Dean Brown

Alexander von Meilenwald – aka The Ruins Of Beverast – casts his net wide on new album The Thule Grimoires with stellar results

Masked NYC brain-melters Imperial Triumphant serve up metal/jazz/avant garde/barbershop madness on majestic new album Alphaville

German occultists Secrets Of The Moon’s new album Black House is more Bauhaus than black metal

New album The Reckoning Dawn finds UK black metal standard-bearers Winterfylleth raising their flag high once more on

Oslo’s second-wave black metal forefathers, Mayhem, are still defining the state of the art

Multi-textured black metal odysseys from the dark heart of Germany

Black-thrash barbarians cough up a bare-knuckled stopgap

Seafaring funeral doom with the wrong kind of sinking feeling

Australia’s arcane murk-mongers shift their axis

Russian black/death crew get too stuck to the script

An abject sludge endurance test from the implacable depths of Colorado

Bergen’s black metal mavens head off the (blast)beaten track

Gothenburg metal linchpins perfect the art of extreme progression

West Yorkshire boozehounds extend their welcome

Dynamic sludge trio cause a disturbance on consecrated ground

Nottingham’s nihilistic legends make a partial return

North East England death metal marauders utilise their scythes

Italy’s astral doom trio go beyond all bounds

Dynamic noise/sludge with some familiar sources

South-East UK death/thrashers find themselves behind the pace

Anguished Oregon quartet dangle the baby over the bathwater

Tetanus-inducing death metal from Portland’s genteel climes

Sonically divergent sludge, with strings attached

Japan’s sonic explorers hit the full spectrum