CD

Since 2005, Greece's SAD have been a madly prolific bastion of pure 'n' cold black metal. Their canon is vast and varied - VERY relatively so, given that this is all-caps BLACK METAL after all - with the longstanding duo of instrumentalist Ungod and vocalist Nadir exploring the darkest corridors of their souls every step of the way. They've did so across a half-dozen albums for such esteemed labels as Drakkar, Obscure Abhorrence, and Old Temple among others as well as a dozen splits, but then joined forces with PURITY THROUGH FIRE in 2020 for the release of their seventh album, Misty Breath of Ancient Forests.

Indeed, that album was aptly titled, for it saw SAD delivering their most ancient work in many moons. But the Greek duo are ever surprising, and nearly four years later do they emerge from the shadows with the fully-fuck-off Black Metal Craft. It's no accident that the album is titled such, as it reasserts the purity at the very heart of the SAD aesthetic and strips it to the fucking bone with ghoulish violence. Raw and rippling, here SAD somehow inject the melancholic melodicism of its Misty predecessor and then stir the maelstrom to a swirling boil, remaining hypnotic and locked-in whilst managing to gallop forth from time to time in a manner most regal. Put another way, Black Metal Craft could serve as a love letter to the late '90s heyday of Sombre Records or the aforementioned Drakkar, so old & cold its aesthetic (and, again, unapologetic its title). PURITY THROUGH FIRE is thus the most fitting stronghold for SAD's eternal black metal craft!

Burial Moon are a mysterious international entity which may or may not include members as distant as Northern Europe as well as the southernmost climes of Europe. Grim and ethereal is their black metal, as the four lengthy tracks across their 22-minute Burial Moon mini-album cast a spell of raw mysticism immediately felt. The guitar tone alone, despite being hypnotically melodic, sounds like decay in realtime; the vocals suitably hover above the ever-surging miasma like a malignant spectre, and often take on a disembodied choral effect. And, for as lengthy as those four component tracks are, their song titles go to great lengths - literally - to convey the psychic headspace Burial Moon are occupying on their public debu

The cult is alive! Winter is approaching, and the tyrants of the Clandestine Circle of Aldebaran slowly return... When few expected it, much less considered the shadowy entity RIP, GINNUNGAGAP arrive with their long-awaited first full-length, fittingly titled Heliacal Arising.

No strangers to the ever-fertile Portuguese black metal underground, GINNUNGAGAP preceded the esteemed likes of TRONO ALÉM MORTE, ORDEM SATANICA, and VOËMMR.

 The hauntingly grandiose new Hulder album Verses In Oath, created during the dreariest cold months of the Northwest winter, constitutes the most majestic, untamed manifestation thus far in the band’s journey of conquest, as new territory is put to flame and conquered by sword and shield.

• Majestic black metal from the colds of the Pacific Northwest

Noble hardcover digibook
Limited to 333 handnumbered copies