“Let me just address the elephant in the room: Voidmilker? Sure, metal’s got lots of voids – don’t even get me started. However, milk is far from the most metal liquid, unless you thought Milking the Goatmachine was the most kvlt thing since Mayhem took a shit on the ashes of an unsuspecting Norwegian church. And kvlt Voidmilker is, because black metal is the name of the game.” Got void?
“Sammath’s style isn’t my usual cup of tea, but Godless Arrogance still wowed me nearly a decade ago. Avoiding any pretense of variety, the Netherlands’ Sammath played war metal in the truest sense. Monotony can be hit-or-miss, but Sammath made it work through the emotive power of their music. Godless Arrogance both sounded and felt like being in the trenches during a losing battle. Its successor Across the Rhine Is Only Death shattered the underpaid Score Safety Counter in 2019, leaving me with high expectations for 2023’s follow-up Grebbeberg.” Back to the front!
“Just as the painting focuses on a spectrum of blacks, earth tones, and distortion, so Ǥứŕū does with their fusion of black metal and doom metal. Expect the typical unholy blackened trinity of shrieks, tremolo, and blastbeats, alongside the dramatic and full-bodied baritone and thicker tone of doom.” Painting with tar.
“Drowstorm is a project of Sudbury, Ontario’s Joe Caswell, mastermind of all things black metal. Acts like the Viking black Burden of Ymir, the post-black Olim, and second-wave worship Vintertodt populate his repertoire – Drowstorm’s vicious edge of dissonance is a new step into the chasm.” Drowstorming with menace.
“For the uninitiated, Tulus has been around since ’91, 1996 debut full-length Pure Black Energy considered a cult classic of early black metal. Although taking a six-year break between 2000 and 2006, the trio has amassed six full-lengths and a compilation over the project’s career.” Olde and still Khold.
“Who could have foreseen that I would grab an album with “steel” in the title before our Mighty Ape could get his banana-stained whore hands on it? Perhaps it was due to the absence of “swords” that I now hold in my sausage fingers the debut record from New Jersey’s The Gauntlet.” Stealing the steel.
Steel Druhm put sweat equity into his Top Ten(ish) of 2022 and you will repay him with readership and blind acceptance.
![Darkthrone – Astral Fortress [Things You Might Have Missed 2022]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Darkthrone_Astral-Fortress.jpg.webp)
“Darkthrone is the only early-days black metal band that’s kept me interested through the decades. In times when I care little for the vast majority of black metal releases, I’ll always give a new Darkthrone album a fair shake. That’s because over their 36-year career, Nocturno Culto and Fenriz always embraced change and took more risks than a degenerate gambler at a no-limits poker table in Macau.” Olde, colde, bolde.
“I picked up Terror Winds for shock – I’ll admit that fully. When we last met T.O.M.B. readily dealt my very first 1.0 roundhouse kick. 2020’s Thin the Veil was, by all accounts, a disgrace. Offering a revolving door of guest musicians without a thread of consistency while flaunting painfully directionless songwriting in the name of kvlt kred, it consisted of forty-five minutes of noisy industrial black metal that felt about forty-three minutes too long. Straddling the fence between a bargain bin Psyclon Nine “beats ‘n shred” approach and the Tetragrammacide ascetic aesthetic with the grace of a toddler, it was something else. I just didn’t expect to see T.O.M.B. back ’round these parts so soon.” T.O.M.B. soon?
“No one does music like Jason Köhnen. His projects like Mansur, The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble, and Bong-Ra constantly push boundaries, and while my reception to his work has been largely mixed, The Lovecraft Sextet has stuck. Debut In Memoriam was a unique and visceral experience, somehow weaponizing dark ambient, black metal, jazz, and opera into six tracks with three disparate but compatible palettes.” Sax and tentacles.
