[RIFFS] #BehindScreenandSpeaker April 2025: Album Mini-Review Round-Robin.
With a brain that craves novelty in the day and age of inattention writ-large, I figured both audience and writer alike could do with one less simple listicle of recent releases (although those are totally fine, useful even).
The temptation’s always there, what with the impetus to provide coverage versus the constraints of both time, energy and the unrelenting swarm of new music being released lately - most of it high-calibre at baseline, too!
Instead, and in a similar vein to the recent AOTY 2024 articles - articles I still havent fully finished, ‘cause man’s busy out here running this place - heck, why not give a more personalised touch to the idea? Do a round-robin of mini-reviews/synopses of particular standout amongst the press-release promo-pile? Why not indeed, I say. You don’t get to boss me around, I’m 35yo and a big grown-up boy. Almost. One day.
And what any good child needs (man-children included) is a hearty and enriching sensory environment to help their cognitive and emotional development. Speaking of enrichment more seriously for a moment, I’m a massive advocate for promoting lesser-known creatives on this podcast/blog.
Broken record, but with the various creative industries effectively in various forms of fiscal shambles, it’s on us as community members to go punk-rock and take some of the music distribution/discourse back, eh?
And so, here’s my humble offering to you, Dear Readers, of my favourite picks from the press-release folder on our official email account. It’s part of the Behind Screen and Speaker series, which will culminate in some much bigger/meta discussions/podcast episodes and the like as we go.
Finally - yeah, we’re primarily a heavy/alternative-music focussed outlet here, however I’ve also made a point to do a broad spread within my palette of music tastes. Hopefully there’s something here which piques interest, but if not you’re more than welcome to leave a comment here/our socials and request coverage of specific genres! We don’t bite. Well, least from what I’ve heard and seen so far.
Peace, Love and Suffocation Under A Menagerie of Stank-Ass Riffs xoxo - Brady.
PRIMO PICKS FROM THE PRESS-RELEASE PILE: APRIL 2025 RELEASES
SLUNG - Limassol
Location: Brighton, UK
Label: Art as Catharsis/Fat Dracula Records
Release Date: 2nd May (yes, yes, wrong month but c’mon, close enough)
Genre: Experimental Power-Pop/Psych-Rock
For Fans Of: QOTSA, Baroness, Deftones, Kylesa
Synopsis:
Now this was an interesting one. Being peddled pretty hard by at least a few outlets, I was definitely initially drawn in by an initial listen. Occupying a similar sonic space to Australians Turtle Skull, these Brighton natives ply a brand of powerful, poppy, hook-laden alternative/indie-rock with some serious detours down a lot of winding musical corridors. One minute, you’re bopping to lilting choruses and harmonic hooks with a sheen so crisp it’d cut glass, the next you’re being slammed with a seriously heavy doom/post-metal sounding riff?!
Being a concept album based on theme of lost love in 90’s-era Cyprus, the album does a particularly great job of capturing that very specific brief quite capably - it’s both breezy, exotic and warm, with a dash of hard-hitting musical/lyrical melancholy to keep the entire framework placed on solid ground.
There’s a reason I’ve included these guys in several Heavy News features (such as our recent singles mini-roundup here); there’s an originality here that’s deserving of many more-clever good-words than a simple run-through will properly elucidate.
You can be the judge of such a statement right here and now - here’s the full-album stream, courtesy of Youtuber Rob Hammer:
Thought this was good musical juu-juu for your cochleas? You’re in luck, I have the album-order link right here!
LOOK! I’VE ‘SLUNG’ YOU THEIR LINKS, HAR-HAR:
Official: https://slungband.com
Instagram: https://instagram.com/s.l.u.n.g
Facebook: https://facebook.com/slungband
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@Slungband
Label: https://fatdracularecords.myshopify.com + artascatharsis.com.
2. FELGRAVE - Otherlike Darkness
Location: Norway
Label: Transcending Obscurity Records
Release Date: April 25th
Genre: Avant-Garde Blackened Death/Doom-Metal
For Fans Of: Weeping Sores, Bolzer, Dragged Into Sunlight, Arcturus
Synopsis:
Little bit confused by that FFO up there? Good, you should be; the avant-garde label isn’t just something to whack on anything outside the usual metal rubric to call it a day. Not in my books, anyway.
Nay, one-man merchant of what feels like a mind-warping intergalactic constellations’ worth of extreme-metal subgenres is back at it again with latest LP Otherlike Darkness. The album title alone acts in some small way to underscore the haunting, harrowing and psychedelic journey you’ll be taken on here, but it doesn’t properly do it justice.
With just three tracks total orbiting the 15-20 minute mark apiece, this is not an album you can easily digest while cursing the idiot who cut you off from the right-hand lane. It’s not exactly a music-slider-on-your-game-down play-and-listen affair. I say this as someone with an attention-deficit disorder - this one demands your attention. Heck, it’s a lights-off, headphones-on, phones-away experience, really. Don’t put too many sensory inputs between yourself and this album.
