Five For Friday: March 22, 2024

Greetings, Decibel readers!

I’m particularly excited to talk up the new Necrophobic album this week, as it continues a winning streak they’ve been on for the last couple albums. But there’s other sources of righteous racket to enjoy below as well, including new ones from Apparition (I did the name … for no reason in particular) and Hideous Divinity. As always, I’m hoping the albums below fuel a fantastically heavy weekend for all of you.

Enjoy!

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Apparition – Disgraced Emanations From A Tranquil State

Once I hit play on this album, it felt like something landed on top of me and I was sprayed with a firehose of mud and human blood. This is some brutal stuff, but the pieces are cut up in such interesting and unpredictable ways. The band finds ways to weave doom and slam into their ghastly concoction, providing a wealth of sounds for any metalhead’s stylistic palette.

Stream: Apple Music

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Hideous Divinity – Unextinct

Modern epic extreme metal very much in the style of bands like Cattle Decapitation and Fleshgod Apocalypse. It’s a big, powerful, and cinematic sound that, in a just world, would be on the soundtrack of action-packed summer blockbusters.

Stream: Apple Music

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Khold – Du d​ø​mmes til D​ø​d

Groove-laden Norwegian black metal. This is the eight album from this long-running dark institution.

Stream: Apple Music

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Mastiff – Deprecipice

From our full album stream of Deprecipice:

As always, Mastiff’s sound is rooted in aggressive sludge metal and metallic hardcore. On Deprecipice, they draw more heavily from the second, cranking out a steady flow of thick, chugging riffs and raucous mosh parts. The opening one-two punch of “Bite Radius” and “Everything is Ending” set the mood: these are songs for when you’re at the end of your rope, when hopeless lyrics and vicious fight riffs make more sense than therapy or promises of better days.

Stream: Apple Music

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Necrophobic – In The Twilight Grey

Necrophobic‘s sonic trajectory has been clear since 1997’s Darkside: take the cutting and ominous riffs from The Nocturnal Silence and push them forward into a bigger, more enveloping sound (in other words, layer on more black metal). And since 2018’s stellar Mark of the Necrogram, this sound has been refined to a reliably satisfying blend of all things dark and deadly. In The Twilight Grey is without blemishes in terms of Necrophobic’s signature brand of noise, a triumph that hopefully presages many more to come.

Stream: Apple Music