Ex-Altar Of Plagues members stream their killer new split EP!

We’re still mourning the passing of Ireland’s Altar Of Plagues, one of the most bewildering, exhilarating and groundbreaking black metal bands of recent years.

But praise be, there is now more heartbreak to be had, thanks to Krawwl, a two-piece rising out of the band’s ashes and whose journeys through the outer reaches of anguish to the far shores of deliverance could be considered shoegaze black metal only if those shoes are steel-toed and are traipsing through the ashes of your soul.

Now they’ve teamed up with Scotland’s Barshasketh for an absolutely essential split EP – released via Human Jigsaw Records as a digital download and none-more-trve cassette format – not least thanks to the Scots’ lo-fi but stirringly epic black metal, keeping one foot in the personal-testimony US-style post-black metal camp and the other in the kind of barrelling, pierce-the-mortal-veil charge beloved of people who live in cold climates and in the vicinity of forests.

Thanks to the good, but clearly emotionally scarred people at Human Jigsaw, we are playing host the EP in all its cathartic glory. Dive in below, and don’t expect to come out unscathed!

Make a pilgrimage to Krawwl’s Facebook page here!

And make a detour via Barshasketh’s Facebook page here!

Having freelanced regularly for the Melody Maker and Kerrang!, and edited the extreme metal monthly, Terrorizer, for seven years, Jonathan is now the overseer of all the album and live reviews in Metal Hammer. Bemoans his obsolete superpower of being invisible to Routemaster bus conductors, finds men without sideburns slightly circumspect, and thinks songs that aren’t about Satan, swords or witches are a bit silly.