows the imagery in our lyrics to exist as complete ideas rather than representations of an idea.” ¶ Is “Skoria” a way of thinking about the album or is the album a way of thinking about “Skoria,” and does it matter either way?

14 : FEBRUA RY 2025 : DECIBEL

According to Mefitis, The Skorian side is “direct and immediate,” with The Greyleer more of a great emotional unraveling, more theatrical. The different productions—both DIY jobs, tracked to analog tape then transferred to digital—support Vatha’s assertion that the two sides of the album are the “external and internal” views of this fictional world. Yes, this is pretty far out. But Mefitis give the impression they’d prefer to exist outside of the conventional extreme metal timeline. They draw from second-wave black metal and death metal’s physicality; vocals modulate between black metal snarl and choral. Whenever asked, Mefitis describe their sound enigmatically as “dark metal.” You sometimes get the impression they resist outside influences, but Pendath says no. “I appreciate your characterization of us, but wouldn’t say

we actively try to ‘resist’ outside voices,” he says. “Nothing comes out of a vacuum… It’s a lot of ‘What did this artist do right?’ and then taking those devices and repurposing them. You spread that across enough influences, unify it through a common aesthetic/methodology, and you get something unique.” Pendath argues that it’s harder to write something profound in metal nowadays. The “low-hanging fruit” is gone. Metal can’t go any faster. Or slower. The secret is to look inwards. There, he says, you might find something compelling. “Many of the new bands seem to miss what made the classics great,” he says. “You can only listen to your favorite records so many times until you need something more. Our goal is to make the things we want to hear. If others aren’t doing it for you, then you have to pick up your damn instrument and start writing.” —JONATHAN HORSLEY

PHOTO BY ERIKA SCHULTZ

MEFITIS

CLUSTERFUX

CLUSTERFUX Defiance reigns for once-abandoned crossover thrash mongrels

THE

heavy music scene in Denver has undergone seismic changes since crossover OGs Clusterfux first put down stakes in the mid-’90s. Today, it makes perfect sense for Decibel to throw a multiday metal festival in the Mile High City. Back when John Elway was winning Super Bowls? Not so much. ¶ “Denver was really small,” Clusterfux frontman Josh Lent says. “You might play a bill that would have a pop-punk band like Qualm on it, and then maybe [the grindcore band] Catheter on the same bill, and us. There was some diversity there because everybody had to come together; otherwise there wouldn’t be anybody at the show.” ¶ Defy, the first Clusterfux album in a dozen years, toxicwaltzes its way into a very different Denver than the one the band shredded during their initial run. That the record exists at all qualifies as a small miracle. When a planned tour supporting 2012’s Abandon Your Gods fell through at the last minute, Lent and his brother, guitarist Justin, dissolved the band. 16 : FEBRUA RY 2025 : DECIBEL

“I was just like, ‘It’s too much stress, I quit, I’m going snowboarding,’” Lent recalls. “And that was that.” It wasn’t until years later, at a memorial service for former Clusterfux drummer Colin Carey, that the Lent brothers started talking about turning the machine back on. “It was really emotional to see his friends, his community, and how important his time in the band was to all of them,” Lent says. “When we were driving back, we were like, ‘You know, we still have those songs. We know all that shit. Maybe we should just play a couple of shows.’” Playing shows turned, inevitably, into writing songs. Beer City Skateboards and Records, label home of M.D.C., S.M.D. and D.R.I., was soon in touch about putting out new Clusterfux music. The band signed the contract, and two weeks later, the pandemic hit. “I remember telling the band, ‘Right now, this is between us. Nobody say anything until we’re in the

studio,’” Lent says. “We had time to work on the songs, hone them, trim the fat and just really craft them a little bit better. We looked at it as a silver lining, because we changed some of this stuff quite a bit.” Defy is recognizably Clusterfux— peep the updated version of first-LP classic “Air Raid”—but there’s a newfound maturity to its pissed-off, scorched-earth political thrash. A few songs even betray Lent’s recent study of Zen Buddhism. Still, every evolutionary step that Clusterfux take remains in line with the core ethos that’s been in place since those shoestring shows in Denver in the ’90s. “We wanted to stand up for those that can’t stand up for themselves,” Lent says. “Back in the day, that might’ve been getting into some fights here and there. But you get older and you take a more mature approach to things. And you’ve gotta have a message in your music.” —BRAD SANDERS

BEDSORE

Italian death/prog maniacs do anything but lie still

a concept, transcendence pales in the face of Dreaming the Strife for Love. Bedsore’s second fulllength unifies prog, death and black metal like an ancient text that birthed them all. In fact, the Italian quartet drew preternatural inspiration from one of the earliest printed books, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which translates as Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream. ¶ “We felt free to explore a much broader vocabulary without feeling confined to any genre or expectation,” confirms Stefano Allegretti, a tour de force of guitars and synthesizers, mellotron and particularly organ. “Here, the narrative component is essential and needs one music that follows it in a visual and sonic counterpoint.” ¶ Bedsore’s 2020 debut, Hypnagogic Hallucinations, also roiled blood in the sand, but Dreaming the Strife for Love conjures operatic dramaturgy. Dreamt by a Dominican monk at the close of the 15th century, the origin story posits what the album press sums up with Benatarian succinctness: love is a battlefield—in life, death or dreams. Jacopo Gianmaria Pepe’s anguished, blackened vocals cry a Greco-Roman tragedy set to timeless timbres. 18 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

Opener “Minerva’s Obelisque” reminds me of Yes, Traffic, Deep Purple. PEPE: Absolutely! We [also] embraced the golden era of Italian progressive rock, the ’70s scene we grew up with as musicians and men: PFM, Area, Goblin, Il Balletto di Bronzo. This album is purely personal and deeply Italian.

“Scars of Light”: Black metal sounds SO GOOD in Italian! PEPE: In its essence, black metal always blended with Italian culture through bands like Death SS and Mortuary Drape. We just chose to go further—take that step someone would eventually take.

In “Realm of Eleuterillde,” I hear jazz, prog, fusion. PEPE: Definitely! Fusion and jazzy influences—Brad Mehldau, Sun Ra—are particularly evident in the central, quieter section which captures Poliphilo’s bewilderment in the presence of the five nymphs. However, also the black magic,

speed-heavy, rock energy of bands like the Devil’s Blood and Angel Witch influenced the whole album. Poliphilo eventually wakes up, except surrealism never resets. Ditto Bedsore, whose profane opera feeds Italian extremity: tourmates Fulci, MDF 2024 coffin-closers Mortuary Drape, even Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats’ audio giallo Nell’ Ora Blu. As such, Dreaming the Strife for Love challenged Allegretti, Pepe, fretless bassist Giulio Rimoli and tectonic kit Davide Itri epically. “Due to its complexity, Dreaming the Strife for Love indeed pushed us to new levels of conceiving, composing and recording our music,” writes Allegretti. “Each member’s individual know-how, from composition to audio engineering, made a constant contribution throughout the creative process. We come out of it with a greater awareness of ourselves, just like Poliphilo at the end of his personal Hypnerotomachia. We hope to have touched your hearts in some way.” —RAOUL HERNANDEZ

PHOTO BY FRANCESCO MARIA PEPE

BEDSORE

ABDUCTION

U.K. black metal project focuses on truth over trve

peaking to abduction’s a/v the day after Donald Trump was re-elected president felt fitting. Though A/V hails from the U.K., his latest record, Existentialismus, zeroes in on the post-truth world Trump has helped shape. What started as a solo project with a humble self-recorded demo cassette has evolved across several albums, with Existentialismus emerging as a truly next-level work of blistering, compelling black metal. ¶ For A/V, this record marks several firsts for what began as a solo endeavor and has since grown into a full band. It’s the first time he has shifted from high-concept themes to deeply personal reflections. Beneath the mask, A/V is both a father and a schoolteacher, roles that challenge him to reconcile his fears about a world teetering on societal collapse. “My son is nine, and I’m worried,” he says. “We’re living in this kind of ‘post-truth’ era where nothing is real anymore. It’s my job as a father to build his morals, and how to choose from right and wrong in a world where there’s no obvious compass.” 20 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

This uncertainty and anxiety bleed through the music, bringing forth a brutal take on black metal that feels restless and constantly evolving. The opener, “A Legacy of Sores,” plunges listeners into a whirlwind of blast beats and pitchperfect black metal riffing, with the chaos giving way to a surprisingly mosh-ready part that feels perfectly at home in its ferocity. Beyond the anger and frustration, there’s a real mediation on existence, as A/V incorporates quotes from Dostoevsky’s Demons on “Pyramidia Liberi” and an interview between David Lynch and Harry Dean Stanton on “Truth Is as Sharp a Sword as Vengeance.” Existentialismus also marks A/V’s first venture into vocal melodies, drawing inspiration from unexpected sources, including pop artists like Chappell Roan and Miley Cyrus. “It’s such an obvious and helpful counterpart to black

metal for vocal melodies,” he says. “I really fucking love Miley Cyrus. I would get absolutely chastised for that within certain ‘trve’ European black metal circles, but I really don’t give a shit.” Although nothing in Existentialismus overtly resembles stadium-level pop, when A/V injects melodic touches—like those in “Truth Is as Sharp a Sword as Vengeance”—the moments feel monumental, unafraid to blend broken beauty with black metal’s usual storm of chaos. For A/V, if there’s any way to counter the dread of modern life, it lies in resilience. “I don’t have the answers to existential worry at all,” he says. “But I effectively teach broken children. The only thing I find effective is building up their resilience through exposure to challenge. When there’s zero resilience being built in your life, you’re causing long-term harm rather than good.” —JOHN HILL

YOTH IRIA

Hellenic underground metal hero conquers all on blazing second LP

THY

mighty contract. Non Serviam. Triarchy of the Lost Lovers. His Majesty at the Swamp. All four of those exalted tomes in Greek black metal share a commonality: the bass-playing and lyrics of Dimitris Patsouris, better known to metal’s underground as Jim Mutilator. Emerging in 2020 with a new act, Yoth Iria, Mutilator summoned the attention of those who worship the might and melodicism ingrained in Mediterranean extreme metal with excellent 2021 full-length debut As the Flame Withers. ¶ “I feel really proud to be a part of such legendary and influential albums like [Rotting Christ’s] Thy Mighty Contract or Non Serviam,” says Mr. Mutilator. “You know, it’s about our ancient culture. This ancient aura is always in our unconscious, and is working in an effective way to build our own distinctive black metal sound. I call it Mediterranean black metal, inspired by the sound of the sea cycling all of Greece;

22 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

the warmth of the sun; the magnificence of our ancient gods, like the wisdom of Athena, but still the power and glory of Zeus and the anger of Ares.” With vocalist the Magus (a Greek metal legend in his own right due to his time with Rotting Christ and Necromantia) stepping down—an inevitability according to Mutilator, since the Magus is very busy in his personal life and does not like to play live—and a full lineup joining since 2021, the wisdom, power, glory and anger of the ancient ones ripples seismically throughout Yoth Iria’s stunning second LP, Blazing Inferno. “In my opinion, it is quite different from our debut album,” Mutilator states. “I didn’t want to just copy the quite successful formula of As the Flame Withers. So, I thought it was a good idea to give some space to my guitarist Nik [Perlepe] and let him put his own aesthetic to

my ideas. He really understood my philosophy exactly. I can describe the new album as more melodic, more heavy metal compared to As the Flame Withers, but still powerful and easy to be stuck in the mind.” At 53 years young, Mutilator has been involved in bolstering the legacy of Hellenic heavy metal since the 1990s. Where does the motivation still come from? “It seems that I was born to follow this kind of music, that it is more a way of life for me,” Mutilator asserts. “I feel the same passion and hunger like I did during my 1980s days, and I follow the same left hand path—maybe in a more mature way. “Yoth Iria is a new band, but is here to stay ’til my last breath,” he concludes defiantly. “It’s not only a band for me, but an esoteric evolution; it’s a journey through Metal, through Magic, through Freedom.” —DEAN BROWN

PHOTO BY GOLDEN DRAGON PHOTOGRAPHY

YOTH IRIA

HARAKIRI FOR THE SKY

Austrian post-black metal duo sets the world afire

quintet of wild beasts emerge from a burning forest, either racing away from the flames or towards the listener. Each one represents a different animal from the first five album covers of post-black metal duo Harakiri for the Sky’s catalog, now united, encompassing their career to date and their momentum into the future. The forest symbolizes something else entirely: a literal forest. ¶ “There are two things that had a huge impact on the lyrics,” vocalist (and lyricist) J.J. tells us over Zoom. “First, this Coronavirus stuff and everything that happened in between, I had huge personal struggles at that time. I had a heavy breakup after a six-year relationship. During that time, I moved into a cabin in the woods for like, three months to get away from all that trouble, because I couldn’t do anything else. There were no concerts, you couldn’t go out partying or whatever. You could just meet up with a few friends, and they visited me there anyway. 24 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

It was just writing music for my other band, Karg, writing lyrics for Harakiri and all that stuff. I would call it a catharsis. I went there. I’ve had to try to put all this bad stuff out of me. And for sure, I wasn’t completely another guy when I came out after these three months, but it changed me to a more positive J.J.” Which is not to say that album number six, Scorched Earth, brings any more light into the world (outside of the joy of more music from J.J. and his multi-instrumentalist partner M.S.). “The second big influence on that album—this is also where the title Scorched Earth comes from—is from how life changed for me in a technological way since this whole Ukraine war, and now the Near East war started, which makes me nervous, and way more

nervous for further conflicts in the world. Maybe it’s a little bit because all the social media shit makes it so present all the time.” Don’t expect political songs, however. Just a quick glance at song titles like “Heal Me” and “Without You I’m Just a Sad Song” should tell fans that, after six albums, they can expect a pretty consistent worldview. As J.J. puts it, “Harakiri is about life, love, death and everything between, like estrangement, broken relationships and generally grief; maybe also personal stuff like depression or substance abuse. But that’s it. It’s writing about things like this since the first album, and I think this won’t change, because this is the main thing: that it’s hurting me and I want to write about it.” —JEFF TREPPEL

HEATHEN DEITY

HEATHEN DEITY English black metal battalion gets medieval on your heinie

ccording to dagon, Heathen Deity’s founder and lead singer, “music is one of the most personal forms of art.” Perhaps it’s why he feels so strongly about black metal: “Some people believe black metal is just a case of picking up a guitar and making noise, apparently in the name of Satan, or just screaming down a microphone and proclaiming some half-arsed Satanic statement. When you dedicate such a massive part of your life to something, you can’t help but to live it, breathe it and take it seriously, and if you don’t take it seriously, then I think you are a fool.” ¶ He concludes, most devastatingly, that if “the music you have created has been made for other reasons than what you are portraying,” you are, “in other words, fake.” ¶ There’s nothing fake about this Derbyshire, England outfit. Birthed in the underground in the late 1990s, the band released a string of demos and EPs before splitting in 2004. But Heathen Deity were not to remain in obscurity forever. 26 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

They have been on a steady trajectory of blasphemous glory since reforming in 2014, performing a familiar second-wave sound—but with their own infectious and satisfying mix of melodicism, atmosphere and cold ferocity. Their new album, Satan’s Kingdom, invites easy comparisons to Gorgoroth, but also contains echoes of early Satyricon, along with the brute-force approach of bands like Dark Funeral and Darkened Nocturn Slaughtercult. Dagon himself notes that “adding acoustic guitars and clean vocals is an integral part of the band, part of what we feel makes us what we are. It has been said before that the addition of the clean-sung parts and nylon-strung acoustic guitars adds a more traditional-sounding English element… I can agree that it does add a more medieval and primitive

sound to the music, which fits very well with us.” It’s no surprise, therefore, that Dayal Patterson picked them to be on his Cult Never Dies publishing house/record label, releasing their debut full-length, True English Black Metal, in 2021. That release, featuring artwork in the iconic style of David Thiérrée, was a culmination of the band’s long history up to that point. The follow-up, with blistering tracks like “Fucking Worthless,” once again has Patterson’s support and Thiérrée’s artwork. Yet it’s not a simple retread of previous achievements so much as “a natural progression from TEBM. Our musicianship, personal beliefs and songwriting have grown and developed over the years, as to be expected, so we weren’t trying to accomplish anything more than a further step along our path.” —J. ANDREW ZALUCKY

SARCATOR

Young Swedish rippers find balance between madness and perfection on third album

hings go by fast when you go fast on the instruments,” quips Mateo Tervonen, the 19-year-old scion at the forefront of the new wave of Swedish extreme metal. His band Sarcator—which he formed when he was only 13 alongside fellow teenage drummer Jesper Rosén and thenguitarist/now-bassist Felix Lindkvist—will release third fulllength Swarming Angels & Flies on Century Media early 2025. “It’s a big accomplishment for us, doing our third record,” says Tervonen. “It’s always the first three records that are the most formative for a band. And for us, it’s [also] the most formative years of our lives.” ¶ Tervonen’s father Marko has played guitar for well-known Swedish melodeath act the Crown since they were called Crown of Thorns back in the early ’90s. According to Mateo, “As far back as I can remember, I’ve always known how to play guitar. There’s photos of me holding [my dad’s B.C. Rich] Mockingbird guitar when I was like 5.” 28 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

Since Sarcator’s 2018 demo, Papa Tervonen has been recording his son’s band in his own studio. “There was no stress at all,” Mateo says of the experience. He calls it a “very smooth approach,” adding, “I think it’s pretty contradictory because we’ve pushed everything else [about the band, but recording with my dad] works so well. We don’t need to change that. Maybe eventually we will.” Speaking of pushing themselves, the young Tervonen admits he wrote Swaming Angels & Flies precisely to defy easy genre classification. “It’s a balance thing,” muses Mateo. “If we were a ‘pizza thrash’ band, it would be pretty easy.” He explains that people would expect pizza thrash, and that’s what they’d deliver (ahem). “But we’re too bored [for that]. We have to prioritize ourselves as musicians. We can’t write within limitations.”

