Mānbryne - Heilsweg: O udręce ciała i tułaczce duszy

Well holy shit. No one saw this coming. Debut albums are often pretty good. Rarely are they AotY contenders. However, this album, translated as Of Carnal Torment and The Wandering of the Soul, certainly is.

Is it a super group? Kind of. Except the Polish metal scene doesn't really work in the way you might expect. Many musicians are in overlapping projects of all sorts, so instead of a bunch of steady bands and an occasional supergroup, you have a spider web of permutations.

The permutation here is Priest (the drummer from Odraza), Wyrd (the touring bassist for Blaze of Perdition), S. (the vocalist of Blaze of Perdition), and newcomer Renz playing guitar.

The result of this recipe is essentially the album everyone was upset that Blaze of Perdition didn't release last year. Melodic, riff-filled, unmistakably Eastern European. Add in a neckbreaking pace and a bunch of gang vocals, sprinkle liberally with samples and you get something furious, cavernous, melodic, melancholic, and complex. Exactly as black metal should be.

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Coffin Lurker - Foul and Defiled

Industrial sludge death doom funeral noise from Oakland. Maurice De Jong is the most prolific dude in music, I am certain. Gnaw Their Tongues , Cloak of Altering , De Magia Veterum , Dodenbezweerder are just a few of his projects. Apparently Rene Aquarius from Imperial Cult decided that he would challenge Maurice to a doom-off, and the loser would have to sweep up after the planet was destroyed. This is the sonic record of that planetary destruction. It is also one of the best doom records I've ever heard. Thankfully free of Sabbath worship and lazy rehashing of every boring stoner riff imaginable, this is actually a brand new thing. Suffocatingly vile and planetarily heavy, this is the answer to the unasked question "what would happen if Sunn 0))) were from New Orleans. Foul and Defiled by Coffin Lurker

SPECTRAL WOUND - A Diabolic Thirst

TRVE KVLT BLEK METAL. Black Metal Without Adjectives. However you want to signal that a band or an album is orthodox, foundational, traditional, what have you - this is it. 100% blast beats, tremolo picking, and wraith-rasp shrieks. This is crudeness as an art form. Spectral Wound are now the keepers of the black flame. There is zero nostalgia here. This is true modern black metal, but also exactly what 90's black metal was. I'm going to go ahead and predict that this will be my black metal AotY. It would take truly herculean effort to make better black metal than this. A Diabolic Thirst by SPECTRAL WOUND

Perturbator - Lustful Sacraments

This album answers an incredibly important question: What if Rick Deckard was a goth? A goth replicant that could pass the Voight-Kampff test easily. More importantly, it provides a stunning backdrop to the writing I am supposed to be doing, but keep avoiding. French composer James Kent has always been something of a polarizing figure. Much of his earlier work has been very HOTLINE MIAMI style synthwave. This is most definitely NOT THAT. Instead you a weird robot sex soundtrack - a post-punk mood piece cloaked in goth rock nihilism and sexual malevolence. Gritty, misanthropic, but still atmospheric and ambient, this is some nice stuff! Lustful Sacraments by PERTURBATOR

Trumpet of Amdusias

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