HATE: “BELLUM REGIIS”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 302025
 

(We present DGR‘s review of the newest album from the Polish titans Hate, which is set for release this coming Friday, May 2nd, by
Metal Blade Records.)

Poland’s Hate have been a musical monolith for blackened death metal for over two decades now. They’ve become a lighthouse by which you can orient yourself, ever fixed upon land and as steady as the world could allow it to be. With thirteen albums in their arsenal, Adam and the crew of the machine named Hate have been one of, if not the most reliable sources of extreme metal around for a long time. While erecting an unscalable wall of imperial riffs and relentless double-bass drumming, they have also become a gateway into the wider expanse of the dark arts.

Hate have stayed rigidly true to their formula, such that you could pull any album post-Anaclasis from their discography and use it as a guide into blackened death metal for anyone willing to take the plunge. Few have ever attempted the sort of fiery riff work that Hate build their music out of, and because of that there’s been little reason for the group to ever shift. Hate don’t do massive artistic evolution: the Hate you see now was a Hate set in stone a while ago, already concrete and recognizable. What Hate do now is to iterate on their sound, such that there’ve been a few distinct three-to-four album arcs over the course of their career. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: OBSIDIAN TONGUE, HATE, OBSTRUKTION, JORDSJUK, APPLE OF BASILISK, SERIAL HAWK, CONTEMPLATION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Mar 292025
 

(written by Islander)

I didn’t expect I would be able to pull this Saturday column together, or the usual one tomorrow either. I thought my spouse and I would be leaving home very early today for a weekend trip. I even prepared a short notice to post this morning saying there would be no music at our site this weekend. But for reasons there’s no need to go into, we canceled those travel plans late yesterday.

That left me flat-footed this morning. I mean, I’m usually still scrambling on Saturday mornings to get this column figured out and finished, but today was set up to be an even bigger scramble because I’d given no thought to which songs and videos I might include. I had done a pretty good job over the last week of saving links to potential choices as I saw news about them — 30 or 40 links! — but no way could I check out most of those.

So, aside from picking a couple because the band names made me feel I’d be in good hands, sheer impulse ruled the rest. It’s a sign of how healthy metal is these days that making choices by impulse still turned out to be good choices. Continue reading »

HATE: “RUGIA”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Oct 192021
 

 

(This is DGR‘s review of Hate‘s 12th album, which was released by Metal Blade on October 15th.)

I guarantee you my Hate collection is incomplete given the storied career that Poland’s blackened death metal export have had, but my music library informs me that I still have upwards of ninety-something songs accredited to them. I sometimes wonder if that is being generous, as Hate are one of those groups who are a hallmark of consistency in the metal scene.

After having found a blueprint that worked for them, Hate have been rigid adherents to it. They’ll put a spin on it so that over time the outside of the package morphs and changes, but that core is solid and immovable. That’s why it doesn’t really feel like I have ninety-something songs from Hate, so much as I have three-to-four distinct moods of the band, as they continually remake the outer structure of their machine while keeping that main sort of imperial march to their overall sound.

In my review of Aborted’s Maniacult release, I mused on the idea of how some bands have served as a gateway to deeper genres, and one of the ways of doing so has been by achieving the sort of consistency that could be compared to a Japanese train line. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 3): GOAT TORMENT, HATE, NECROMANTIA, REEK, REVERENCE TO PAROXYSM

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Sep 182021
 

 

As promised yesterday, I’m continuing to make my way through the metal alphabet, with another slug of songs and videos that I siphoned out of the ongoing flood during the past week. I thought I’d make it to the end of the alphabet today, but now I’m not so sure. The demon alcohol afflicted me last night, and the affliction both caused me to sleep like a hibernating bear and also to wake up in a state of severe brain fog. I’ll just have to see how things go.

GOAT TORMENT (Belgium)

If you’re not already educated about the kind of music Goat Torment make, one long look at the album art will tell you much of what you need to know. There’s one important piece of imagery missing from the artwork though — massed howitzers and machine-guns firing at will. The song you’re about to hear sounds like a mechanized war zone, one that’s also plagued by frenzied demons, who reach heights of mania in a really stupendous guitar solo. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY (TOO MANY NAMES TO PUT IN THIS TITLE, AGAIN)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Aug 212021
 

 

The usual torrent of new music continued this past week, culminating in the expected high tide on Friday. Harried by my day job, I couldn’t keep up with what happened yesterday, though my compatriot DGR did, and he again funneled a lot of the new stuff my way. Five of the selections you’ll find below came from him, though I did manage to add eight more advance tracks that I scoped out this morning, to create a lucky 13.

