CD

And here float the remains of this gloomy world… The debut album of Gulguhk – another incarnation of Finian Patraic of Ifernach, Aufnorden, Moosegut – was released on tape last year by Tour de Garde, and will now see the well-deserved LP and CD treatment on ASRAR. Four more amulets of triumphant Gespeg Black Metal that deserve the attention of any true disciple of the dark arts.

The pendant swings once again. Ebony Pendant is back with the second full-length album and it’s the best material they have ever recorded. Him and his demons.
Relentless pounding blasts of black energy intertwined with corrupted acoustic hymns, and elegiac guitar leads move like quicksilver – like they have a life of their own. More epic than ever, this one-hour journey proves again that Ebony Pendant is the dark star showing the way to those who are lost in the light.

The pendant swings once again. Ebony Pendant is back with the second full-length album and it’s the best material they have ever recorded. Him and his demons.
Relentless pounding blasts of black energy intertwined with corrupted acoustic hymns, and elegiac guitar leads move like quicksilver – like they have a life of their own. More epic than ever, this one-hour journey proves again that Ebony Pendant is the dark star showing the way to those who are lost in the light.

The pendant swings once again. Ebony Pendant is back with the second full-length album and it’s the best material they have ever recorded. Him and his demons.
Relentless pounding blasts of black energy intertwined with corrupted acoustic hymns, and elegiac guitar leads move like quicksilver – like they have a life of their own. More epic than ever, this one-hour journey proves again that Ebony Pendant is the dark star showing the way to those who are lost in the light.

The pendant swings once again. Ebony Pendant is back with the second full-length album and it’s the best material they have ever recorded. Him and his demons.
Relentless pounding blasts of black energy intertwined with corrupted acoustic hymns, and elegiac guitar leads move like quicksilver – like they have a life of their own. More epic than ever, this one-hour journey proves again that Ebony Pendant is the dark star showing the way to those who are lost in the light.

Arguably, NAKED WHIPPER's cult status is second only to Necrovore. Formed in 1993 by lone deviant Dominus A.S., the band quickly released their first recording, a self-titled 7" EP, that very year. However, it was NAKED WHIPPER's debut album, 1995's Painstreaks, where Dominus A.S. cemented his legendry. While the "second wave" of black metal was in full swing by then, Painstreaks was a defiant & debaucherous assault of BLACKGRIND. The lineage was there - from the berserker wave of earliest Brazil on to Blasphemy's demo and fellow Germans Blood (Dominus A.S. did vocals on their classic Christbait from 1992) and then especially the early proto-bestiality of Impaled Nazarene, with '80s Napalm Death connecting the dots - but on what would remain, for decades, their lone album did NAKED WHIPPER assimilate those strains into something undeniably unique and unremittingly perverse

Following close on the heels of last year's digital-only debut album Jaundiced Hag of the Wood, Norwegian entity GRYLA make an even-stronger case for black metal supremacy with The Redeemer's Festering Carcass. Like that dark-horse debut, GRYLA's second album features a similar schematic - ripping 'n' roiling riffcraft, forward momentum whipped into a continual crescendo, tension and release waging a wondrous war - but a sound that's strangely classic and modern simultaneously. The work of one prodigiously young Torbjørn Kirby Torbo, GRYLA honor early domestic touchstones like Gorgoroth and Dødheimsgard's respective first albums as well as Kvist's lone album and Sorhin's '90s recordings whilst twisting the knife in different-yet-honorable ways. For one, Torbo's skewed melodicism nods the various schools of dissonant BM the past few decades; for another, there's often a clanging, minimal-is-maximal punkishness that reminds of Bone Awl's influential tapes or Carved Cross more recently. Put all together - and again, with RIFFS to infinity and beyond - The Redeemer's Festering Carcass breathes rotten, refreshing life in strident second-wave classicism

Hailing from the ever-fertile Finnish black metal scene, MOONFALL's origins date back to 2008. The duo released one demo in 2010, Ad Majorem Sathanae Gloriam, before disbanding the next year. The band reactivated in 2020 and released a demo, with a split with Regere Sinister the following year.

However, this duo - Goatprayer and Black Moon Necromancer, both of whom handle multiple instruments depending on the recording - have been insanely prolific together, currently playing in the esteemed Witchcraft as well as other such cults as Necromonarchia Daemonum, Funerealm Gloom, Darkera, and Infernathan. Even separately, both men are notable: among many others, Goatprayer maintains the monolithic CEREMONIAL TORTURE while Black Moon Necromancer currently plays guitar for the legendary Beherit.

Hailing from Australia, GROTESQUE BLISS feature vocalist / bassist Bjorn of the equally mighty TEMPLE NIGHTSIDE and Grave Upheaval; guitarist Chris Burton, whose credentials stretch back to the '90s with Paramæcium, Cryptal Darkness, and then the successive The Eternal among others; and veteran drummer Matthew Southcombe, whose credits include Internecine Excoriation among others, filling out the lineup. In 2022, the trio promptly set about capturing their ancient doom-death. Two rehearsals followed, with a self-titled demo arriving in 2024.