Doom Metal

Hecatoncheir – Nightmare Utopia Review

Hecatoncheir – Nightmare Utopia Review

“The journey begins by following a dark silhouette, each installment describes surreal and dreamlike landscapes, strange characters, and objects—with monolithic importance attached in the strange way that dreams do. In the latter tracks, ever-vigilant eyes watch from the stars and assume a more horrific face as they emerge from the darkness as the cruel pelagic and empyrean deities and monsters among Lovecraft’s multitudes. Hecatoncheir’s uniquely dreamlike take on chthonic horror, balanced by its ambitions in liminal spaces, set one hell of a precedent for the music contained herein.” Fear and loathing in Slovakia.

Grey Skies Fallen – Molded By Broken Hands Review

Grey Skies Fallen – Molded By Broken Hands Review

Grey Skies Fallen have managed to fly under the radar here at AMG, despite releasing music for nearly a quarter century. While previous albums saw the band leaning into the more aggressive side of death-doom, the return of founding guitarist Joe D’Angelo has yielded a record steeped in the weepy sadboi doom of My Dying Bride and November’s Doom.” Three shades of Grey.

Stuck in the Filter: January’s Angry Misses

Stuck in the Filter: January’s Angry Misses

It’s becoming apparent that our filtering systems work quite well! The crew has done a fine job pulling filth from the workings and releasing the pressure to the system. A second too late and the toilets would have backed up.

Blazar – Fatal Cosmic Wound Review

Blazar – Fatal Cosmic Wound Review

“People call funeral doom boring, and I get it. It’s very slow, often very long, not particularly technical, and contains few riffs per minute. Its compositions are not ordinarily gym-friendly, or headbangable. But good funeral doom is good. Crushing, transportive, and at times incredibly beautiful, as the low, slow and leaden is partnered with rising, floaty, ethereal melodies. Think Shape of Despair, Clouds, Esoteric. All this to say, that the best funeral doom is that which balances its punishing heaviness and crawling tempos with clean, graceful melodiousness in order to produce something truly immense. Blazar, Spanish funeral doom/sludge gang have a different philosophy.” Angry burial.

Ponte del Diavolo – Fire Blades from the Tomb Review

Ponte del Diavolo – Fire Blades from the Tomb Review

“Having spread the spectrum of their influences across a few EPs, Ponte del Diavolo reigns in the fettering ambience and shriekier black metal extremes of their formative work for this debut full-length. In this regard, these witchcraft-worshipping Italians come across like a punk-edged, tremolo riff-informed Sabbath Assembly, with mic-echantress Erba del Diavolo capturing the same essence of cult-fearing warble that a fervent Jamie Meyers possesses.” Tomb knives.

Stygian Crown – Funeral for a King Review

Stygian Crown – Funeral for a King Review

“The clamor of zhangu, taiko, ahuli, tabor—even the timpani in a modern orchestral context—the steady hammering of the battlefield finds a comfort, an attachment to the mallet metronome of such simple instruments. In memory of sorrow, the rhythm of death metal through one of its most bass-rumbling pioneers, Bolt Thrower, finds that war-like march not just in pounding kicks but also weighted guitar harmonies and bass-throttled grooves that stir the warrior’s heart. Stygian Crown in their idiosyncratic expression of the metal arts embodies in part that low-end fueled, sword-rattling thunder. But as the title Funeral for a King may imply, and as the Steel One himself has explored before, Stygian Crown doesn’t just riff, they doom. Oh, do they doom!” Crown Thrower.

Counting Hours – The Wishing Tomb Review

Counting Hours – The Wishing Tomb Review

“Tears freezing in the cutting winter winds. Life’s blood staining the freshly fallen snow. These are the things that bring Steel to the graveyard. Naturally, I love my sadboi doom as well, and the long-defunct Finnish act Rapture in particular. Their style of highly melancholic melodoom resonated deeply in my cold dead chest cavity, and though they’ve been gone since 2005 I still go back to those albums regularly. When the two guitarists of Rapture reunited to form Counting Hours and dropped the excellent debut The Will back in 2019, I was ecstatic. It was as close to getting new Rapture material as we were ever going to get and they hit all the same grim feelz as they fused the early days of Katatonia with Dawn of Solace into a cold grave of an album. Now a few years later we get the eagerly anticipated follow-up.” Counting hours and tears.

Praise the Plague – Suffocating in the Current of Time Review

Praise the Plague – Suffocating in the Current of Time Review

“Evolution can be a tricky thing for a band to get right. Change too much and risk alienating an existing fan base. Or don’t change enough and risk pigeon-holing oneself, or even boring the audience who want to see some growth. Ever since Praise the Plague stepped onto the scene in 2018, they’ve been subtly shaping their intriguing admixture of doom and black metal. Particularly after sophomore The Obsidian Gate saw them commit to wielding in equal measure the grandiosity of the former with the sinister savagery of the latter, the question of where their approach would go next, as they established themselves, was foremost.” Down with the…Plague.

The Obsessed – Gilded Sorrow Review

The Obsessed – Gilded Sorrow Review

“Every album we get from Scott “Wino” Weinrich at this stage of his career feels like playing with house money. As a living legend in the American doom scene, Wino had his fingerprints on so much music over the decades that trying to quantify it all can make your head spin. As the founder of early doom act The Obsessed in the 1970s, he helped shape the sound of the genre in America along with Pentagram, Trouble, and Saint Vitus.” Living backwards forever.

Distorted Reflection – Doom Rules Eternally Review

Distorted Reflection – Doom Rules Eternally Review

“Formed by Sorrows Path co-founder Kostas Salomidis, nascent Greek epic doom metal trio Distorted Reflection are so new that they don’t even have a Metallum profile up yet. Established in 2022, the young band follows Kostas’ vision of epic doom metal after nearly thirty years with his original band.” Reflections of depression.