As in other instances of gigantic round-ups such as this one, it includes a lot of bigger names, but I’ve infiltrated some lesser-knowns. It’s like putting out honey to attract flies, and then hoping something they weren’t expecting bites them. Welcome aboard flies! Here we go in alphabetical order:

1914 (Ukraine)

It’s exciting to see an underground favorite such as 1914 (whom we’ve been writing about since their early days) getting picked up by a big label such as Napalm, for the simple reason that it will expose their prodigious talents to a wider audience. The fact that Nick Holmes makes a guest appearance on the song/video that leads off this collection will help as well. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2019’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 13): KRATER, HATE, RAPTVRE

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2019  1 Response »
Jan 222020
 

 

Three years ago I vowed that I would begin forcing myself to end these lists before the beginning of February, not because I would really be finished by then but because continuing it past that point had become embarrassing. I renewed the vow this year, and it hit me this morning that January 31st is only nine days away! Shit! Nine days away, and I’m not even close to naming all the songs I want to name.

Well, this means it’s time to expand the daily installments from two songs to three (or more). And I’m going to have to post installments on Saturday and Sunday too, if I can manage that. The three I’ve chosen today have a certain über-dark atmospheric kinship, as I hear them, in addition to being addictive. To catch up with the songs that preceded them on this list, go here.

KRATER

I was very happy to see that Andy Synn decided to devote his November 2019 edition of THE SYNN REPORT to these frightening Germans, putting in one place streams of all their albums and allowing for a clear view of the ways in which their sound has evolved since 2006, culminating (for now) in 2019’s stunning Venenare, which Andy rightly acclaimed as “without a doubt, one of the most intense and impressive Black Metal albums of 2019”. Continue reading »

A(NOTHER) DIRTY HALF DOZEN

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Aug 232019
 


Blackhelm

 

(Andy Synn wrote the following collection of six reviews.)

So it’s almost September, and the last third of the year already looks packed to the gills with new releases, both big and small (and that’s just the ones I know about).

Looking backwards is, if possible, even worse, with the list of bands/albums we haven’t been able to cover here at NCS having become so long I can’t even see the other end of it.

And, again, that’s just the albums we KNOW we’ve missed!

Truly, there’s just too much music to properly keep track of it all.

But that’s not going to stop us/me trying, obviously, so here’s a few words about half-a-dozen recent (or recent-ish) releases, running the gamut from some (relatively) big names to some underexposed underground acts. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BONEHUNTER, HATE, HORRENDOUS, INFERNAL COIL, MESARTHIM, SOREPTION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Jul 132018
 

 

This is obviously a big end-of-week round-up. Today the size of the round-up will be in inverse proportion to the volume of words in my descriptions of the music, because I have three premieres to write and there would have been more except I exercised some rare restraint and started saying No.

What is it about this day that makes it so popular for premieres and releases? Could it be that there is only one other Friday in 2018 like it (and that one occurred three months ago)?

I arranged the music in alphabetical order by band name because I couldn’t think of a more logical way to stitch these sounds together.

BONEHUNTER

This time Bonehunter chose to keep the rampaging bear’s penis less prominent on the magnificent cover of their new album (rendered by Joe Petagno), to the disappointment of some and the relief of others (as long as they don’t look to closely at that tongue). But how does the music on Children of the Atom compare to the tunes on this Finnish band’s more prominently erect last record, Sexual Panic Human Machine? Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2017’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 13): JUPTERIAN, FORGOTTEN TOMB, GLOSON, HATE, MARTHYRIUM

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2017  2 Responses »
Jan 262018
 


Jupiterian

 

As you can probably tell, I’m beginning to feel the pressure of time running out. If I’m going to finish this list by the end of January I may have to do more of what I’m doing today — packing more songs into each of these posts than I’ve been doing. Although I doubt I’ll have time to add five each day, I’m able to do that today.

And the key word for today’s installment of the list is “crushing”.

JUPITERIAN

There’s heavy, and then there’s HEAVY.  As metals go, Lead is heavy, but Iridium is twice as heavy as lead. As metal bands go, Jupiterian is the Iridium of heavy music. Continue reading »

HATE: “TREMENDUM”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
May 022017
 

 

(DGR wrote this detailed review of the new album by the Polish band Hate.)

There are some groups who exist like heavy metal’s undercurrent, groups who seem like they have always been there and never seem to age, as if the band were immortal, with each release they put out slotting neatly right next to the others in their career. Hate are one of those groups. Their martial brand of Satan-inspired, Anti-religion death metal has seemingly existed as part of heavy metal’s subculture forever, one of a small handful of bands playing a particular style, a constant go-to for a specific fix.

The new Hate album Tremendum marks the group’s tenth release in a little over twenty years. The thing that has kept Hate around like this, like many bands who’ve enjoyed a twenty-plus-year career in the metal business, is that Hate found a sound, and since locking into it, for better or worse, they have put out albums with differing variations on that overall style, but have never gone for a massive genre-shift or anything blindingly different. Hate are going to consistently sound like Hate. That is one of the ways you wind up a pillar of a genre, as Hate have done. Continue reading »

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