“New York City is a strange dichotomy. Depending on who you ask, you’ll either get mental pictures of Broadway musicals, jazz concerts, the colorfully decorative Times Square, and shopping centers and skyscrapers within a stone’s throw of each other… or you’ll get a grim story of the rampant drug use and homelessness, its long history of violent crimes, and the hopelessness and gritty realities of its citizens that birthed the city’s rap, hardcore, and metal scenes. The thing is, either story would be correct. On their third full-length, Vile Luxury, Imperial Triumphant paints a vivid picture of their city’s duality: shimmering and powerful, yet simultaneously ugly and brutal.” The big apple is rotten to the core.
Throatruiner Records
Pyrrhon – What Passes for Survival Review
“Three years: a trial for many, an eternity for some, an unnoticeable instant of geology. But enough time for Pyrrhon’s The Mother of Virtues to become a landmark work in extreme music, the most forward-thinking and brazen death metal album of the decade thus far. When I reviewed it, I mused that “A more difficult album [was] hard to come by.” What Passes for Survival is that and more.” Worth the weight.
Comity – A Long, Eternal Fall Review
“Comity have been concocting their complex mixture of chaotic metalcore (the Botch, Converge, and Coalesce sort), sludge, noise, and all things experimental and dissonant since 1996. Of course, a band so complex and difficult to comprehend can only come from one place: France.” Why does France want to hurt us so much?
Plebeian Grandstand – False Highs, True Lows Review
Plebeian Grandstand is a name destined for immortality. Over the course of two albums – 2011’s How Hate is Hard to Define and 2014’s Lowgazers, the Tolousian group have annihilated any doubt as to their supremacy in extremity. How Hate is Hard to Define’s distillation of noise, black metal and mathcore proved their worth as ‘the angriest band on the planet,’ but the sheer ambition of Lowgazers propelled the group somewhere further.” Prepare to be destroyed.