It’s a complex one, both in serpentine riff-changes and tonal dynamics, but also emotionally. In other words, a perfect album to chuck on while you try and existentially make some sense of whatever the hell kind of year 2025 has shaped up to be, thus far. It’s like Ulcerate and Cryptic Shift were left in the woods with Ihsahn and ICS Vortex for a month, and at the end of said month you come back to find a congealed, bombastic mass of dissonance, doom and beauty all in one.
Bonus brownie-points for ‘Straya inclusion - Brendan Sloan (of Convulsing/Altars fame) mixed this album, and the mastered result lends really well into the gritty dynamic offered by this skilled one-man outfit. Brendan’s own projects do act as a sort-of adjacent reference point to the album in question too, or at least that’d be correct if Felgrave wasn’t so uniquely out-there in its’ own right.
Apropos to drumming from Robin Stone (Evilyn, Norse), whose playing is powerfully impactful here.
One for the knuckle-draggin’ extreme-metal thugs and quiescent, introverted souls alike. Top marks.
Head off into dimensions unknown with some outlandish extreme-metal/doom exotica, right here:
FEL INTO THE ‘GRAVE AFTER THAT LISTEN? LINKS HERE:
3. TIGERLEECH - Bicephalous
Location: France
Label: Octopus Rising/Argonauta
Release Date: April 18th
Genre: Sludge/Hardcore, Noise-Rock, Stoner
FFO: The Jesus Lizard, Fugazi, Glassjaw, Poison The Well, Red Fang
Synopsis:
When you think of France and music, what comes to mind? Tut-tut, no Gojira or black metal allowed. Just made it a little more challenging there, didn’t I?
Whilst a number of tropes about the breadsticks-and-Parisian-cafes nation might come to mind [man in striped-shirt, beret and accordion with novelty-length cigarette dangling from mouth as he ‘a-haw-haw-haw’s not pictured], it’s easy to forget the tentacles of globalisation and their capacity for projects to take roots in places you don’t expect.
Also, we were all raised on too much TV; a chronically-online world is not one demarcated by tropes and stereotypes! (Australians slamming tinnies in hearty agreement - also not pictured).
Bicephalous is antagonistic to such tropes, being an album almost starkly simple and cleverly deft at the same time. And with some absolutely thundering, hoof-heavy riffage to boot.
Tigerleech would be just at home on a Melbourne bill with some of our local sludgelords, as they would hitting the circuit with any number of noise-rock, metal and hardcore bands across the globe. There’s a certain tinge of Americanisation to their heavily jagged, thick and stomp-heavy blending of the above genres, but enough of their own imprint that it stands on its’ own merit.
This album feels like a love letter. A pining, how classically French of me to say, but clearly one for the nostalgic heyday of when metallic hardcore, brutish sludge and noise-rock were often festival (and album) buddies. A time in the 90s to early aughts, just before NWOAHM came in and took unsuspecting teens like myself for a ride. If you miss the dive-bar strain of hardcore that operated in looser categorical boundaries, picking up motifs from sub-genres as they go, you’ll find nostalgia and comfort here.
And for you whippersnappers out there, these guys are a perfect example of why metal and hardcore are ugly cousins. Sludge wasn’t mentioned for no reason. Sorry, kids, there’s no overproduced 7-string whistle-clean 4/4 going on here - this one’s clearly wandered in from the streets, and we love the company.
Let your ears adopt a solid slab of sludgy French noise-rock/hardcore right here, mon ami (via the wonderfully-named user WEEDIAN on Youtube):
DON’T BE A LEECH - DIRECT YOUR BICEPHALOCURIOUS ATTENTION HERE:
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/Tigerleechband
Bandcamp Profile:
https://tigerleech.bandcamp.com/
Label:
http://www.argonautarecords.com/
Youtube Channel
4. ANCESTRAL SIN - Next of Sin (10” /EP)
Location: The Netherlands
Label: Independent (10” vinyl also released via Oblivion Records)
Release Date: 16th April
Genre: Hardcore/Crossover/Deathgrind
FFO: The Red Chord, Leng T’che, Municipal Waste, Ringworm
Synopsis:
Holy shit.
Y’know, we were already on the subject of tropes, so why not go with the Dutch next while I’m at it?
Still suffering one hell of a hangover and what-year-is-it jetlag days into my post-Arctangent adventure, any notions about The Netherlands being a place full of whimsical, aloof stoners who hang out in coffeeshops all day was met smack-bang with a people I can only describe as utterly based. Dutch people give no fucks, and they’ll not pause for a second to let you know what’s on their mind. Not in that narcissistic Australian wanker ‘I TeLl It LiKe It Is’ preamble to opinionated verbal garbage - just the facts, straight and simple.
That very Dutch spirit of riding and shooting straight, speaking the truth, etc (yes, bad Entombed reference and wrong country, shhh) permeates their music, too. A very artistic and creative people, it’s also a nation from where you’ll find some of the most outright no-frills, savage-as-hell extreme metal in all of Europe let alone elsewhere.