He continues: “If someone would say, ‘Is this a thrash album?’ I would say no, because it doesn’t follow those stereotypes, and it goes the same with, ‘Is it a death metal album?’ No. Not a black metal album either. So, it becomes like, ‘Then what fuck is it?’ So, if it’s a black, death and thrash album, it’s just as silly to say all that. You could just say that it is what it is.” Swarming Angels & Flies is the most intense-yet-sophisticated, technicalyet-memorable, raw-yet-best-produced effort not only that Sarcator themselves have released, but that you’ve likely heard in a good while. Mateo admits, “It’s not fun to play these songs. In the rehearsal room, we’re struggling, you know; it is hard to play. But I think it’s important to push yourself, especially in, like, the early years, the formative years, you know, especially when you’re still trying to really find your sound.” —DUTCH PEARCE

PHOTO BY CHRISTOFFER HOVHAG

SARCATOR

RE!! MORE ANDD MO N, AN TION, ACTIO FI, AC SCII FI, LT, SC CULT, OR,, CU RROR HORR HO

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interview by

QA j. bennett

WIT H

NICKE ANDERSSON The HELLACOPTERS’ main man talks Death Breath, Entombed, Lucifer and Overdriver

30 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

icke Andersson is surprised. “It’s cool that we get to be interviewed without him. And LG just fits in perfectly,

by Decibel, but the Hellacopters are like ABBA compared to anything else in there.” He’s not wrong. The Hellacopters’ feel-good rock ‘n’ roll is a far cry from Pig Destroyer. But here’s the thing: Because Andersson is such a renaissance man, our chat also gives us a chance to discuss a few other topics. Like Lucifer, the band he shares with his wife, Johanna Platow Andersson. Or the long-awaited new album from Death Breath, his side project with Repulsion’s Scott Carlson. And, of course, the granddaddy of them all—Swedish death metal legends Entombed. ¶ But first: Overdriver, the Hellacopters’ latest slab of freewheeling garage rock in the classic ’70s style. Led by Andersson on guitar and vocals, the band looms over the Scandinavian rock landscape like a leviathan. They’ve won Swedish Grammis, toured with KISS, opened for the Stones (and ZZ Top!), been the subjects of documentaries and generally kicked maximum ass since forming 1994. After splitting up in 2008, the band reformed in 2016 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their award-winning debut, Supershitty to the Max! ¶ The Hellacopters unveiled their comeback album, Eyes of Oblivion, in 2022, and now they’ve returned with Overdriver. “We were supposed to record the album last year, but we had to wait for Dregen, our dear guitar player, to heal,” Andersson explains. “Which he didn’t. But if people say this album is a lot worse than the last one, it’s on me because I produced it. But it was a risk I was willing to take.” ¶ Our man spoke with us from his 10-year-old son’s room, where a Cookie Monster doll hung on the wall behind him. What happened with Dregen that caused the delay with the Hellacopters album?

I got a call in July last year—this is five days before we had a festival in Spain—that he had injured his hand. He broke two fingers—the fretboard fingers, no less. We don’t like to cancel, you know, so there was a lot of back and forth and Dolf [DeBorst], our bass player, said, “Don’t we know any hot guitar players in Spain?” At first, I thought, “Yeah, right.” But then I realized that the hottest guitar player in the world lives in Barcelona. I had produced this band from Barcelona called 77, and they sound like AC/DC. I swear, if you close your eyes, you’d think it was Angus Young playing guitar. His name is LG Valeta. I hadn’t talked to him in maybe six years, but I called him and asked if he had three minutes. He said, “I’m in the middle of a recording session. Can I call you back tomorrow?” I said no. [Laughs] And then he said, “Can I call you back in 10 minutes?” That was fine. And then I asked him if he still had long hair. He said, “Kind of.” That’ll do. He learned all the songs in five days and then played better than any of us. He’s just amazing. Usually when guitar players get that good, they move into the territory you would call shredding. But he still has the best taste. He likes the Sex Pistols as much as he likes Captain Beyond—all the good stuff. PHOTO BY PER KRISTIANSEN

He hasn’t turned into Steve Vai.

Yeah, exactly. You spend too much time practicing and by default you end up there, shredding. Maybe that’s why I never practice. But that’s not so good because maybe I should be a little bit better. So, Dregen was of course in turmoil, which I understand. If that happened to me… fuck, I can’t even picture what I would do. But he was very positive and said that his doctor told him he’d be fine in three weeks. Broken fingers healed in three weeks? I’ve never heard of that, but what do I know? And of course that wasn’t the case. So, we just continued with LG until he was fine. He just had another surgery in September, so it’ll take a while. Which is okay. The most important thing is that he heals. How did he break his hand?

Well… [laughs] this is secondhand information, of course, because I wasn’t there. But I understand it was by car door. He was packing up the car and then I guess someone else slammed it without knowing his fingers were there.

so we’re happy about that—but sad about our friend. Why did you decide to call the new album Overdriver?

Sometimes I wonder when I get these questions whether I should be honest or make up some bullshit. [Laughs] The older I get, I can’t think of any titles. I always try to compare to album titles I love. That shouldn’t matter that much, but I can’t help it. I’m such a music fan. When I think about the best album title ever, it has to be Overkill. It works on so many levels. So that’s always in the back of my head. Of our other album titles, the one I really like is By the Grace of God because I feel like any band is hanging by a thread, you know? Other than that, I don’t think we have so many good ones. Eyes of Oblivion worked because of the cover art. I always thought Supershitty to the Max! worked well.

Yeah, okay, but for me it’s always weird because it’s a slang phrase. It’s like when Swedes say “fucking.” It doesn’t sound right. It’s like we’re not allowed to say that. But yeah, I guess the title works. You know, with all album titles, I think you have to wait a little bit to see if they’re good. Black Sabbath’s Paranoid seems like a classic album title, but maybe if you take it out of context it wasn’t so great? The way I heard the story, they wanted to call it War Pigs, but the label shot that down because Vietnam was a hot-button issue at the time.

Oh, that’s true! I think I heard that, too. War Pigs is a better album title. But for us, I started looking at all the song titles on the new album and I didn’t think any of them would work as an album title. But there’s this pedal that I’ve always liked called Overdriver. I still don’t own one because they’re so fucking expensive. It’s one of those old ones that’s really big. But it’s a classic guitar pedal, and I’ve always liked the sound of it, so I thought we could just call the album Overdriver. We have overdriven guitars— maybe not as much as some bands—and if you translate it to Swedish, it would be Exaggerator. Which I thought was quite funny. Maybe that’ll be my new death metal project: Exaggerator.

Ouch.

Is the new song “Doomsday Daydream” directed at anyone in particular? It sounds like you’re addressing someone, or a group of people.

Yeah. I saw the X-rays. The bones were completely off, so of course it’s going to take a long time. Of course I miss playing with him, but the bulk of the Hellacopters’ career was actually

That’s what it felt like when I was singing it, but I didn’t write the lyrics for that one. Dolf, our bass player, did. But there was one word in there that I had never uttered before—I’d just DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2025 : 31

Pure hyper bowl  Andersson (center r) and the Hellacopters put the pedal to the metal

I thought we could just call the album Overdriver. We have overdriven guitars—maybe not as much as some bands— and if you translate it to Swedish, it would be Exaggerator. Which I thought was quite funny. Maybe that’ll be my new death metal project: Exaggerator.

You have a song called “The Stench.” Of course, you’ve got a history of this type of thing with Death Breath—Stinking Up the Night, Let It Stink, etc. Do you have a preoccupation there?

[Laughs] Maybe you’re onto something. I’ve actually never thought about it. I think I wrote that song quite a while ago. I just thought it was a powerful word. When you say “the stench,” it’s quite visceral. But the song is just about the state of the world. In the original lyrics, I had a line that said, “You can’t polish a turd,” but Dolf said, “Can you not sing ‘turd?’” [Laughs] So, I changed it to, “You can’t polish every stain” or something. You’re heading out on tour with Lucifer tomorrow, and you guys recently released a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Who by Fire” with Bobby Liebling singing a duet with Johanna. How did that come together?

I’m sure it was Johanna’s idea. She and Bobby 32 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

had talked about doing something together for some years, and obviously all of us like Pentagram. It came up again maybe one and half years ago, and that’s when I did the drums for it. I hadn’t heard that Leonard Cohen song before, but I thought it was great. I don’t think Bobby knew it, either. There was some difficulty getting someone to track him where he was. When I pulled up his tracks in my studio, it sounded like it was recorded in a kitchen—which it probably was. But I thought it turned out really cool. And of course, I’m super excited to be on the same record as him. What’s going on with Death Breath? I understand the new record is almost done.

I just have to finish it! The last time Scott [Carlson] texted me, he said, “We should finish the fucking album.” I agree, of course, but then I started thinking, “Isn’t there one more lyric that you’re supposed to do?” So, now I’m not sure who we’re waiting for. Are we waiting for me or for him? I don’t know. That might be the problem, then.

[Laughs] For me, I know it is, because I have too many things at the same time. It’s silly at this point. It doesn’t make any sense. I do wanna finish it, but people are gonna be so disappointed

when it comes out because it’s been so Chinese Democracy. No matter what we put out, people are gonna be like, “Meh.” But I feel really bad about this. Last but not least, what the fuck is happening with Entombed?

With Entombed, I forget what’s “official” or not. I think I may have said this somewhere—maybe I even told you—but we have started recording. Me, Uffe [Cederlund] and Alex [Hellid] recorded seven songs that we have the basic tracks for. But then I kinda ran out of steam because I didn’t know who was gonna sing on it. I’m very particular with that. One of the few people that I like is Scott, but then it gets really close to Death Breath, so what do you do here? At one point, I thought it would be cool if we had a younger dude singing. I combed Spotify for young death metal bands, and while I do like some of them, nobody has that angry old man vocal. I want a Scott Carlson, a Paul Speckmann, you know? It shouldn’t be too guttural, too Cookie Monster—I want to hear what they’re singing. Fucking Cronos should be the singer. I did think about that, actually, but then it gets too tricky. I have talked to one person in particular, but I don’t think I can mention his name. But you know who he is. I’d say everyone knows.

PHOTO BY PER KRISTIANSEN

read it—so I didn’t know how to pronounce it. I thought it was “hyper-bowl” because I’ve never heard it! I went to a website to learn how to say it and I learned it was “hyperbole.” But I don’t know who the song is about. Next time we talk, maybe I’ll have made up my mind. Or maybe I’ll just ask him.

uring an interview many moons ago, Melvins’ head ’fro, Buzz Osborne whipped out a baseball metaphor in referencing odds and averages. Said King Buzzo: “If you can hit a baseball three times out of 10 on a regular basis, you’ll be a multi-millionaire by the time you’re 27.” As Decibel moves into year 21 as Planet Metal’s most reliable source, our annual Most Anticipated Albums collation and predictive ability has made the Mudrian family hundredaires—maybe even thousandaires—over the years. Will 2025 be the year our average of bands actually coming through with the goods moves into Tony Gwynn territory? Who knows? In the meantime, you can read a bit about what folks (hopefully) have in store over the next 365 days. — K E V I N STE WA R T- PA N KO 34 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

THE SILVER TITLE: Looking Glass,

Hymnal Blue LABEL: Gilead Media PRODUCER: Damien Herring RELEASE DATE: Early 2025

As the Silver vocalist Nick Duchemin puts it, the sessions that birthed the luxuriousness of the post-black metal outfit’s first album, Ward of Roses, “were a first step in seeing what this band was capable of accomplishing. With that as a baseline, we took an effort to expand what this incarnation of the Silver could be.” The quartet found great inspiration in living closer in proximity than ever before and, as guitarist Matt Knox notes, “creating a world onstage that matches the atmosphere and ‘story’ being told through the music. As we approached our second record, we wanted to develop the band’s aesthetic even further. I think this desire for creating a high-concept stage performance ultimately influenced the musical direction; part of writing the record felt like an attempt to musically match what we envisioned for the band as an entity onstage.” The result is an album that, as Duchemin describes, “leaves the listener with a lot more to digest. Each track is a soundscape in and of itself.”

GRUESOME TITLE: TBA LABEL: Relapse TITLE: TBA LABEL: Nuclear Blast PRODUCER: Testament and

Jens Bogren RELEASE DATE: Early 2025

hear it said should come as no shock: Testament have been busy. On paper, it might not seem that way, seeing as their last full-length, Titans of Creation, was issued in 2020. But a closer look shows that the Bay Area bashers have been consistently having at it since 1983, and that work ethic continues. Most recently, in addition to a blacktopchewing tour schedule and socially exhausting nightly meet-and-greets, the band acquired the rights to—and released remastered vinyl editions of—their first three albums. This, while working in conjunction with companies Concept Cafes, Heavys and Modist Brewing to make available, respectively, their Brazen coffee line, headphone shells emblazoned with the Souls of Black cover art and the Apocalyptic City West Coast IPA. When we nail down vocalist Chuck Billy, mere days following the conclusion of the mammoth six-week Klash of the Titans tour (with Kreator and Possessed), PHOTO BY HILL ARIE JA SON

it hardly seems possible when he informs us, “We start mixing the new album in January.” Of that new album, Billy recently told our own Chris Dick, “We’re inspired by what the new bands are doing. It’s going to be a different Testament record. I would say stepping into what’s current and what’s fresh for us, but still staying true to Testament. It’s eight songs.” When asked to peel back a few more layers, Billy reveals, “We are working the same way as before, except [drummer] Chris [Dovas] and [guitarist] Eric [Peterson] have now worked together consistently more than any other drummer has worked in past recording processes. There is something exciting going on. Chris has influenced Eric in writing some really strong songs. Once again, I have been challenged vocally.” By that, he’s specifically referring to a stillunnamed track that he feels connects Practice What You Preach’s “The Ballad” to the band at present. “There’s variety, like always. Eric and [guitarist] Alex [Skolnick] created an epic piece of music that gives me the feeling of a classic Testament ballad. We haven’t written a song like this in many years. We are going to bring in Floor Jansen [Nightwish] to sing with me on the track. Might even be some strings on the song, which is something very different for us.”

PRODUCER: Jarrett Pritchard RELEASE DATE: Spring

It’s no secret that Gruesome are (and always will be) “a Death worship band,” as described by guitarist/vocalist Matt Harvey. The CaliFloridians tackled Death’s first three albums on their first two. Now, they’re “moving into the [band’s] more musically ambitious era,” paying homage to 1991’s Human. The original plan was to have Sean Reinert join Gruesome in the studio, but his unexpected passing in 2020 had the band reconsidering everything from their confidence to their existence. “He and [drummer] Gus [Rios] were not only teacher and student years ago,” explains Harvey, “but very close friends and paying tribute to Chuck [Schuldiner]’s legacy, a classic era of the band and the passing of a friend put a ton of additional pressure on an already daunting task. This was the most creatively demanding record we’ve ever done. We’ve been writing, discussing and wringing our hands for five years, and at some points, I thought it might break the band. But I’m very pleased to report that we made it through.” DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2025 : 35

STABBING TITLE: TBA LABEL: Century Media RELEASE DATE: Early 2025

Back in the day—um, 2021—Texas’ Stabbing wrote brutal death metal as a means to an end; that end being simply having fun. “There was a charisma to the rawness of the writing and recordings,” recalls guitarist Marvin Ruiz. Heading into the follow-up to their Extirpated Mortal Process debut, Ruiz says, “The sound we have now is a little more focused. Everyone says their next album is their best, so I won’t say all that. But I’ll go ahead and say there was a little more thought put into this one and hopefully the listeners enjoy it as much as we do.” He credits new members—bassist Matt Day and drummer Aron Hetsko—and being able to track at a single studio for injecting new life into the young band. “It’s gonna be fast [and] brutal, and there will be a few moments where the instruments branch out, but we’ll always bring it back to our TXDM and brutal death roots.”

INGROWN

Says bassist/vocalist Evan Seinfeld about the forthcoming Biohazard album, their first in over a decade: “Biohazard is extremely prolific, TITLE: TBA but only when the four of us come LABEL: BLKIIBLK together do we have all the ingredients to make the special sauce that PRODUCER: Matt Hyde shapes our legacy and our infectious RELEASE DATE: Late spring/ life shows. We go through a process that’s like a meat grinder—we make early summer sure that the groove, the riff, and the vocal delivery moves us and gives us chills, because we are all music fans first! We want to move people physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, and with the resurgence and rise of all of these amazing young heavy bands in the scene, we feel like Biohazard is poised to make a massive impact. Something special happens when the four of us are in the room. All I can say is that it sounds like fucking Biohazard, and if you love Biohazard, this is going to be your shit.”

IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT TRIBUNAL TITLE: Goldstar

TITLE: TBA

TITLE: Idaho

LABEL: Century Media

LABEL: 20 Buck Spin

LABEL: Closed Casket Activities

PRODUCER: Colin Marston and

PRODUCER: Jesse Gander

PRODUCER: Andy Nelson

MIXING: Greg Chandler

RELEASE DATE: March

Imperial Triumphant RELEASE DATE: March

It’s not likely to be obvious, but the second album from Boise-based hardcore nose-punchers Ingrown will showcase an influence no one, least of all the band itself, ever imagined. “Getting to meet Blood Incantation while touring together was an enormous inspiration,” says guitarist/vocalist Ross Hansen about a spring 2023 tour package that included themselves, the Denver-based Stargaters and Immolation all supporting Obituary. “[BI vocalist/guitarist] Paul [Riedl] helped me see how limitless our creativity can be with the outlet of releasing any type of music we could ever want to.” That’s not to say the bruisers have hopped on a mushroom-powered spacecraft destined for music’s outer reaches, but “I felt I had a lot more to say this time, which led to extended instrumental parts I wasn’t used to. Having many more lyrics to yell than usual was a challenge I didn’t plan on, so some songs have more variety to them. I definitely felt inspired by our previous record, but this time we went for more.”

“The results are quite interesting.” Having Imperial Triumphant vocalist/guitarist Zachary Ezrin describe his brass-plated band’s music as such is unsurprising, but the direction the New York trio’s sixth album takes should turn heads. “Placing boundaries on the writing process forced us to think differently. We tried to keep all songs under five minutes and lean into rock ‘n’ roll formats. Simply put, they’re all rippers. Front to back. No mercy. You walk into the chimps’ cage and don’t leave alive.” The album’s urgency was captured under the dark cloud of the impending shuttering of producer Colin Marston’s Menegroth, the Thousand Caves facility. “Every Imperial Triumphant record is a labor of passion. This one was maybe the least stressful, even though we only had five days to record before we left to tour with Abbath. Dare I say we had fun making it. We were the last band to ever record at Colin’s. A wonderful swan song to the studio that produced every Imperial Triumphant album and so many great NYC bands.”

Any band experiencing a membership shuffle is obviously looking to a brighter post-personnelshift future. Vancouver’s Tribunal have admittedly and happily had their powdered-wig gothic doom bolstered by new members Jessica Yang (guitar), Dallas Alice (keys) and session drummer-turned-full member Julia Geaman. “The songs were all still written by [vocalist/guitarist] Etienne [Flinn] and me,” says cellist/bassist/ vocalist Soren Mourne. “The arrangements came alive through collaboration. All of the members perform on the album and have brought their own viewpoint and style. On a musical level, our first album was written and arranged for a standard guitars/drums/bass sound with cello and keys added later. This album was written and arranged with cello and keyboards as a central element from the beginning. It was great to be able to workshop the songs with everyone in the jam space, as well as in a few performances on tour.”

36 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

RELEASE DATE: Spring

PHOTO BY A.J. KINNEY

PRODUCER: Chris Kritikos and Ben Gott

Brand new full length by Denver's longest going crossover band!

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RIVERS OF NIHIL TITLE: TBA LABEL: Metal Blade PRODUCERS: Rivers of Nihil with

Carson Slovak and Grant McFarland RELEASE DATE: May For Rivers of Nihil original member Adam Biggs, much of the excitement surrounding the follow-up to The Work concerns the vocals. The bassist has added lead vocalist duties to his workload, while new guitarist Andy Thomas (Black Crown Initiate) is widely known for his angelic throat textures. “Those changes alone had an obviously large amount of impact,” says Biggs, “as we were writing this record with a lot of different talents in mind that we wanted to make sure had solid representation.” In light of the changes, the Pennsylvanians remained cognizant of not straying too far from the path. “We were really mindful of not letting too many ideas wander, and wanted to make the album more digestible overall. But, of course, there’s still the spirit of experimental progressive music at play in what we do, so there are still plenty of twists and turns to be had within this more streamlined approach.”

BLACKBRAID TITLE: Blackbraid III LABEL: Independent PRODUCER: Neil Schneider RELEASE DATE: Summer

Despite the success achieved since the release of 2022’s Blackbraid I, mainman Sgah’gahsowáh remains steadfast in being “an independent artist, not contracted to or owned by any label.” But as he’s navigated growth in the music industry and gained experience, he’s definitely having to consider the unfamiliar as he approached the creation of the upcoming Blackbraid III: “The music still comes from the same place and will always be based in nature. If anything, I feel a bit more pressure, having toured the U.S. and Europe and seeing the way fans react. It has all been amazingly fulfilling, but at the same time increases the pressure to write a better album each time.” To that end, “I spent a lot more time on the songs individually than in the past. This record is definitely more thought out. I feel like my songwriting has improved and really begins to show more on Blackbraid III.” 38 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

espite florida-based black/death/ doom outfit Worm existing since 2012, mainman Phantom Slaughter is still getting used to translating the band’s black/death/doom in venues and clubs. When we catch up with the multi-instrumentalist/vocalist, he’s only recently returned to his Dade County lair folTITLE: Necropalace lowing a lap around the country supporting LABEL: 20 Buck Spin Gatekeeper and Frozen Soul. His time spent onstage indexes one of two significant notes PRODUCER: Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal for Worm heading into album number four. RELEASE DATE: First half of 2025 “The band is fairly new to playing live,” he asserts. “The run we just did marks my second tour ever. These new experiences have definitely altered the way I view songwriting; adding a new kind of energy and inspiration to the craft. It is the first time I’ve considered how certain arrangements will translate in a live setting.” Second on the brief list of elements that had significant impact on the forthcoming full-length, which he reveals will be titled Necropalace: working in conjunction with another living breathing human; one Wroth Septentrion, a.k.a. Phil Tougas, also of Chthe’ilist and Funebrarum. “This was the first time Wroth Septentrion and I wrote an album together. I consider this to be a true collaborative effort. It’s been a pleasure to be able to work with someone who is equally as obsessed and possessed by the process as me. It has only raised the quality of these new spells.” And even if Tougas welcomed the escape from the chest-high snow banks of Montreal for the heat and humidity of South Florida, know that his Necropalace experience wasn’t all sunshine, sand and sangria. “The guitar work on this new material was so demanding that our [resident] necromantic shredlord injured his hand,” Phantom Slaughter reveals. “A lot of what you hear on the record is him playing through the pain.” At press time, Worm had completed tracking and were just about to dig into the mixing process of what Phantom Slaughter describes as, “our most dark and evil work yet. It is a 100 percent black metal record. No mistakes about it. This album will have some of the fastest and slowest material we have ever conjured. Everything that you’ve known about the band thus far is challenged and taken to the next level.” PHOTO BY BLOOD COUNTESS

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ONE

of this hack’s TITLE: TBA favorite moments of the 2024 edition of the LABEL: Season of Mist Maryland Deathfest PRODUCER: saw Cryptopsy take Christian Donaldson the stage at Power Plant Live and, sud- RELEASE DATE: TBA denly, a song or two into their set, nothing was coming out of the PA. All anyone could hear was Flo Mounier’s hummingbird-wing drumming echoing off the skylight and concrete of the neighboring watering holes. Given how hair and fingers were still flying, it appeared that the band themselves had no clue of the near-silent treatment they were delivering to the crowd. When what was happening clicked in, Cryptopsy did what Cryptopsy have done since 1992—they didn’t stop. In fact, they went harder with vocalist Matt McGachy exhorting the crowd to sing along to rhythms and riffs.

40 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

That tradition of non-stop death metal intensity carries on to the band’s upcoming ninth album. “We are just about to enter the studio and hope to be finished tracking before Christmas 2024,” McGachy says a handful of days after the conclusion of the second leg of the Necromanteum tour supporting 2023 predecessor As Gomorrah Burns. For a band that has been going at it for 32 years—even further back when they were known as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Necrosis—firsts are rarities, but this upcoming album ushers in a particularly significant note in Cryptopsy history. “For the first time we wrote most of the record while on tour!” McGachy adds excitedly. “We wrote a bit during our run with Death to All in the summer and wrapped up a lot of tracks during our run with Carnifex this past October.” It’s a process the hirsute frontman describes as “rather Zen,” stressing, “Writing on the road is not always easy. It took a lot of motivation to get things started, but once we were in the process, things moved swiftly. We are super-excited about the new material. It honors the Cryptopsy legacy while remaining fresh and relevant, too.” McGachy describes the new music as “dark, memorable and supergroovy,” and points out that the band made a conscious step to not make too much of a move towards left field. “We tried that in 2008 and we all know how that went…” he trails off, laughing.

PHOTO BY MIHAEL A PE TRESCU

D E C I B E L : F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 5 : 41

PHOTO BY JEREMY SAFFER

The 11th album by Håvard “Mortiis” Ellefsen was originally designed to be a collaborative project between TITLE: Tribes of Dystopia our elf-eared friend and a LABEL: Prophecy Productions “prominent musician with his own well-known band.” PRODUCER: “I am the production!” After that fell apart, Ellefsen RELEASE DATE: Late 2025 took what they started and “went crazy on the whole Tangerine Dream/Vangelis vibe,” and has been in tinkering mode since 2020. “It’s almost all recorded, but my brain wants to try absolutely everything, so I’ll spend a lot of time messing around with production. Some songs are done, while others have notes saying ‘replace all the software synths with that overpriced Roland Jupiter 4 you bought six months ago. And the ARP Odyssey. And the Solina. And the Korg. And the ElectroComp 101. And don’t forget to add six hardware sequencer lines and see if it works.” Keeping the original communal spirit alive, vocalist Laurie Ann Haus, Thorsten Quaeschning (Tangerine Dream), Sarah Jezebel Deva (ex-Cradle of Filth) and Christopher Amott will feature as guests.

DEMOLITION HAMMER EVOKEN

SANGUISUGABOGG

TITLE: TBA

TITLE: “Let’s just call it

LABEL: TBA

LABEL: Profound Lore

PRODUCER: TBA

PRODUCER: Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal

RELEASE DATE: Summer

RELEASE DATE: Mid-to-late 2025

Demolition Hammer may not have all of their upcoming album—their first in 30 years—nailed down yet, but bassist/vocalist Steve Reynolds is making sure things are decidedly old-school. “It’s definitely a continuation of our previous releases, Tortured Existence and Epidemic of Violence. Obviously, some time has passed, but we only know how to write one way. No mistake: It is pure Demolition Hammer—fast, heavy, raw and relentless.” Curiously, the New York thrash/ death legends’ brutality has taken a page from the Gambler himself in knowing when to hold ’em and walk away from themselves. “There have been occasions during the writing process where we have come up with a riff that we all thought sounded pretty cool. In the end, however, it just didn’t sound like Demolition Hammer, and it was scrapped. At the end of the day, we are who we are, and we are totally cool with that. We are not trying to escape it.”

As heartless and shitty as it sounds to say so, the upcoming seventh album by New Jersey death/ doom miserablists Evoken will thankfully be bogged down in appropriate experiences. “Many. Far too many to list, any of which could have derailed a lesser band for good,” says drummer Vince Verkay about the myriad of unique experiences and hiccups that have impacted the creative process. “The past two years were especially difficult, with the loss of parents to illness, close friends leaving far too soon, and what seemed like an endless stream of setbacks and pain. Despite all of it, here we are, and the anger we’ve felt will come through in the music.” We don’t know if the sextet was actually in the middle of a session when Decibel rang, but Verkay reported, “We’re in the studio recording now. All the drums are tracked and the rhythm guitars are almost complete, but we’re just getting started. Things are moving along quickly, but there’s still much more to do.”

LP BeastMode5000 for now” LABEL: Century Media PRODUCER: Kurt Ballou RELEASE DATE: Fall

42 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

Just how deeply entrenched are Sanguisugabogg in the creation of their third album? When we initially contacted the Ohio death-thudders to inquire about where they’re at in the process, guitarist Drew Arnold promised a prompt response. Prompt became not-so-prompt when, days later, he apologetically messaged, saying they were in such a writing groove that he lost track of time. “So far, it’s been the usual process, which is playing musical chairs with a guitar, coming up with riffs, putting them into [the] reaper, then [drummer] Cody [Davidson] puts drums over it. It’s hard to say at this point,” he continues, about how the new stuff compares to their Homicidal Ecstasy breakthrough, “but I can confidently say what we’ve been working on is awesome. There will be a variety of surprises. We’re not the biggest fans of doing the same thing over and over, and we love to experiment. We want to build on the last record and put out our best material.”

HELLOWEEN

YOB

DOWN

TITLE: TBA

TITLE: Down V

LABEL: Reigning Phoenix Music

LABEL: Relapse

LABEL: Down Records

PRODUCER: Charlie Bauerfeind

PRODUCER: Billy Barnett

PRODUCER: TBA

RELEASE DATE: Late 2025

RELEASE DATE: Late summer

RELEASE DATE: TBA

Tapping into the energy that greeted their 2021 self-titled 16th album, which begat a two-year, 30-country world tour that culminated in the recent release of Live at Budokan, German speed/ power metal geezers Helloween haven’t taken their feet off the gas. Being bolstered by a threeguitar, three-vocalist lineup since 2017 shouldn’t make it shocking that the songwriting continues to move at a rocket-fueled pace, with album number 17 being already close to completion. Says singer Andi Deris: “The new album is promising to become a real highlight! All the songwriters within the band have contributed great ideas, everything is shaping up in the studio and it feels great. Most of the rhythm tracks are done; [co-vocalist] Michael [Kiske] and I can’t wait to sing on the new songs and push them to the next level!”

Oregon stoner/doom metal trio YOB have taken longer than most in making a triumphant postpandemic return to action. Our Raw Heart came out in 2018 and for Mike Scheidt, “inspiration was a fickle beast at best. Creatively, I was pretty dry for a couple of years. I kept picking up the guitar and, eventually, ideas started flowing again. We all feel grateful to be able to keep doing this, and the timbre of that feeling is unique to the writing of this album. It’s been slow going, but the momentum is building and things are taking shape.” And even if Scheidt is hesitant to compare new material with past glories, the guitarist/vocalist describes what’s taking shape as “what makes us feel triumphant when no one is watching and some of the most challenging picking and chord-phrasing that I’ve ever written. Fingie challenge: nine!”

Getting the members of sludge/doom supergroup Down in one room—let alone one city, even though they all still live in the New Orleans area—at one time is a Herculean task in and of itself. So, consider it a small miracle/victory that after a decade, the sons of NOLA have been able to recently and regularly congregate at Nodferatu’s Lair studio with the goal of releasing new music. “We have several really cool demos,” vocalist Phil Anselmo, states bluntly. Comprising those demos, we assume, will be more of the swampy southern songs and crushing canticles Down have become renowned for over the course of their 30-plusyear history, with Anselmo reporting that things, “have been really smooth so far. The two pop-up shows we played were remarkable, everyone’s contributing and I think [the new material] is all a very logical extension and true to form.”

PHOTO BY HRISTO SHINDOV

you flip through the Decibel archives hard to say what’s what and when what is and go back to the issue containing the what, especially as Holt likes to keep things studio report for what became Exodus’ up in the air as he dives into his lifelong creed 12th album, 2021’s Persona Non Grata, of “following the riff.” But when pressed you’ll notice the album was recorded about where the new album is at, the living “in the garage next to Tom Hunting’s house.” legend offers, “I’ve got about 12 songs in variThe experience at the drummer’s northern ous stages, but also coming up with new ideas TITLE: TBA California pad was such a fruitful and positive all the time. I tend to write some of the best LABEL: Napalm one—one that guitarist Gary Holt excitedly says stuff at the end of the process when I’m on resulted in “an epic record, [one that is] going to a roll. [Guitarist] Lee [Altus] has some songs PRODUCER: Exodus be hard to top”—that they wanted to replicate he’s working on as well. There’s some really RELEASE DATE: Late 2025 the scene again. cool things going on musically for sure, and “We would go back to Tom’s in the mountains,” it’s all killer stuff. And for fans old and new who appreciate not only the Exodus legacy, says Holt, “but it’ll be winter and there’ll be six feet of snow on the ground. So, this time we’re using an actual studio, Trident Studios. The but their steadfast iconoclasm, the still-unnamed album looks to hold last album really cemented our way of doing things. Build our own studio that line. whenever possible, work the hours we want. We will be self-producing “I’m always looking for new ways to create riffs that work around again and will approach it the same way: work in shifts, keep writing new rhythmic themes within the world of Exodus,” Holt concludes. “New during the whole process.” patterns and new ways to tackle things. We live in a bubble and go about The creative process of any album by arguably the Bay Area’s first things differently. It’s always been the case. We won’t ever concern thrash band is always one of morphing flux. It’s therefore sometimes ourselves with anything but doing things the way we want.” DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2025 : 4 3

efore the release of 2022’s Loud to the process, letting go and being carried by Arriver, there was no way anyone could— the sound, as opposed to trying to control the or would—have described heavy goth sound’s direction. Not to mention some particurockers Sonja as road dogs. Since that larly insular vicious inter-band banter. album’s, um, arrival, Melissa Moore (vo“It sounds like Sonja, but not like the same alcals/guitar), Grzesiek Czapla (drums) and Ben bum,” Moore insists. “You can tell when we play Brand (bass/vocals) have supported Wayfarer in these songs versus the Loud Arriver songs. They North America, spent plenty of time in the Old feel different. The new songs feel like they are of TITLE: TBA World and are planning 2025 festival appearancthe same world as each other in a way that isn’t LABEL: Century Media es, including a spot at the next Decibel Magazine like the last album. We have no control over it; PRODUCER: TBA Metal & Beer Fest: Philadelphia in April. And it’s just happening. We aren’t going to let our when we reach Moore via email, Sonja have just brains get in the way of it all unfolding. RELEASE DATE: TBA returned from a run through Greece. Yes, a tour “We are very direct and aggressive in our comof Greece. Just Greece. munication with each other,” Moore says, ad“We were not a touring band before our first album,” Moore reiterates. dressing the band’s interpersonal rawness. “It feels very precious to have “New music has definitely grown within us while on the road, and we’ve that level of trust; sacrifice yourself and your friends for the song. We played things at soundcheck that just ‘came out’ like a movie montage probably sound scary, the way we talk to each other, but it’s because we as our eyes got wide. Now we have these collected discoveries to forge have tried to destroy our ‘selves’ and egos to be worthy of the vision. I’m into something final.” fully aware of how pretentious that sounds, but who cares. How about Moore says the new songs are still in unfinished phases of sonic arjust actually kicking ass? There isn’t even a reason; we do it because we chitecture, forms that are being sculpted by a combination of surrender must. Rock ‘n’ roll is life, and fake rock ‘n’ roll is death.”

4 4 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

PHOTO BY DON VINCENT ORTEGA

DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2025 : 45

the

definitive stories

behind extreme music’s

definitive albums

Eat My Dust! the making of Fu Manchu’s The Action Is Go FEBRUARY 2025 : 4 6 : DECIBEL

nick green

cover. That’s legendary skater Tony Alva demonstrating a “frontside air” at the Dogbowl in Santa Monica in ’77. After 12 years, professional skateboarding was finally finding its rhythm, but Alva and the Z-Boys bucked convention with a more audacious and aggro style based on surfing. By 1997, Fu Manchu had been kicking up dust for 12 years (dating back to its origins as the hardcore punk act Virulence) and had already recorded several fuzzed-out full-lengths. But Fu Manchu vocalist/ guitarist Scott Hill was already growing restless with that sound, so for The Action Is Go, he approached it like his childhood hero Alva would’ve: When you’re feeling pent-in, go vertical. The dominant storyline of The Action Is Go is one of reinvention, but Hill and bassist Brad Davis also had no choice, since half of the lineup from Fu Manchu’s first three albums left after the recording of 1996’s In Search of... to form Nebula. This opened the door for guitarist Bob Balch and drummer Brant Bjork, representing the era of Fu Manchu that birthed three of the band’s most fully realized and beloved albums, and ultimately led to the band’s current lineup (replacing Bjork with drummer Scott Reeder) that has been a constant since 2001. As a member of Kyuss, Bjork had already witnessed Fu Manchu through multiple incarnations: “Fu Manchu was like a chopper or custom car. Sometimes they had to take it apart and rebuild the motor, but the underlying spirit was there throughout.” Lyrically, The Action Is Go represents Hill’s endless fascination with things that affected cultural shifts in the mid-to-late 1970s: muscle cars, lowriders, action sports, things that go vroom, big skies and endless blacktops. That’s pretty much every song on The Action Is Go until you get to “Laserbl’ast!,” a last-minute addition to the album written in the studio, where Hill contemplates the apocalypse. It’s also worth highlighting that the penultimate track, “Saturn III,” arguably the band’s magnum opus, is about outer space. Except that, in typical Fu Manchu fashion, the biggest concern is whether the spaceship’s engine has enough horsepower to carry its passengers across the universe. The best way to describe this album is that it sounds like the second half of My War, but if Black Flag had discovered Foghat and Blue Öyster Cult instead of Black Sabbath. Lots of time spent in pre-production and in studios with wonderful ambiance, plus the encouragement of producer Jay Yuenger and veteran engineers Joe Barresi and Brad Cook, helped to coax the very best out of Fu Manchu on The Action Is Go. And led to some pretty out-there stuff, too, like the sound of an electrified Slinky moving down the hall on “Burning Road.” But the band supplied the blueprint with stone-cold classics like “Evil Eye” and “Saturn III,” the reason that material from The Action Is Go remains at the top of the band’s set lists. Congrats to Fu Manchu for entering into the Decibel Hall of Fame. Keep on truckin’ and have a nice day.

DBHOF242

FU MANCHU The Action Is Go MAMMOT H OCTOBER 7, 1997

Go Daddies

D E C I B E L : 47 : F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 5

PHOTO BY MIA MOLLBERG

ahead and judge this book by its

DBHOF242

FU MANCHU the action is go

1996-1997 was a period of significant upheaval for Fu Manchu, with early members Eddie Glass and Ruben Romano leaving to form Nebula, and new recruits in the form of Bob Balch and Brant Bjork. How did the lineup from The Action Is Go take shape?

“I started playing music in ’85. I had a hardcore punk band and we would practice in my parents’ living room. So, you got about 15 minutes or maybe half an hour before the cops showed up at your door or a neighbor complained. I always went into practices with the idea that I would be as efficient as possible. Like, you have to know your shit before you go in.”

SCOT T HILL home from work and there was a message on my machine from Scott letting me know that Ruben and Eddie were out and that he wanted me to play drums. Being a friend and a bro, I knew what needed to happen there. So, we rolled up our sleeves and went to work. What do you recall from the writing process for The Action Is Go? How much time did the band set aside for rehearsing? HILL: Brad is also a good drummer, so we would

record stuff at his place with him on drums and me on guitar. “Grendel, Snowman” and “Saturn III” were written towards the end of the In Search of... period. Both are slower, low-tuned songs; I remember playing those for Eddie and he wasn’t really into them. When we got fully into writing for The Action Is Go, we were rehearsing maybe two or three times a week. We’d practice all day and record on a four-track, and then take those tapes home and listen to them and maybe try something different the next practice. That’s kind of the way we still do it. DAVIS: Once we got Brant and Bob in the band, we could see all of the potential for Fu Manchu. Me and Hill were totally pumped to play with FEBRUARY 2025 : 4 8 : DECIBEL

Brant, who is a fantastic songwriter. Bob revealed himself quickly to be great at coming up with riffs and solos, so we were feeling allaround inspired and excited. The Action Is Go was a very easy writing process. As with most of our records, we did try out a lot of different arrangements. But we had everything mostly hashed out before going into the studio. We like to do a lot of pre-production; we are very oldschool in that way. BALCH: The Action Is Go was pretty much already written by the time I joined the band. It’s hard to remember, but I think there were four to five songs that were already done. They’d already demoed a bunch of stuff. They’d done a version of “Strolling Astronomer” with Brant as a b-side for the “Godzilla” 10-inch. When I joined the band, I distinctly remember going out to the Palm Desert and Hill showing us the riffs for “Trackside Hoax.” I remember working on the arrangement to “Anodizer.” Tracks like “Grendel, Snowman” were already written, but “Saturn III” and “Evil Eye” were not. At the time, I was pretty young and I didn’t know my role yet, so I spent a lot of time watching what everyone else was doing and taking cues from that.

PHOTO BY EMILY SHUR

SCOTT HILL: Brad and I weren’t getting along with Ruben and Eddie, musically and personally. So, we kind of figured that, at the end of the In Search of... tour, we were going to get a new drummer and a new guitar player. I’d known Brant since Kyuss started, so I called him up and asked if he’d be interested in joining Fu Manchu. He immediately said yes, because he was working as a roofer in the Palm Desert, which is not fun to do when it’s 100 degrees outside. After we recorded the “Godzilla” 10-inch for Man’s Ruin, Brad recommended one of his friends as a guitarist. He was like, “He’s totally into the exact same music and stupid movies, and he’s ready to hit the road.” That was all it took—Bob was in. BRAD DAVIS: Brant produced Fu Manchu’s No One Rides for Free, so he understood what Fu Manchu was all about. We hadn’t found a guitar player by the time we went to Rancho de la Luna and recorded the “Godzilla” 10-inch. So, that was just me and Scott and Brant on that. This was maybe a few months before Bob joined the band. Bob was my co-worker at a music store in my hometown El Toro, and we had mutual friends because we’d gone to the same high school. I knew from working with Bob that we got along really well and that we had similar musical tastes and humor. We jammed out one night after work, with me on drums and him on guitar. We never tried anyone else out, and we pretty much started writing The Action Is Go right away. BOB BALCH: The store where Brad and I worked was called Music House, and I got the job because they needed to hire someone to replace Taylor Hawkins, who’d left to join Alanis Morissette’s band. When Brad came back from touring In Search of..., I learned that two of the guys had left the band. I suggested that they should just bring me on. I was just kidding, of course, because I was only 19 at the time and I didn’t think I could get into any of the clubs or bars where Fu Manchu would be booked to play. But Brad and I had mutual friends, and we’d both taken lessons from the same guitar teacher when we were younger, so it was a good fit. We were in the studio to record The Action Is Go maybe four weeks after Brad asked me to join. It was pretty crazy, man. BRANT BJORK: Fu Manchu was kind of like a brother band to Kyuss. I knew that they were having some inner conflict, and I was prepared for them to splinter. Which is what happened. But it never really occurred to me that I would be asked to join the band, until one day I came

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BJORK: In the beginning, they would come out

to the desert, and we would rehearse at what we called the Chihuahua House, which was the focal point for a lot of Palm Desert happenings. It was Mario Lalli’s place—Yawning Man and Across the River were born in that house. Then we eventually started rehearsing in Orange County. Scott knew that I was a songwriter and Scott was the primary riff-writer for Fu Manchu, and we agreed that the two of us would become writing partners. It was a no-brainer for me because I was already familiar with his writing style. I wanted to contribute to that and to preserve the writing style that they had established, because Fu Manchu was great even before I joined the band. What was the band’s philosophy towards jamming and how did that influence the songwriting process? HILL: I started playing music in ’85. I had a hard-

core punk band and we would practice in my parents’ living room. So, you got about 15 minutes or maybe half an hour before the cops showed up at your door or a neighbor complained. I always went into practices with the idea that I would be as efficient as possible. Like, you have to know your shit before you go in. We’ve never shown up at practice just to jam; I’ve been trained to sort of do stuff on the clock. DAVIS: We don’t really do a lot of jamming when we’re writing songs. The songs mostly start with somebody showing up with a riff. It’s never from us noodling around. We don’t approach things that way. There just aren’t a lot of Fu Manchu songs that spring forth from improvising. Someone has a riff, and that riff determines the tone of the rest of that song. We figure out an arrangement and think about what parts we would want to add to that. Some of our musical influences were a bit more open to improvisation and jamming, but those aren’t the cues we took from them. BALCH: We jam a little bit here and there, but we’re more structured. Someone might bring in a riff and then someone else might be like, “I have something that goes with that.” But I think it’s more like putting a puzzle together. It’s a very verbal process. Making shit up on the fly is totally cool, too. But that’s not how we did The Action Is Go. It was much more methodical. BJORK: I come from a jamming background. That’s what we did in the desert. My first band that I was in, the band leaders were older and they were into, you know, smoking grass and listening to the Grateful Dead, so we jammed all the time. I loved to jam and I did kind of inspire the band to maybe take some more improvisational roads. But, in general, Fu Manchu was not a jamming band. It never was. Fu Manchu is a very precise rock ‘n’ roll machine. If there are

any jamming elements to Fu Manchu, it would be a kind of “jam” comparable to something that Black Flag was doing in the later years with, like, The Process of Weeding Out. The Action Is Go was recorded in early 1997 at Grandmaster Recorders and Sound City in Los Angeles. What do you remember from that experience? HILL: There are some overdubs and a bunch of

sound effects and some additional percussion, but for the most part, we kind of all sat together in a room around the drums and waited for Brant to signal when it was time to start. So, I think it was nine or 10 days at Grandmaster, and then we went to Sound City and recorded a few songs. We were pretty well-rehearsed. One exception is that when we were in Sound City, recording “Grendel, Snowman,” Brant notified us that he had an idea for a different drum beat for the song. We played the song both ways and asked Jay Yuenger which version he preferred. We all liked the one with the newer drumbeat. DAVIS: Initially, we went into a different studio with an engineer named Ulrich Wild. He’d recorded White Zombie and we wanted to try working with him. We recorded two songs. One was a cover of Thin Lizzy’s “Jailbreak.”

It was the second time we’d recorded “Jailbreak,” because we’d also done another version at Rancho de la Luna that we didn’t end up using. So, we re-recorded that, and did a version of “Strolling Astronomer,” which we later fleshed out and used on The Action Is Go. I think about half of the songs were done at Grandmaster and the other half at Sound City—you can tell by the drums. We did a fair amount of tracking of the “room-y” sounding stuff in the garage of Grandmaster, songs like “Saturn III” and “Grendel, Snowman.” BALCH: I remember staying at a really shitty hotel down the street and being broke as fuck. I was so poor that I ate the worst meal of my entire life: Top Ramen with hot bathwater from a Motel 6. Our manager saw what I was doing and was like, “Oh my god, take $200 for pocket money, just so you don’t have to eat that.” I remember we tracked a lot of guitars and vocals at Grandmaster, and did drums at Sound City. We did our first show with both Brant and I in the band during the recording. We flew up to San Francisco and did a Man’s Ruin showcase at this place called Bimbo’s 365. We recorded half of the record without ever having played live together. By the time we finished making The Action Is Go, we’d only played one show.

 Last action hero

Brad Davis live, circa 1997

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BJORK: I think the combination of Brad Cook

and Jay Yuenger and the studios and the material and the band itself—there was a synergy with all of that. It’s kind of rare to have that, but when it happens, it’s a pretty beautiful thing. Everyone was proactive and positive. It felt good. My time in Kyuss had been temperamental and insecure and confusing. This record was legitimately enjoyable to make, and for the five years that I was in Fu Manchu, I had a fucking great time. What was it like working with Jay Yuenger, who produced the LP? HILL: I was a fan of Jay Yuenger from Rights of

the Accused, and I really liked the White Zombie “God of Thunder” 12-inch. He would come out to practices, write notes and offer up ideas about the song structures. We got along with him really well. Jay Yuenger had a lot to do with the sound of the record. All the effects like the theremin and the space drum and the phasers came from wanting to incorporate some sci-fi sounds. Jay Yuenger had some specific ideas for how to achieve that. I think that was his space drum. That’s what you hear on “Laserbl’ast!” We were definitely on the same wavelength.

DAVIS: I really liked Jay personally, and he had

BJORK: I knew Jay from touring with Kyuss and

a big impact on the way that album sounds. He wasn’t so much telling us what we should be doing, but instead pointing us to the parts that could benefit from trying out other ideas. It was an ideal way of working with a producer. As far as adding all of the ear candy, we had a lot of fun incorporating that. There was one song where Jay Yuenger was pressing down on the second fret on Bob’s guitar to help him play that part. There was some stuff at the end of “Saturn III,” featuring an electro-harmonic space drum, and he was contributing to a lot of the special effects sounds on there, too. It was definitely a good step in expanding the sound of Fu Manchu. BALCH: It was a super eye-opener for me, especially as my first time in a real studio. It was rad seeing how Jay Yuenger would mess around with the song structures, rearrange parts, and change tempos and keys. We went out to dinner with him at the Rainbow before we started recording and I remember him saying, “I want to make a record with you guys for the kid that’s in Kansas that smokes too much weed and listens to music on headphones.” After spending two weeks in pre-production and another two weeks in the studio with Jay Yuenger, I came out of it like a different musician. I was a huge fan of White Zombie. And Fu Manchu. And Kyuss. So, I was pretty much shitting my pants at that point!

White Zombie, so we already had a vibe. He’s a cool guy. I turned him and Sean Yseult onto Fu Manchu when I was in Kyuss. They got it immediately. So, when he offered to produce—I think Scott had already talked to him about it and agreed to have him do it—I thought it made sense. His enthusiasm kept us on point. I think one of the biggest elements of an effective producer is someone that wants to be there, loves the band, knows what the band is and what it’s doing, what it should do and what it could do, and supports the band doing that in the sometimes high-stress adventure of making a record in a studio. So, he was able to do all of that and, obviously, you can hear the results on the record.

“I remember staying at a really shitty hotel down the street [when recording The Action Is Go] and being broke as fuck. I was so poor that I ate the worst meal of my entire life: Top Ramen with hot bathwater from a Motel 6.”

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How did the cover of SS Decontrol’s “Nothing Done” that closes the album come about? HILL: We didn’t decide on recording “Nothing

Done” by SSD until we were halfway through. I was sharing a hotel room with Brant and playing old hardcore stuff in the room. Brant heard “Nothing Done” and was like, “Oh, man, I love those punches at the start of the song.” He was the one who suggested recording it. I had no intention of recording a hardcore song, but we went to the studio the next day and played it for Bob and Brad. I think we played it through maybe once or twice in the studio before recording it. Jay Yuenger directed me to hold the mic in my hand and just scream as loud as I could. It was his idea to play a trick on the listener by ending the album with that song. DAVIS: I honestly can’t remember how it came about. I’m going to assume that Hill chose that because he’s a huge SSD fan. We actually had the good luck to be able to play that cover live with Springa from SSD a couple times, which was rad. I think we thought “Nothing Done” would be a funny little surprise for people who were listening to the album from start to finish. The idea was to kind of hit you over the head one last time. At least at that point, a lot of Fu Manchu fans hadn’t picked up on the band’s hardcore/ punk influences, so it was another way of reminding people where we came from. BALCH: There were two tracks that weren’t written before we went into pre-production with Jay Yuenger. One was “Laserbl’ast!” and the other was the idea of doing a cover of “Nothing Done”—both of those were suggestions from Jay. I remember that there was a scramble to get the lyrics. Jay knew a guy that was friends with Springa from SSD. The lyrics were sent to us by fax—that’s how fucking old The Action Is Go is. I remember Jay proclaiming, “That’s what faxes should be for: Retrieving old hardcore lyrics!” BJORK: Just to make sure that everyone wasn’t nodding out after “Saturn III,” we threw the hardcore cover on the record right after that. That’s very Fu Manchu, to leave everybody scratching their heads in disbelief. A lot of

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Core values  Brank Bjork live, wearing the band’s hardcore roots on his sleeve... er, chest

our contemporaries and all the guys I came up with in the Palm Desert, we all grew up on hardcore punk. Our roots were in that music. Scott is a huge hardcore enthusiast. Fu Manchu is almost like a hardcore band slowed down with fuzz guitars. So, the SSD cover was something that we were really excited about. The album art features an iconic photo of Tony Alva taken by Glen E. Friedman. What’s the story behind the cover and its concept? HILL: I had this idea where I wanted the cover

the skateboarding and hardcore icons that we grew up with. I suggested that instead of trying to find some random pictures from the late ’70s or early ’80s, maybe we could just get a rad shot from Glen E. Friedman. So I called our manager Catherine Enny, and she contacted him and sent him the record. That cover was the first time that image of Tony Alva had been printed. I think it was shot in 1977, at the Dogbowl in Santa Monica. I’m a little biased, but it’s one of the greatest rock record covers ever. What was the experience of making the video for “Evil Eye” like? HILL: We did a quick West Coast tour with

Corrosion of Conformity in ’97 and shot the video during a couple of days off in L.A. Penny Marshall’s nephew directed it. He asked us what we wanted and I suggested a tribute to Over the Edge. We went to this development about an hour north of Los Angeles where they were building some houses, and shot all day. So, part of the shoot was in the house, with a bunch of kids destroying stuff, and part of it was shot at an elementary school. We played live on the blacktop. It’s weird that we went with this, because Tom Osborn, one of the guys who worked at Mammoth, was actually in that movie as a kid. We were freaking out on that. DAVIS: Oh, that was awesome. We had done videos before, but usually it was us working with Ken Pucci as the video director. He would direct and film. This was the first time that we weren’t working with him, and the first time there was a large crew working on the shoot. Obviously, we were patterning the video on the Matt Dillon movie Over the Edge. We were trying to replicate it as a music video. That was a lot of fun, and it FEBRUARY 2025 : 5 4 : DECIBEL

was exciting going out to the various locations and filming. Watching the kids doing their parts and seeing the crew directing them to, you know, smash stuff was really amazing. BALCH: The whole thing was very indebted to Over the Edge, the Matt Dillon movie where the teenagers take over the town because they’re tired of their parents’ bullshit. We ripped that off completely. There was even some talk of getting Matt Dillon in there, but it fell apart. That would’ve been pretty cool. The first time we saw it, we were out on tour and stopped off in North Carolina, where the label was headquartered. They took us to a pizza place and they projected it onto a screen in the restaurant. A lot of the stuff was filmed when we weren’t even there, so that struck a chord in me, like, “Wow, the label is really getting behind this record.” BJORK: Aw man, that was so much fun. We had a blast. It was great. We loved the movie Over the Edge. That was a movie we grew up with. Bob might’ve been too young. But Over the Edge was a huge influence on the rest of us, and we wanted to kind of take the movie’s storyline and plug it into our video. We did and it was awesome. The director was very cool. Dave Markey, the great independent filmmaker and drummer of SSD, played the cop in the video, which was extra cool. This album is the second album Fu Manchu recorded for Mammoth during a period where it was partnered with Atlantic and functioned as a major label. Did that create any additional pressures or expectations? Did it have any effect on the budget or promotion? HILL: Mammoth knew what they were getting

with us; they just liked Fu Manchu. I don’t even know what the budget for the record was.

PHOTO BY LISA JOHNSON

to have a 1970s feel to it and depict someone surfing or skateboarding or doing motocross. I figured that The Action Is Go was the type of record I would’ve listened to as a kid when I was doing all that stuff. So, I pitched that to the label and a few days later, one of the guys at the label told me that they’d contacted Glen E. Friedman and he’d offered a shot of Tony Alva, who was my favorite skateboarder growing up. The image was so perfect. Once we saw that, there was no other choice. DAVIS: It completely blew our minds when we saw the photos from Glen E. Friedman. It couldn’t have been more perfect. It’s one of the best album covers we’ve had. I would say the best. Gotta definitely do a shout-out to the guy at Mammoth who was responsible for doing all of the album layouts. His name was Lane Wurster. He did the art direction for all of the albums we put out on Mammoth. He made everything look super nice. BALCH: The Action Is Go came out back when Tower Records was still a destination. I had friends that were like, “Oh, I saw your record on display at Tower.” That was a big deal for me because the music store I worked at with Brad was literally right next to Tower Records in El Toro. The music store had a panel you could remove, where you’d be looking straight down into that Tower location. We had a lot of fun fucking with the Tower customers when it was slow in the store. Anyway, to go next door and see the record on display there was crazy. I think that cover lent a hand to the album being featured in displays at so many stores. BJORK: Scott had the title for The Action Is Go in mind and he was describing to me how he wanted to incorporate some images of motocross or skateboarding or surfing. There was this magazine in the early ’80s that was popular in Southern California called Action Now. It was kind of a predecessor to Thrasher. Scott wanted to encompass that kind of vibe. Glen E. Friedman was the guy when it came to capturing all of

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“I’m a little biased, but [The Action Is Go] one of the greatest rock record covers ever.”

We didn’t even have to deal with it, and we didn’t really pay attention. We’d send them fourtrack demos and they’d be like, “Oh, these sound good. Can’t wait to hear ’em in the studio.” As far as the budget was concerned, I think that goes back to us having our shit together and being used to getting things done. Everyone at the label was totally cool. Mammoth was a great label. The general manager Steve Balcom and Tom Osborn—both of those dudes pushed the band a lot and were a great help to Fu Manchu. DAVIS: I don’t think we ever felt any sort of pressure from the label. The only pressure was the good kind. They were always very excited about the potential of Fu Manchu. We worked really well with everyone there. They gave us a lot of flexibility and they’d let us do side releases on other labels. Mammoth was down for putting us out on the road as much as we could take. They put a lot of thought into the promotion of Fu Manchu. It was awesome. I keep saying “awesome” over and over again, but that’s really the best word to describe the experience of working with Mammoth. BALCH: I think the promotion side of it was really good. We were getting really good reviews in all kinds of magazines. It was fun to see my name in print. I think Mammoth did a fantastic job, especially with that record. I have nothing bad to say about the label. There wasn’t a lot of pressure to do things we didn’t want to do. They were just like, “Do what you do.” And they were behind it. I miss that label a lot. It was a pretty rad situation. It was a good team of people supporting us. They believed in what we were doing and they didn’t question it.

BJORK: No, those were the golden years. I’m

very grateful for Mammoth because Fu Manchu wouldn’t have had that platform to work from if it wasn’t for the label. All good things come to an end, though. I think Mammoth sold itself to Disney and then tried to buy it back, and then ended up selling to Hollywood. Looking back, that probably had a great effect on Fu Manchu’s momentum, unfortunately. All that bullshit aside, Mammoth gave the band carte blanche to do whatever we wanted to do. It was like an independent record label with deep pockets. What do you think is the record’s legacy and how does it fit in with the rest of Fu Manchu’s output? HILL: I don’t know what kind of legacy is

attached to this record. I just know that for me, I wanted to do something that was more aggressive than we’d done and also slower and more tuned-down. I think we pulled that off. There’s nothing I’d really change about it. King of the Road has its following, but The Action Is Go is the fan favorite. Getting Brant and Bob was a big change. I think there was an energized feeling surrounding The Action Is Go, and that carried through in the writing and the recording. When I listen to it now, it sounds like the work of a new band, even though Fu Manchu was already well-established. DAVIS: It always seemed to be received well, at least with the people who were into our genre of music. It wasn’t like only metalheads dug us or only people that were into skateboarding. We seemed to go over well with anybody. That made it easier for us to go on tour with different kinds of bands and not lose our ass onstage. I remember FEBRUARY 2025 : 5 6 : DECIBEL

opening up for Slayer in Ireland when the album came out and being like, “Oh man, Slayer fans will not be excited to sit through any opening band.” During the first couple of songs, we heard people chanting “SLAYER!!!” As we continued, those folks were getting drowned out by people chanting “Fu Manchu!” I think we were able to win people over in those situations. BALCH: The band evolved after The Action Is Go, because the record kind of catapulted us into a situation where we could tour on our own and have it be sustainable. It helped us with exposure, and we were able to do some headlining runs. It made it easier for us. I teach guitar for a living and I still encounter people that are like 15-16 years old and want to learn songs from that album. It’s weird to think about because I was 19 when I recorded it. If someone had told me, “You’re going to have your own studio and teach people how to play these songs on guitar when you’re 46,” I wouldn’t have believed that. The Action Is Go put us in a lot of people’s heads. BJORK: Scott Hill is one of the smartest and hardest-working band leaders I’ve ever known, and I learned a lot from him. One of the many things that the two of us shared is that we both have strong work ethics. It was all about finding the thing that you believe in and working hard to keep it going. The band came close to dying, and I was able to contribute to bringing life back to it. To me, that’s what The Action Is Go is about. It represents a band that went through the wringer and got beat up a little bit, but we knew that it was still a great band and it needed to live. The world’s a better place because Fu Manchu’s in it.

PHOTO BY MIA MOLLBERG

B RA NT BJO RK

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How EINAR S E LV IK’s journey from the black metal underground took him to world music’s center stage with

WARDRUNA story by C H R I S D I C K | photos by E S T E R S E G A R R A

est-selling author Bruce Tulgan’s“Learn When to Say No” piece in the

Harvard Business Review states, “Every good no makes room for a better yes— one that adds value, builds relationships and enhances your reputation.” This might be the first time Decibel has cited a management magazine or anything originating from Harvard, but Tulgan makes a salient point: There’s power in saying no. Saying yes to everything—essentially what the American Psychological Association labels “people-pleasing”—is embedded in the human condition. We’re predisposed to gratuitous dopamine hits. For Einar Selvik (a.k.a. Kvitrafn), headman of folk music outfit Wardruna, saying no is institutional and has been transformative. ¶ “For me, it’s about the art [of Wardruna],” says Selvik from Hamburg, Germany, where Wardruna are scheduled to play the Laeiszhalle, a world-renowned stage once host to Sergei Prokofiev, Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd. “Saying no is not a tactic. It’s more pragmatic than that. When we, in Wardruna, performed our first concert in front of a 1,300-year-old Viking ship [at the Viking Ship Museum in Bygdøy] in 2009, I saw the power of performing in a setting with a positive synergy effect. Suddenly, four plus four becomes 10. The experience is so much better for everyone by choosing the right opportunity. We want Wardruna to be on our terms. It has to fit the art. So, we have been picky about opportunities and patient to not oversaturate what we do. If you don’t put a price on your art, no one else will in this business. I’m not talking about money either.”

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Wardruna’s onstage count is shy of 200, the lion’s share between 2016 and today. Perseverance and, yes, saying no has been fortuitous. Certainly, Selvik’s musical relationship with the History Channel’s Emmy Awardwinning historical drama Vikings plays into rare, nearly historical opportunities such as performing at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens, Greece, or the Devín Castle in Bratislava, Slovakia, but the foundation of Wardruna’s proverbial runestone was already plenty deep. Selvik’s vision was uncompromising, and to this day, the Norwegian (who now calls Eastern Norway his home) and his label, By Norse (which he co-founded with Enslaved’s Ivar Bjørnson and AISAmusic’s Simon Füllemann) remain resolute. “Saying no is a luxurious problem to have,” Selvik laughs. “In general, we’ve made our point. If it’s not right for Wardruna—the entire band, actually—then it’s not going to happen. It’s very simple. We’ve had a lot of good opportunities come our way, and in a way, having too many of them is another incentive to say no. Burnout is a real thing. If I ever tire of Wardruna, I’m not sure what I’ll do. It’s a big part of who I am and my life. So, I want to protect myself and my art. I want to do this until I get old.”

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“We [Enslaved] unfortunately discovered way too late what Einar knew early on,” laughs Bjørnson, a lifelong friend/collaborator/business partner and survivor of Enslaved’s first, almost comically fatal 1995 U.S. tour with Incantation, Absu and Kataklysm. “Einar and I come out of different places. I’m not nearly as hard-nosed as Einar. He’s the most serious person I know about his art. Though, over the years, we’ve concluded that he could use a bit of my unseriousness in life, and I could definitely benefit from a pinch of his seriousness. So, the stupid answer is: Yes, it’s good to say no.”

BI N D I N G of the SPI RI T Who are Wardruna, though? That might be obvious to astute first-year Decibel readers, but the Norwegians might be relative unknowns otherwise. Though they formed in the crucible of black metal, namely when Selvik and Kristian Espedal (a.k.a. Gaahl) were in bruisers Gorgoroth, Wardruna’s six studio albums, of which Birna (By Norse/Sony Music) is the latest, have only tenuous musical connections to the art form. When the group—Selvik, Espedal and singersongwriter Lindy-Fay Hella of synth-pop duo Ullan Gensa—formed in 2003, they were powered by contemplation, not haste. Selvik (and Espedal) delved headlong into the runes, conceptualizing, researching, living, and interpreting the various forms and the stories they told. The Wardruna sigil, a proto-Norse set of runes bound and then forged into a single graphical representation, is one of many products of their inculcation. While the bind rune had (and likely still has) several connotations for Selvik, it translates to “Warden of runes/secrets/knowledge.” “From my first recording [with Wardruna], it took me seven years to create the first album,” recounts Selvik. “I worked with Kristian and Lindy only a few times during the early period. So, Wardruna was my thing. For most of what I’ll call the pre-album years, though, Kristian was there, talking to me and being the person I could throw ideas at and discuss things with. We share a lot of the same interests in the themes that I’d put into Wardruna. Towards the end of this early period, Kristian became more involved, doing vocals.” “We had this idea of creating Wardruna in the surroundings or elements of what could be represented through different runes,” Espedal says. “Immediately, we thought it’d be almost impossible to execute, at least as far as recording it. As I remember, we didn’t think about the music too much or how it would end up. The music was more of a symbolic representation of the runes. When it eventually turned into a studio project, I wasn’t surprised, though. Recording outside at different locations was always a challenge.” For Hella, Wardruna was a new beast entirely. When she was young, her older brother played her American pop singers Connie Francis and Brenda Lee. Though she was shy, her brother urged her to 60 : SEPTEMBER 2023 : DECIBEL

sing. Hella eventually found her muse, shedding her coy demeanor. She could have easily become a painter—Hella wanted to go art school in England before life dictated otherwise—but instead scouted the clubs in Bergen, playing in and collaborating with various non-metal affiliated bands. While Hella was known for her singing abilities, it was with Ullan Gensa—featuring Wardruna’s

We’re Norwegian, the music is by Norwegians and we sing in Norwegian, but that doesn’t mean it’s Norwegian. The music is from and touches nature— everyone relates to it.

AMAZINGLY, PEOPLE GET SO MUCH OUT OF WARDRUNA WITHOUT TRANSLATING. LINDY-FAY HELLA current live-band percussionist/vocalist Arne Sandvoll—where she first collided unbeknownst with an eager and open-minded Selvik. “Einar had heard about me through Kristian,” says Hella. “Einar came to one of my synth duo [Ullan Gensa] concerts. We had five concerts in total, and Einar was at one of them, but I didn’t know he was there. Then, I got a phone call from him asking if I’d like to sing something. That’s typical Bergen, though—musicians always helping one another out. At first, I thought, ‘OK, let’s see what this is.’ I hadn’t heard his music until I was at his place. For me, it was freedom. For example, on ‘Bjarkan,’ I could sing whatever I wanted over the stretch of music he had created. He told me what the song was about, and I traveled there in my mind. He said the lyrics were based on Old Norse traditions, but I misunderstood him. I thought he meant the Vikings, F E B 2 0 25 |

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which is understandable, but I had no idea about them [historically]. I remember telling Einar he should get someone else, but he didn’t care. He wanted my energy in his music.” Espedal exited ahead of the conclusion of the Runaljod trilogy, Ragnarok, in 2015, but not before Wardruna ignited fiery imaginations of not just Norwegians but the rest of the world, their Nordic-themed folk music based on runes and skaldic traditions hitting hearts with unparalleled force. The spark might’ve been the group’s debut live gig at the insistence of battle-scarred scene vet Anders Odden (of Cadaver fame) at the Viking Ship Museum in Bygdøy in 2009 or Selvik’s inclusion in Trevor Morris’ Vikings soundtrack (as well as a cameo in Season 3, Episode 7) in 2014, but those are high-water marks, not the gut-level, universal rhythm of compositions like “Heimta Thurs” and “Helvegen” (from Gap Var Ginnunga and Yggdrasil, respectively) that tirelessly worked its way into the marrow of multi-generational, transcontinental appeal. “Anders, who was working for the Inferno Music Conference, kicked me in the butt,” Selvik says. “I hadn’t really thought about taking Wardruna to the stage at all, and I never thought about performing in front of a Viking ship. That’s when this ‘old band’ feeling formed. We grew into being a live band, in a way. I remember thinking, ‘If this show doesn’t work out, it’s meant to be.’ I was adamant—if it went wrong, it’s one and done. During the first song I closed my eyes, and halfway through, I opened them to see bearded men crying. Here’s this weird music we were playing, but it had a real impact. I could tell Wardruna was resonating with people other than me. People believed in us from the beginning, but the growth was organic. What we’ve been able to do still surprises me.” “I would agree with Einar,” nods Hella, who’s been at Selvik’s side for the better part of two decades. “What I noticed almost immediately when Wardruna played live, and this goes back to our very first shows in Norway, is the audience response to our music is warm. There’s no coldness, no hatred, just a glow coming off them. I feel it onstage. Also, because we’re Norwegian, the music is by Norwegians and we sing in Norwegian, but that doesn’t mean it’s Norwegian. The music is from and touches nature—everyone relates to it. Amazingly, people get so much out of Wardruna without translating.” By “we,” Selvik means Espedal (formerly), Hella (currently) and his current live band of Sandvoll, Sondre Veland (drums, percussion, backing vocals), Eilif Gundersen (bukkehorn, lur, flute, backing vocals), HC Dalgaard (drums, percussion, backing vocals) and John Stenersen (mora-harp). Together, they and their handmade traditional instruments have transformed Wardruna into an international juggernaut. They’ve also become family—a sociological trait not unique to the Norwegians, but one reinforced

by the power of no and the reassurance that whatever Wardruna agree to, the family must be whole, flying in V-formation. “This [family] is a whole big process,” Selvik acknowledges. “Many factors go into deciding to do a thing or not. It’s not like it’s something I take lightly or just do. It’s a step-by-step process. It’s become a big production and quite a big extended family of a collective of really good people carrying their weight (and then some). Creating a healthy environment where you will spend a big part of your life is important. I’m very protective of that. Being a shitty person or doing shitty things is contagious. Being good has the same effect, so I focus on that as a priority. We create safe spaces for people to thrive in and want to play a part in. Wardruna becomes part of their lives, a good part of their lives.” “It’s important to take these people along,” says Füllemann, who encourages Selvik’s familyfirst approach. “When we book or arrange something, we always ask people first. There are certain periods when we know the family comes first. If a big thing is going on, then Wardruna’s not happening because if the percussionists are not there, it won’t work. We have a very considerate setup. Also, setting up a show isn’t just saying yes and showing up. We have a light designer, a production manager, a tour manager and, of course, Einar is involved in almost every aspect of the decision-making process.” Continuity and consistency are additional factors in Wardruna’s expansive pantheon of life, art, music, nature and culture. A little sleuthing in the cobwebs of the digital realm found this on the group’s website in 2007: “Wardruna is a Norwegian musical constellation set out to explore and evoke the depths of Norse wisdom and spirituality. Musically, Wardruna has its main focus on the cultic musical language found in the near-forgotten arts of galder, seidr and the daily acts of the cultic life, mixed with impulses from Norwegian/Nordic folk music and music from other Indigenous cultures.” Ain’t that the truth, then and now.

H OW the F OLK did this H APPEN Wardruna have found themselves in an interesting predicament. Before the invention of Tupperware, categorizing things in neat compartments was unnecessarily necessary. The group’s association with black metal—namely Gorgoroth, Jotunspor and Selvik’s infamous Peter Beste photograph of our man in corpsepaint on Kjellersmauet in Bergen—is persistent and pervasive. That’s never going away. Similarly, music industry folk have arduously and often with hilarious results, slotted the Norwegians into the rock category (nice try), the pagan folk genre (whatever that is) and the neofolk silo, a possible contender for the right fit, but it also comes with tenuous associations.

“That’s partly because we fall between the chairs,” Selvik says. “The press doesn’t know where to put us or how to relate to it until they see us live. We have what I’d call ‘Old Norse rapping,’ which isn’t what I’d call typical. But we’re not Viking music. We aren’t Bronze Age music. Wardruna is modern music. It sparks your imagination. That’s why I love classical music and have loved certain parts of traditional and historical music since I was very young. It’s visual—I can see it as I hear it.” “Wardruna is definitely at the helm of the new wave,” says acclaimed singer-songwriter and Wardruna superfan Chelsea Wolfe. “I think artists like Ethel Cain and Aurora are as well because they’re so unapologetically and openly themselves while creating some of the most beautiful and unique new music.” Certainly, metalheads have been privy to, comfortable with and respectful of the various offshoots of (extreme) metal-adjacent music. Cold Meat Industry, a label run by Brighter Death Now’s Roger Karmanik, has released some of the darkest, strangest and most confrontational music to date. Artists like In Slaughter Natives, Arcana, and Aghast have captivated masochists and sadists alike. Similarly, Release Entertainment, a defunct experimental music label under Relapse Records, ushered out albums by Amber Asylum, Trial of the Bow (a side project of diSEMBOWELMENT) and Tribes of Neurot (a companion project of Neurosis) to an open-eared F E B 2 0 25 |

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faithful. This is ages ago and only tangentially related to Wardruna’s aesthetic, but new trees have old branches. “It’s always cool to see music and projects that initially exist outside the box create their own box,” says Håvard Ellefsen, of Mortiis and Emperor fame. “I remember Andrea Haugen, who sadly passed away a while ago, who had her Hagalaz Runedance project at a time when this sort of music wasn’t as popular as it is now. I’m sure she would have been excited to see how something she helped start became appreciated at such a large scale. Even though I don’t think Mortiis was ever considered ‘pagan’ or strictly ‘atmospheric,’ musically, I happened upon enough of the same—or similar elements—that I crossed into that scene a little bit.” Talking to Selvik, Hella, Espedal and others, there’s a reason folk music of various strain and stripe is surging in popularity. It’s not just a notional thing, either. Wardruna’s combined sales have surpassed 250,000 units. Streams of folk music—both independent and on label— are in the tens of millions, with Wardruna’s “Lyfjaberg” video surpassing 70 million views alone. Artists like Eivør, Aurora, the Hu (who, by the time you read this, will have completed a stateside run with Iron Maiden) and Faun are also part of this desire for simpler, deeper meaning in music. The world is ever more frenetic, and, according to Selvik, there’s a need to reconnect with nature and step out of the DECIBEL : SEPTEMBER 2023 : 61

fast-footed life to clear the head and, more importantly, heal.

B E A R in MI ND From the Japanese and Quechuas to the Norwegians and Native Americans, the symbology of the bear has had and, in places, still has great significance. Long before anthrozoology was a term used by erudite folk, humans have studied animals to understand our place in the world. Strength, protection, calm, aggression and rebirth have long been associated with bears and their behaviors. For Selvik, they provided a focal point for the post-Kvitravn (2021) landscape. Instead of spreading concepts across a wide range of co-related themes—whether runic, animist or in-between—Wardruna’s seigneur centered on the bear, not by happenstance. While it would seem logical for Selvik to derive inspiration for Birna (or she-bear in Old Norse) from tales of hero Bödvar Bjarki, the metaphysical aspects of Fenrir’s restraints, or even jocular 4D chess moves on his old pal, Ivar—whose last name is Bjørnson (or “son of Bjørn” [a.k.a. bear])—he went up a different branch of the proverbial oak tree. “My music has always had nature in the center,” says Selvik. “A lot of people think it’s about the Viking Age and swords and warriors and whatnot. That’s understandable because our music was in [the TV show] Vikings. Our music is very much about nature and our relation to it, 62 : SEPTEMBER 2023 : DECIBEL

the beings there, and us being a part of that. On our latest album, Birna, I speak more directly and clearly about that.” Selvik’s Wardruna interests aren’t casual. Whether it’s researching, interpreting and living the runes to realize his Runaljod trilogy or partaking in scholarly discussions at the University of Oxford, the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Bergen, the Norwegian, who Bjørnson describes as “an academic,” digs deep. Birna is solely about the bear. From the opening heartbeats of “Hertan” to the rustic beauty of “Himinndotter” and the delicate nuances of “Hibjørnen” and the rug-cutting drive of “Skuggehesten,” Selvik’s bear comes to life and wanders the world, returning, as intended, to its torpor state. “I spent so much time studying the history of man and bear,” he says. “The traditions, ancient traditions we are no longer in contact with in any form. I also studied the problematic relationship between man and bear. Along the way, I realized at some point that this album needed a full-on contemporary perspective on things, at least more so than any of the other albums. It was also important to remove the human aspect of it as much as I could. The bear doesn’t need our cultural ornamentations to be its powerful and beautiful self, and the world doesn’t need another song about Berserkers or cool things like that. So, I stayed in the here and now to contemplate the rich material of F E B 2 0 25 |

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traditions, folklore, totemic images and star signs about the bear. “What created all of this, I asked myself? Rather than regurgitating some distant tradition with which I have no contact or any relevant bonds, I let the bear tell me. The traits of the bear are connected to the guardians of nature and Mother Earth. Simply, the rhythm of the bear is cyclic—it encompasses the whole cycle of life. The bear mirrors Mother Earth, at least in places on the planet where the variation of seasons is observable. The bear sleeps (or dies) and awakes (or is reborn) annually. You see this cyclic theme in the Old Norse traditions and all the great preserved myths.” Indeed, observations of the bear have benefited humanity, and our word associations have described elements of its behavior. Evidence of this is everywhere in language, discourse and place. The capital of Switzerland, Bern, is named after the bear, as the story goes. In Greek Myth, Callisto is punished into she-bear form and exiled to the stars by Zeus—see Ursa Major (“the Great Bear”). In Slavic languages, the word medved translates to bear, but its meaning is “mead eater,” a trait it shares with the Blackfoot peoples of the Blackfoot Confederacy in Montana and Alberta, Canada, whose Siksiká words for bear are kyıyo and pukksiko’yi, or “sticky mouth.” Selvik is spreading Wardruna’s raven-white wings far and wide with leitmotif on Birna. “It’s a universal human conclusion that the bear is a powerful creature—that’s truth,” says Robert Hall, a member of the Blackfeet Nation and Blackfeet Native American Studies Director at Browning Public Schools in Montana. “The bear is an omnivore, and we have a word, kyıyiinnimmay, for how we learned from the bear. When ethnographers heard about this, they thought, ‘Oh, these pesky little Indians—they’re so superstitious.’ Yet, watching the bear and seeing it eating berries was common sense. If the bear can eat berries, then we can. We learned to live through observation. “Bears have patience, but they can also be aggressive. Our word for bear is kyıyo, or powerful jaw, but that’s just speculation. It’s a very old word. There’s another word for bear, pukksiko’yi, which is used by societies who don’t want to say kyıyo because it’s such a powerful word. I’m not sure how it was with people in Einar’s country back then, but we call Ursa Major or the Big Dipper the Seven Brothers, or kitsiikamiiks. They ascended to spoo”tsim, the celestial realm because their sister turned into a bear and chased them there.” “Bears exist in our mythology,” adds Nicholas Rink, another member of the Blackfeet Nation and teacher at the Buffalo Hide Academy for Browning Public Schools. “We have a lot of stories about them. We have stories about individuals being in trouble, running from an enemy, encountering a bear on the trail and making

a treaty with the bear, saying, ‘If you protect me and if you stop these guys chasing me, then we won’t hunt you again after this.’ The story is long and complicated, but the Blackfeet rarely hunted bears. If they did, then most likely, the purpose was to take a hide and use it in a ceremony to represent the bear. To bring the bear into our ceremonies, we would take their hides, tan them, and wear or dance with them. So, if we were to kill a bear, it was to honor it spiritually. Bears definitely weren’t a food source for us. We had an honorable relationship with them as well as we could.” Comparative mythology is the collegiate term, but there’s a reason ancient cultures across different generations and geographies shared similar views of their environs and how those views influenced their interaction with the physical and ascension to the spiritual worlds. We used to be closer to nature, revere it and respect it before we sought to bend it to our respective wills. So, in a way, Wardruna’s upcoming performance at the Fire in the Mountains Festival in 2025 parlays into Selvik’s wide-angled, slow-moving plan. He isn’t just aiming to bring Nordic musical traditions at the behest of Firekeeper Alliance Director Charlie Speicher (along with several co-directors, one of which includes Steve Von Till of Neurosis fame) to the Blackfeet Nation, where the festival will be held, but to bridge a timeless gap and more deeply understand the bear. “It’s not only Native American animist traditions who saw the bear as a teacher,” Selvik says. “The Blackfeet people are similar to the Old Norse people, I think. They saw the cycle of life, death and rebirth in Mother Nature, and they respected it. When we met with the Blackfeet people, I could see how their philosophy, concept of nature and the bear align with what we’re doing in Wardruna. This experience will be so much more than a concert for us.”

songs like “Thur” (from Gap Var Ginnunga), “Andvevarljod” (from Kvitravn) and “Lyfjaberg” (from a single pre-dating, but included on Birna) out of the Norwegian. “Growing organically is important,” Selvik says. “You create much stronger roots if you allow whatever you’re growing to take the time it needs. Stimulating it—in a false way—leads to symptoms later on. Nature is a very good teacher. Also, the sound patterns of nature do something to me. My music is about capturing something from whatever I’m trying to express, letting the theme be the composer and me be the instrument. Hunting for sounds is a part of my process.”

WAL K like a N ORWE G I AN

EINAR SELVIK

There’s no mystical panacea to Selvik’s writing process in Wardruna. Like any other song in the history of the universe, it starts with instinct. His approach, however, is singular. During the Runaljod trilogy phase, the songman started with the Elder Futhark and proto-Norse runes, letting them tell their story, inspiring instrument, tempo and tone, and imparting their esoteric energy into written form. In fact, this is something Bjørnson learned from Selvik, applying the runic-first system to Enslaved’s “Heimdal” off last year’s Top 40-ranking Heimdal. Inspiration isn’t limited to right-angled character sets, though. Instruments, including the Lur, Langeleik and Kraviklyra, and poetry, with the Völuspá from the Poetic Edda as Selvik’s alltime favorite, belong to his inspirational arsenal. Wardruna’s chief creative catalyst is nature. Sounds (thunder ranks high), smells (burning wood) and overall rugged beauty coax well-loved

“I use runes as part of my magical endeavors, for incantations, scrying, inner and outward projection,” says Sean Kratz, of Ohio-based dark folk music outfit Osi and the Jupiter, who is also a “big fan” of Wardruna. “The use of bind runes tell a story in a mythical stance; [they] also help with what someone would like to achieve or connect with. Their meanings change to me by their intention at the moment. Spiritual working is a lifelong journey, no matter what path lies before someone.” Biophilia sounds like a Colorado-based death metal band, but it isn’t. The term, which means “appreciating (or adoring) nature,” is scientific, but it’s an integral part of our internal code. Apart from bed bug bites, frostbite or our wicked addiction to objects originating from digital bytes, Mother Nature is plenty remarkable.

The press doesn’t know where to put us or how to relate to it until they see us live. We have what I’d call ‘Old Norse rapping,’ which isn’t what I’d call typical. But we’re not Viking music. We aren’t Bronze Age music

WARDRUNA IS MODERN MUSIC.

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Norwegians, as a general rule, treat friluftsliv, a portmanteau coined by beloved Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen in his Paa Vidderne (or On The Heights) poem, as gospel. This idea of “free-air living” or “open-air living” is so deeply ingrained, it’s now more potent than the Church of Norway. Selvik also imbibes heavily in friluftsliv, taking hours-long walks, often with his trusty Labrador Retriever, as part of Wardruna’s raison d’être. The main goal is to get lost, literally and metaphysically, off-trail to find his muse, whatever the cost. “I don’t live on the West Coast anymore,” says Selvik. “I live in Eastern Norway along the coast. I don’t have mountains and fjords, but I have the fjords, or the sea at least, a typical coastal landscape—beautiful. I agree that many people see the value of being outdoors and spending time in nature, but rushing in there with full-on music in your ears means you’re not being present, aware of where you are, or observing what’s around you. That’s probably not helpful. The idea is to connect to something bigger than yourself. It’s powerful when you go to the ocean, feel the wind thrash against you, and see the horizon. It’s that space I want to be in—always. My creative process starts in nature. For example, it took me several years to learn what I needed and how to say it with Birna.” Prolific Faroese singer-songwriter Eivør Pálsdóttir (professional name, Eivør), who played “Helvegen” (among others) with Selvik and the Danish National Symphonic Orchestra, has a similar view. “For me, creativity and nature go hand-in-hand. When I am alone in nature, I get that feeling of being just a small part of an endless circle. The nature of where I grew up has all those big and powerful emotions and big contrasts—the softness and harshness, the bright light and the deep dark. Sometimes, it can embrace you like a whisper, and sometimes, it can shake you up like a storm. Being alone in nature always puts my mind in a certain mood and creates space for creativity to flow.” Recording out in the wild isn’t for the faint of heart. While Selvik would like to use and try to record the sounds he hears on his constitutional walks, the practice of it, as Espedal alluded to earlier, is problematic. Wardruna have played live extramurally, though. That task is logistically more complicated, but more practical. Performances at Kirkhelleren På Sanna on the islands of Træna, Norway, and the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, went without incurring Magna Mater’s wrath. So, putting the vagaries and might of nature into a studio recording is the challenge. To harness its dynamism and make it impactful, whether streaming or on hi-fi nerdery, is a familiar routine now, but it always comes with the fun of working with audio specialist Iver Sandøy, a frequent Wardruna guest vocalist, shepherd of Solslottet Studio in Bergen and Enslaved drummer. DECIBEL : SEPTEMBER 2023 : 63

“I wanted the production to be alive,” says Selvik, the mastermind behind Birna’s sonics. “I wanted it to breathe some, but at other times be more intense and dense. In a way, I’m painting a picture. I always do conceptual albums, but I think this album makes sense to listen to it as a whole. It’s conceptual and symphonic, especially the way the songs borrow from each other musically and poetry-wise—like a journey. It’s not paved flat and straight. Birna is more like nature: up and down, with surprises and cracks. It’s not perfect, not square. Iver is a person I’ve been working with for many years now. He knows me, I know him, and he understands what I want to do and how I envision things. And at the same time, his attention span is incredibly impressive in terms of recording.” “For Birna, as with previous collaborations (aside from Skald), it has been more a case of Einar bringing some of the songs over to my studio with an already set direction,” Sandøy adds. “Often, Lindy and I worked on her vocals with Einar on call, but for this album, there were a few songs where he wanted my input more, giving us the opportunity and need to be in the same room again. As for my production contributions, in many cases, that can be just confirming that what he has already been doing is great.” As Selvik says, Birna’s voice took years to be heard and understood. The album’s capper, the indrawn yet propulsive “Lyfjaberg,” starring our man and Hella in spellbinding polyphony, saw the light of day in 2020. Indeed, the album’s formative ghost followed patiently, prompting an enterprise of music, prose and art, opportune and 64 : SEPTEMBER 2023 : DECIBEL

inconvenient. Songs like “Hertan” and “Birna” didn’t flash into existence. They swayed and hailed to Selvik from afar, inviting the rhythm of life and irrationality of heart into Wardruna’s circle. The posterior of Birna is rife with long exhales, some idyllic and naked, like Hibjørnen” and “Tretale,” others grandiose and storming, like “Himinndotter” and “Skuggehesten.” All arrived at Wardruna after time, a bear wandering in early summer searching for a mate.

MARAT HO N not a S PRIN T Life comes fast. So, too, does the temptation of success. Despite Selvik’s inclusion in the ultrapopular Vikings series, the Grammy-winning soundtrack to the billion-dollar selling Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla video game, charting in top positions—Ragnarok hit #1 and Kvitravn landed at #3 on Billboard’s World Music and U.S. Top New Artist Album charts, respectively—everywhere, and Wardruna picking off dream-gig locations, like the Ancient Theater in Plovdiv, Bulgaria and the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado, the ancient thoroughfare to the present hasn’t been without two decades of patience, diligence and commitment. Plus, riding the wave has never held water in Selvik, Wardruna or By Norse’s camp. “We’ve been cooking up this stuff on our own,” Bjørnson says, citing By Norse and Wardruna’s self-sufficiency. “We got our own sites, and we operate differently from what I would call a traditional record label. I consider myself lucky to have been hanging around it [and Wardruna], though. It also helps [that] Wardruna are more popular than Phil Collins now.” F E B 2 0 25 |

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“When I first learned to sing, my brother wouldn’t give up on me,” Hella says. “I remember he said, ‘I know that you are going to be on big stages when you are older, and you will sing all over the world.’ At the time, I thought he was joking.” Universal is anything and everything. Often, it’s depicted as something cold and unrelatable. Last count, 200 billion trillion stars stretch across 93 billion light years in the universe— hard to even fathom. For Wardruna, the appeal is similar, but instead of lifeless and inhospitable, it’s warm and inviting. Selvik thinks his band of Norwegians have the gravitas they do because they have a universal heartbeat. That their intent is pure. The positively explosive reactions to Birna’s three singles, “Hertan,” “Himinndotter” and “Hibjørnen,” reflect that. “Surprise is perhaps not the right word,” says Selvik. “I never get used to it [the response]. When you put your music out there, you give it away. It lives its own life, and you never know how it will resonate with people. So, I’m very humble about those things. I don’t take anything for granted. It’s, of course, moving to see that it resonates with a lot of people, but it’s about being content where you are—that’s the most important thing. You can easily start feeding your ego with your success. Stay humble. Stay grateful. And be aware of where you put your focus and your motivation for doing what you do. For me, when I create music, I create music for myself. I create music I wanna hear, period. Whatever comes after that is a bonus.”

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INSIDE ≥

68 ABANDONS Instrumental but not instrumental 68 CRYPTIC BROOD Torn from the womb 69 GOLGOTHAN REMAINS Rechristening the afterbirth 69 MÖRK GRYNING From orcs, not Ork 70 SARCATOR The law of chaos

Out of the Flames

FEBRUARY

Unforeseen circumstances

Every effort made

6 1

Unable to overcome

No refunds

ALL THE NOISE THAT FITS

In Flames offshoot THE HALO EFFECT burn bright on second jester race

IN 8

flames have one of the most complicated legacies of any act whose singer never shouted “white power” onstage. They helped invent Gothenburg death metal and put out three breathtaking bullet rides (The Jester THE HALO Race, Whoracle and Colony), any or all of which could be in the EFFECT Decibel Hall of Fame. Then they shit the bed so badly that nobody March of cares if we ever put them there. Although I’ll forever defend Claythe Unheard NUCLEAR BLAST man as a deft commercial turn (and my gateway album into death metal), their output in the 21st century mostly served as Hot Topic playlist filler. ¶ Well, if you missed In Flames, In Flames apparently missed In Flames even more. Not the guys currently in In Flames—they seem happy with the band’s direction, and Foregone was a solid later-career entry. Five of the wayfarers who rotated through their extensive roster did, though. Enter the Halo Effect. ¶ You can’t really call them a supergroup when they’re all from the same band, but the Halo Effect’s lineup spans In Flames’s entire history. Mikael Stanne from Dark Tranquillity, who lent his growls

ILLUSTRATION BY MARK RUDOLPH [MARKRUDOLPH.COM]

DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2025 : 67

to debut The Lunar Strain, brings a deeper, more controlled ferocity here. Bassist Peter Iwers and drummer Daniel Svensson, who joined for 1999’s Colony, lock in the rhythm section organically. Niclas Engelin, who performed on their lateteens records, guides this act capably. Finally, Jesper Strömblad provides the jewel in this jester cap; his melodic guitar leads defined the first 20 years of In Flames’ existence and still thrill. That’s a lot of experience embodying the invisible. Frankly, this may be the most overqualified tribute act in metal. It might be unfair to compare the Halo Effect solely to their common source, but it’s also not inaccurate. With Strömblad more involved in the writing process this time around, the guitar interplay sounds extremely familiar—especially when it’s isolated on instrumental tracks like “This Curse of Silence” and “Coda.” Thankfully, while debut Days of the Lost felt like everyone figuring out how to connect their clouds, March of the Unheard serves delicious food for the gods. “Detonate,” “Conspire to Deceive” and the title track could all sit comfortably on Colony. Which is maybe the highest compliment you could pay a project like this—these don’t feel like throwaway or leftover riffs. So, yeah, this sounds like a platonic ideal of good In Flames, before they started adding the industrial and metalcore shit. If In Flames themselves had continued making material that sounded like this, this might feel redundant. As it is, while there’s been no shortage of pinball mappers since the Gothenburgers first broke through the Moonshield, sometimes it takes the originals to remind you why the band was no ordinary story in the first place.

takes a pretty wild swing, inserting a sample that sounds like a family member having a QAnon-induced crisis over moody guitar playing. It provides an unlikely build for the band to lay in a cathartic, heavy riff as they pound through its conclusion. The samples continue as “New Mysteries” layers a woman’s voice discussing the nature of consciousness after death over itself, while the band locks in on an extremely meditative drone. It gets peaceful to the point where it stops resembling a metal act and more closely sounds like something Casino Versus Japan or Squarepusher might produce. But they still make the decision to close things out on a heavier note with “Smiling in the Midst of Two Armies.” The song feels like the band trying to let listeners know every direction and which way they can go, from a black metal-inspired turn at the end of the first quarter to a feedback-soaked conclusion jam. Still, each new chapter and turn hits at the platonic ideal of what postmetal is all about, expressing genuine emotion through music and music alone. Sampling Oppenheimer’s “Now I Am Death” speech at the end is a little too on-the-nose for our tastes, but still, it leads to the most impactful moment of the record, so maybe obviousness is okay sometimes. Which is how the record feels as a whole. —JOHN HILL

CRYPTIC BROOD

Necrotic Flesh Bacteria WAR ANTHEM

What’s eating you?

—JEFF TREPPEL

ABANDONS

Liminal Heart S I G N A L B LO O M

What we all came to not particularly need

Is there still more ground to be covered in the world of instrumental, atmospheric heavy metal in the lane of Pelican and Isis? Perhaps we’re living in a post-post-metal world, and it’s time for those massively lush soundscapes to make a long-awaited return. Denver’s Abandons take their shot at bringing that golden age back. The trio proudly wears their influences on their sleeve (hell, one of the members is rocking a Sunbather shirt front and center in their promo photo), but there are enough formulaic tweaks to make Liminal Heart a nice addition for folks who love this stuff. Opener “Habitats” 68 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

Whoever wrote Cryptic Brood’s bio really did them a solid by describing them as “maniacs.” I’ve always loved that; like “support these Dutch maniacs!” or “blistering fastcore maniacs!” Gets me hyped every time. If you’re not a maniac, are you even making extreme metal? This prolific German trio lives up to the diagnosis on their third full-length Necrotic Flesh Bacteria. Their mania is fixated, unblinking, on fetid, doomedout death metal, and the huge, live-sounding recording lets you hear every strained vocal cord, bulging eye, and bursting blood vessel loud and clear. Autopsy are Cryptic Brood’s most obvious ancestors, particularly their 1991 opus Mental Funeral, perhaps the album that best captures the vibe of earliest Black Sabbath in pure death metal songs. Cryptic Brood have a wider and more extreme palette of doom influences to include—and they do, like when “Digging Into

Skin” morphs from the muscle and malevolence of prime Dismember to funeral doom—but the alternately swinging and staggering rhythms, loud-and-clear bass, and general aura of scuzz keep one gangrenous foot firmly planted in 1970. All three members share mic duty. Not sure who’s who, but two have death-grunts of varying depth and grit and typically tackle the slow parts, while our third guy has a panicked rasp he typically deploys over the frantic, D-beating fast parts to add to the urgency. This vocal variety is cool on an album with just a couple of musical modes, and especially when all three come together, like the slow part of opener “Acrid Fumes,” or the end of “Realm of Rot.” Also cool: having such a goregrind album title and then having doom parts all over it. This is sick. —ANTHONY BARTKEWICZ

DEMON BITCH

Master of the Games G AT E S O F H E L L

Come out and play

A fun little fact about early-’80s heavy metal is that many underground bands knew what kind of music they wanted to write and record, but because of their limited exposure to what the nascent genre was accomplishing—to say nothing of lack of budget and studio know-how—the resulting music often felt idiosyncratic, even alien. Forty years later, younger musicians have all the tools and back catalog at their disposal to learn the many tricks of the trade, so much so that there’s no real reason to ever throw the metaphorical spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. Every once in a while, though, a new album comes out that—intentional or not—captures the messy appeal of those vintage sounds. And it’s irresistible. Following in the footsteps of Manilla Road’s Crystal Logic and Halloween’s Don’t Metal With Evil—two patently unclassifiable ’80s gems—Detroit’s Demon Bitch throw all rules and conventions out the window on Master of the Games. Proto-thrash palm-mutes commingle with nimble twin harmonies that veer from Wishbone Ash to Helloween in the blink of an eye. Celtic melodies are offset with moments of occult mystique, as singer Logon Saton wails and howls maniacally like Nasty Ronnie auditioning for a role in Sweeney Todd. What feels messy at first quickly wriggles into your head, and by the time “Tower of Dreams” and “Soldiers of Obscurity” roll around, you’re invested in the earnestness of it all. It’s charming as hell. —ADRIEN BEGRAND

GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR

“No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead” C O N S T E L L AT I O N

Godspeed You! Brown Emptier

The album title offers little room for interpretation—it’s a reference to the number of Palestinians reported to have died during the first five months of Israeli strikes in Gaza. This is not an unprecedented move for the proudly political Canadian collective, but it may be Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s most effective piece of agitprop yet. In this case, they are using album and song titles to specifically put a “voice” to instrumental compositions and convey what time signatures, ponderous bridges or lush arrangements might not. Substituting a gravestone for a title is meant to have you approach “No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead” from a profoundly uncomfortable place. It’s also a rejection of the “legacy” that the band’s rabid fans have imposed on it, trading bombast for a more triumphant, major key sound. GY!BE’s eighth studio album unfolds much like a film soundtrack, with obvious touchstones like Angelo Badalamenti’s work with David Lynch, as well as all three parts of The Qatsi Trilogy scored by Philip Glass. This is made indelible on the opening track “Sun Is a Hole Sun Is Vapors,” and presented as a dramatic throughline on the first three songs, all of which feel pretty warm and inviting, with shimmering strings and major chords. The back half is where this album takes a more dramatic turn, evoking some of the sturm und drang of the band’s more celebrated releases. Yet even the closer “Grey Rubble—Green Shoots” pivots at the 3:30 mark, steering back towards an expectant and hopeful vantage point, contributing to a “statement” album that doesn’t feel overwrought or overworked. —NICK GREEN

GOLGOTHAN REMAINS

Bearer of Light, Matriarch of Death DARK DESCENT

When Methuselah met Sally

Shrinkflation is a dirty word in Golgothan Remains’ vocabulary. While your candy bars get smaller, but rise in price, this Australian death metal institution gives you more, turning in a dynamic, high-concept EP comprising four epic tracks that all come together with a story to tell—and there’s even an unholy subversion of

Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam as cover art to set the scene. As guitarist Matt Hillman explains, Bearer of Light, Matriarch of Death is a doomed love story about centuries-old creatures who are trying to find companionship, but because the evil spirit is so strong in them, they just can’t be together. And, please, don’t even suggest dating apps; even the VCR is too modern for our protagonists. So, this is where the melancholy comes from, this supernatural longing manifesting itself in doomy, slack-tempo passages, tension building as the coming storm of double-kicks, riffs and blasts gathers. If you’re unfamiliar with Golgothan Remains, firstly, do check out their superlative 2022 fulllength, Adorned in Ruin, and secondly, yes, the name of the band is a nod to Incantation, who remain a lodestar for this kind of sound. But there are all kinds of influences brought to bear on this, largely from death metal’s more atmospheric practitioners, Immolation, Abyssal et al. Those complex, audacious compositions—not to mention the electric dissonance that spikes these tracks—calls to mind post-Vermis Ulcerate. “Methuselah” opens the EP like that, all fizz and raw-nerve guitar. Greg Chandler of Esoteric’s production is on point. Doom’s bleakness and black metal’s totalizing darkness leaches into their sound, so when the blasts do arrive, they are all the more pummeling. —JONATHAN HORSLEY

MÖRK GRYNING

Fasornas Tid

SEASON OF MIST

Mörk ‘n’ Grindy

Mörk Gryning are among the “put-it-on-my-mama” elite when it comes to ingenious harmonic arrangements. The band violently turned my head with their shit-hot, 2005 self-titled record, an album which includes moments of contrapuntal melody so arresting and shrewdly crafted that they’ll knock your booties clean off your body (yes, with your stupid feet still in them). And I do use the word “melody” quite intentionally; we’re talking an Ihsahn-in-hisprime knack for harmonic structures that are haunting and eccentric without compromising their undeniable extremity. The band managed an exquisite wire walk. Following a protracted hiatus, they finally returned with 2020’s Hinsides Vrede, which divulged a different brand of melodicism, the sort that prizes sweeping grandeur and slick accessibility, resulting in tunes that are generally less idiosyncratic and far more sympathetic to late-’90s Ancient/Cradle of Filth styled

pageantry. Fasornas Tid predictably continues in that vein with a windswept, gothic élan and a production so varnished that it’s a wonder my headphones didn’t shoot right off my ears during the opening track. The good news is that the sharp counterpoint remains, the production’s technically fabulous and the performances crush. Drummer CarlGustaf Bäckström, (a.k.a. C-G) delivers an uninventive, but jaw-droppingly meticulous spectacle (an admittedly small disappointment for fans of his work in C.B Murdoc’s Here Be Dragons, an album that is to tech-metal what Dark Angel’s Leave Scars was to ’80s thrash.) The occasional quirky patterns emerge (note the eerie bridge to the otherwise trite “Savage Messiah”), the clever orchestration remains (entirely abetted by the album’s roomy sound-design) and honestly, the more open-and-shut melodicism is likely a wise career move; I can easily envision a track like “Black Angel” dominating Spotify playlists. So, no, it ain’t Fasornas “Mid,”… but it also ain’t for me. —FORREST PITTS

NECKBREAKKER

Within the Viscera NUCLEAR BLAST

On the verge of a breakkthrough

There’s nothing wrong with Danish death metal upstarts Neckbreakker’s debut album Within the Viscera. It blasts where it needs to blast, grooves where it needs to grooves, packs walloping riffs and rhythms, slows down and speeds up appropriately, and will likely leave you with a sore neck. If you’ve been into the latest offerings from bands like Skeletal Remains and Baest, this is for you. I realize that isn’t a glowing endorsement, but it’s not a criticism either. Neckbreakker debuted with an album that fits right in with bands that have been at it for years, and I assure you that it’s in rotation at my house as you're reading this. The problem is that Neckbreakker haven’t found their voice yet. It’s perfectly furious, raging death metal, and I’m sure it’ll land them plenty of tour opportunities within and without Denmark. The only true drawback of Within the Viscera is its production. For all its temper and furor, the guitars feel a little fuzzy and the drums thrash about in a seemingly muffled fashion. Neckbreakker are here to break necks, not violently bend them. Regardless, I look forward to watching Neckbreakker grow as a band. If they continue to hone their craft and forge their own sound, they could be a truly powerful force one album later. —GREG KENNELTY DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2025 : 69

PATRIARKH Пророк Илия

Tush push | N A PA L M

With the Batushka intellectual property ownership finally settled following a protracted legal battle between former comrades Krzysztof Drabikowski and Bartłomiej Krysiuk (the former coming out victorious), Krysiuk has now rebranded his version of the melodic black metal band as Patriarkh. It has been a confusing time for fans of Bathuska’s 2015 breakout debut, Литоургиiа (Litourgiya), as two versions of the Polish act released records in the intervening years to various levels of praise, derision and online memes. Patriarkh’s official debut, Пророк Илия (Prophet Elijah in English), is now upon us, however, and like commentary between Abbath’s solo work and Immortal’s LPs since he left, Patriarkh’s music will be compared against the material released by all versions of Bathuska. Shrewdly, man-mountain vocalist Krysiuk and his current instrumentalists have taken

NOGOTHULA

Telluric Sepsis B LO O D H A R V E S T

Everything sounds like everything else (and everything is fine)

Nogothula’s debut full-length is a good example of how it’s still possible to not factor originality into your sound without it being a detriment. No, this Cincinnati quartet (grown from an original trio) won’t be topping any year-end lists or wowing any explorers of metal’s outer fringes, but as soon as you’re plunged into the chug ‘n’ churn of their “cosmic horror”-based slamming death metal, you’ll feel instantly at home. The relentlessness of Pierced From Within, the oblique dissonance of Obscura, a certain Belphegorian black/death overlap, and even the surprising agile density that Nile have mastered are all more than hinted at on opener “Chaospore.” Sure, everything is derived from something else, and while “derivative” is in general an unpleasant description for a new record, the sheer quality and addictiveness 70 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

a slightly augmented path for Patriarkh, going in a more folk-laden direction, greatly accentuating polyphony and choirs while maintaining prior black metal and doom signifiers. The debut has a concept, too: exploring the life of Eliasz Klimowicz, an illiterate peasant and eventual self-proclaimed prophet of the Orthodox Grzybowska Sect. Russian Orthodoxy is littered with such sects and redeemers, but Patriarkh’s thematic base here cries out for world-building through ceremonial soundscapes, male/female liturgical chants and an array of non-metal instruments (from tagelharpa, mandolin and mandocello to hurdy-gurdy and stringed dulcimer), plus a symphony orchestra. The filmic results have more in common with Heilung or Wardruna than most BM, yet Patriarkh do retain requisite bite when the narrative calls for it. —DEAN BROWN

Telluric Sepsis provides allows them to get away with it rather elegantly. While their songwriting is strong, Nogothula could certainly do with some variation. Even if different levels of the aforementioned influences can be detected throughout, they’re all quite uniform, and it’s hard to pick clear highlights or even deviations that distinguish the album from a relatively straight line of intensity and impact. Still, it’s a promising debut, and hopefully time will help them find a greater degree of individuality and a more distinct personality in their approach. —JOSÉ CARLOS SANTOS

PESTILENT HEX

Sorceries of Sanguine & Shadow DEBEMUR MORTI PRODUCTIONS

What they do in the shadows

In the foggy wilderness of black metal genre classifications, there’s a thin boundary between

melodic and symphonic styles. Casting Pestilent Hex as a “symphonic” band is basically a shortcut forewarning traditional bullet-belters that gothic organs are gonna bat-flap their way. But this project from two of Finland’s nastiest death metal minds—Lauri Laaksonen of Desolate Shrine and Corpsessed’s Matti Mäkelä—doesn’t dawdle in the cemetery wearing puffy shirts. Pestilent Hex’s second LP, Sorceries of Sanguine & Shadow, will teleport listeners through oceans of time and plop them into the second-wave winterscape of Emperor’s In the Nightside Eclipse. After the obligatory two-minute Hammer Horror piano intro, the album quickly relegates synths to a support role as guitars rule the roost. “Through Mirrors Beyond” stands out in the first half with blast beats that feel like they’re digging a tunnel to the underworld. Mäkelä’s vocals are fiery snarls and full-throated howls with the nocturnal conviction to make a motherfucker believe in vampires. As hard as Side A rips, the album’s black magick shines in the second half. “A Spectral Voyage” begins with a mid-paced stomp that sounds heavier and more haunted than anything on their debut, The Ashen Abhorrence. “Threnody of the Moon Ascendant” prioritizes ambience over riffs while warping into a memorable midnightmare. Then there’s the dynamic and evocative 10-plus-minute closing epic “Sanguine Gnosis,” which shapeshifts through the shadows while indulging the band’s most cinematic widescreen aspirations. While their reverence for the past is undeniable, this isn’t a project with shallow mimicry on its breath. Thanks to Laaksonen’s production and the meaty mastering of Dave Otero, there’s a muscular immediacy to their sound that implies they feast in darker and dirtier castles than vintage Dimmu. —SEAN FRASIER

SARCATOR

Swarming Angels & Flies CENTURY MEDIA

Sting first, ask questions later

Anyone remember swarming? You know, like when a group of roving ne’er-do-wells descend on a helpless innocent and rat pack ’em? That’s pretty much the vibe on youthful Swedish quartet Sarcator’s third full-length, Swarming Angels & Flies. These Gen Alphas approach their progressive black thrash like fucking murder hornets whose nest was whacked with a baseball bat: relentlessly and with no care for personal wellbeing. If you survive the assault of the first three manic tracks, you’ll get a brief respite on the

less aggro “The Deep Ends” and “Where the Void Begins” before more buzzy insanity ensues. The crazy thing about these dudes is, as much as they seem to lead with manic ferocity, they manage to find some pretty swinging grooves to lean into, sprinkled amidst the fury. As such, Swarming Angels & Flies is filled with the unexpected, Sarcator never settling for the obvious move. Led by vocalist/guitarist Mateo Tervonen (son of the Crown guitarist Marko Tervonen), they come by their originality honestly, and though the easy thing would be to stick with the hyperactive thrash they seem to do so effortlessly, they somehow work hardcore, classic rock and post-punk noise into the mix as well. Definitely a buzz band for 2025. —ADEM TEPEDELEN

SVARTTJERN

Draw Blood SOULSELLER

Let it bleed

In the arms race of bands trying to out-depress each other, it’s easy to forget just how damn fun black metal can be when it taps into its thrash roots. Whether or not “fun” was on the agenda for Oslo’s Svarttjern with Draw Blood is up for debate, but between the extremely horny lyrics and their absolutely unhinged Rolling Stones cover, they make a strong case for throwing on some BM at your next rager. Things kick off pretty unassumingly, with a spoken word intro urging listeners to distance themselves from their past lives, leading right into

ripper “Determination.” But as the album rolls on, the band lets sweat melt away the corpsepaint in favor of riffs that genuinely rock. The title track is pure headbanger bliss, pivoting between ’90s black metal and ’80s thrash riffs on a dime, all driven by relentlessly punishing drumwork. Then there’s “Don’t Contain Your Lust,” a debaucherous anthem mixing in big rock choruses with an undeniable, thrusting momentum. And despite how out-there these moments are, the band never sounds like they’re doing a bit— it’s all played with complete sincerity. Which is exactly why something as wild as a full-blown Stones cover somehow works. Their take on “Under My Thumb” speeds up the original’s groove to a black metal tempo, transforming the iconic hook into a seriously tasty riff. Sure, there’s always room for ultra-depressive, introspective journeys into the human condition through black metal. But sometimes you just want to crack a beer, crank up some riffs and hail Satan in under three minutes. —JOHN HILL

VALDAUDR

Du Skal Frykte SOULSELLER

Gløgg of war

Nearly four years after Drapsdalen, Valdaudr return with Du Skal Frykte, a record that sharpens their sound without dulling their icy brand of Norwegian black metal. Dialing up both the production and the “Norway,” Du Skal Frykte hits hard with unmistakable bite—just without

sounding like it was recorded in a reindeer stable on a Walkman mic. It’s a homage to the early-’90s scene, channeling the atmospheric dread of Satyricon and Ulver while standing firmly on its own hooves. The ominous introduction of “...Og Jages Bort Fra Verden” gives way to the dark punch and sinister swing of single “Den Mørke Tronen.” “Herren Høster Liv” is a highlight, showcasing how each element breathes within the mix, giving Vald’s vocals (Blood Red Throne) and Død’s guitar work (Blood Red Throne, ex-Satyricon) space to cut through the dark. “Straffen For Dem Som Lokker Til Frafall” is the linchpin, setting the stage for “De Som Fortaeres Av Lengsel”— a personal favorite. Vald’s growls feel relentless, echoing through every track like a stubborn ghost. And Død’s riffs carry an eerie precision, capturing a deep-rooted sense of doom without sacrificing the album’s ferocity. Rhythmic folk jigs rise and fall naturally throughout the album, reaching a fever pitch on “Tilgi Dem Ikke.” Acoustic interludes, backed by Rune Nesse’s drumming, are another highlight, crashing into the main riffs like climateravaged fjords. These moments are well-placed, adding texture to the whiplash that carves brief, haunted pauses only to drag you right back into the storm. Each track flows seamlessly into the next, with no weak moments. Du Skal Frykte hits all the right notes: raw, atmospheric, zero concern for crossover appeal. This is a love letter to black metal’s core, delivered with all the grim, relentless energy it deserves. —TIM MUDD

KRYPTAN VIOLENCE, OUR POWER

SWEDISH BLACK METAL DEBUT FEAT. MATTIAS NORRMAN (EX-KATATONIA) & ALEXANDER HOGBOM (OCTOBER TIDE) FORMAT: CD / LP / DIGITAL. RELEASE DATE: 14TH OF FEBRUARY

STILL HOT: YOTH IRIA “BLAZING INFERNO”, SIDEREAN “SPILLING THE ASTRAL CHALICE”

WWW.EDGEDCIRCLEPRODUCTIONS.COM

DECIBEL : FEBRUARY 2025 : 71

EUGENE S. ROBINSON

HOLIDAYS OF THE

HATE WE LOVED YOU

know that thing

where you want to bathe in misery because the other ways of getting out of the tub of despair just don’t seem to be working? This is not so much a feeling as it is a response to a feeling, and so it goes that during the holidays, inevitably a downward trend line is triggered by articles declaring that it’s a seasonal deal and here are the 10 things you can do to cheer up. As if trying to cheer up actually works. It doesn’t, which is why my modus operandi has always been the exact opposite: locked in a trailer, eating stolen sauerkraut and Ritz crackers, and knowing that whatever Norman Rockwell shit happens this time of year doesn’t happen for some of us at all. And so? So, it was time to lock yourself in your unheated trailer with your shotgun and your cassette of Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast on perma-play, and plot. “I have an idea,” in the days when you had to call someone to 72 : FEBRUARY 2025 : DECIBEL

talk to them, I had. Not a cry for help, but a plot for the furtherance of personal misery, I called my German drummer at the time, and a plan was hatched. We were in full Easy Rider style, in the middle of a California winter, going to go to Mexico. By motorcycle. Little known fact is that I was so heavily influenced by this time and this record that the second tattoo I ever got on a body that now has more than 20 was Eddie from this cover. No one’s ever guessed that that’s what it is on my right bicep, but those with eyes to see could see that it was Eddie the Head. Tape ended, flipped it over. Ended, and flipped it over. Through cold and empty nights. Until finally, on a day that rained, again, we took off, the drummer behind me, and a duffel bag with a gun in it behind him. We made it to Ventura, stopped for dinner at the family house of Steve Ballinger, guitarist and co-founder of Whipping Boy, and listened closely to his father telling us to listen closely.

“Be careful down in Mexico,” he warned. “You may think you have nothing worth stealing, but poverty there is not like poverty here. That motorcycle, for example…” he trailed off. The point was made, and years later when three friends of my oldest daughters were shot to death in the town we were heading for, I would know that he wasn’t wrong. But Maiden and Eddie were in my head, muscling out any resistance I might have found to either depression or danger. We made it to Baja, and beyond, Rosarita. I picked a spot for us to sleep on what felt like the wet sand of a beach. Made a lean-to from a tarp and slept fitfully until dawn when it really started to rain. Which is when we awoke to find ourselves not on a beach, but in what could only be called a garbage dump. Dump dogs, wild strays, saw us stir and made for us as we scrambled back on the bike and tried to get out of a now increasingly muddy hill. “Run to the Hills” in my head

as the bike spun out in the sandy gravel and we could hear the snapping jaws of the dogs that were trying to right some kind of a wrong. The only way they knew how. Covered now in garbage dump mung and having no money for anything other than gas, we sat on a broken wall, in the rain and silence, and knew that it was unlikely that things would get much more… somehow, perfect, than this. “Hallowed Be Thy Name” is what I was humming when it dawned on both of us at almost the same time. “Hey man,” I smiled and nodded. “Happy Thanksgiving.” “Well, we don’t celebrate this in Germany, but OK.” He would later introduce me to the entire canon of the Scorpions, but I swear to God we never got any higher or any better than we were that day. And even if the holidays for me now are full of life and actual joy, surrounded as I sometimes am by people who love me, the total absence of that day in November in 1982 will stick with me forever. ILLUSTRATION BY ED LUCE

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