In similar vein to Messiah Paratroops, Ancestral Sin are a band I hadn’t heard of until viewing/listening to press releases in the inbox, and a fact I am almost mournful for. That is, were it not for the fact that for a band formed in 1989 (the year of my hatching) experienced a hiatus from 1996 to 2018, then came swinging with such an incisive, rust-inflected barrage of up-tempo deathgrind/metallic-hardcore? Damn, dude.
If Frenchies Tigerleech are off in one corner of the hardcore show talking to the guy who sells bunk weed, Ancestral are bumping lines with the most unhinged crossover thrash and grindcore crust punks in the room. There’s a very strong and similar strain of US-themed hardcore bravado, here. That said, this four-track EP is ultimately a decidedly European (and Dutch, at that) flavour of deathgrind - no nonsense, no Scandinavian lilting and folklore. Just straight, fucking fast grind.
That’s a lot of words and context for four songs, but seriously - props to a band who’ve been gestating this for 36 years. Sometimes a decades-long prenatal trimester makes for a savage birth, as i the case with Next of Sin.
Pump this loudly the next time some dickhead tourist in front of you at the Rijksmuseum holds the line up to complain about I don’t know, admission prices, and they get a VERY Amsterdamian response to such bullshit from a no-BS local:
YOUR COLONIAL ANCESTORS WILL FORGIVE OUR SHARED INTERGENETATIONAL SINS, BUT ONLY IF YOU CLICK HERE:
(Contains links for: Spotify/Bandcamp profile, physical/digital album streaming/order links, artist social media, etc)
5 (and 6!) VYR MUK - 1. Dreadmarch of the Hollow Knight (EP, 2025) & 2. Crimson Fields of Sorrow (LP)
Location: Kharkiv, Ukraine
Label: Independent Artist
Genre: 1. Dungeon-Synth/Dark Ambient, 2. Blackened Death Metal
FFO: 1. Burzum, Lustmord, Sleep Research Facility, 2. Emperor, early Behemoth, Krallice
Oh, how our hearts bled for the Ukrainian people for a brief moment. A collectivist cry of dualistic outrage at a certain Putinian pseudo-dictator, and a rallying call of support for the severely oppressed peoples who did NOT ask for such an incursion.
Well, it’s been years folks. The hashtags, Ukraine-coloured-flag advertisements and news pieces alike have dropped off the radar. And, unless you’ve been keenly following the latest calamity in this unending meat-grinder of modern warfare of attrition, you might not be so clued-in as to the scale of terror that still permeates these fine folk.
Thus, much like with our recent review of Tria Prima’s excellent alchemical-death-metal EP 'Three Primes of Alchemy, I want to show some international solidarity for a populace writing music under chronic duress. Our one-man progenitor here has gone in completely polar-opposite ends of the blackened spectrum with a more sombre, dark-ambient/dungeon-synth EP, and a balls-to-the-wall blackened death metal LP follow-up.
I’m going to briefly cover both, here and now!
Dreadmarch Of The Hollow Knight
The spectre of conflict writhes its’ way throughout this brief but atmospheric (and heavy) release, by one Vlad Bliznuk. Vlad reached out to us personally via our Instagram and ISC email, and mate - this is a solid effort! Beginning with haunting, Bodom-meets-Emperor cloying synth-keys, it’s a moody, vast and bleak affair from there on in.
I am seriously considering using this one as backing music for my tabletop RPG’s, but only for the most forlorn encounters with the most gruesome undead. A grim and foreboding harmonic presence, aided by some intricate and well-polished synthesiser, choral effects and ambient dark enough to make Lustmord blush.
Following that up with his traditional-metal 2025 affair Crimson Fields of Sorrow is an appetiser-to-main-course progression that’s of course intentional, but just feels so snugly natural in the most blackened, extreme terms of what said comfort implies.
Rifling through a relentless crescendo of tremolo-flaying riffs with a subdued but imperialistic screech, the symphonic element surprisingly doesn’t bother me one bit. My autistic/ADHD ears have a very high sensory tolerance compared to many other neurodivergents, but shrill synth just kills a tune for me. Fortunately, Vlad’s done well on making R I F F S and blasts the omnipresent focus, and the very vampiric/regal tone of said keys isn’t overused.
Which I’m thankful for, ‘cause this is another addition of shit-eating-grin-inducing blackened death metal for the blogosphere. I’m seriously impressed with the level of grandiosity and scope on offer here, for a solo project. And that’s leaving out the simply tasty flair for riffage and blazing leads scattered throughout the extreme-metal pomp.
Two great recent releases from a man in a country literally embattled in every sense of the word. Show my man some support, and some horns-up!
Immerse yourself in the dust-ridden necromancers’ tomb with John Williams and Vlad’s horror-movie-ready aural soundscapes first, here (courtesy of Vlad Bilznuk’s Youtube Channel):
‘Kay, now go get your face ripped off by the new album - a total-metal-180!:
CHEER VLAD ON TO MIGHTY BLACK-METAL VICTORY VIA LINK:
VYR MUK - DistroKid (Album Order/Streaming Links, etc)
Enjoy Responsibly. Support Local Artists - Support The Scene.
Inner-Strength Check Links: