ACCEPTHumanoid Napalm (2024)Rating: 8/10 With their 17th full-length studio outing metal legends Accept keeps things on the level with another solid, balls to the wall opus. With no real surprises, Humanoid dishes out great dollops of steel, memorable choruses, sharp riffs, and decent lyrics. Let’s also not forget that Accept can still rattle off waves […]

DARKTHRONEIt Beckons Us All Peaceville (2024)Rating: 7/10 After the comedy capers on the cover of 2022’s Astral Fortress, the Norwegian duo of Ted “Nocturno Culto” Skejellum and Gylve “Fenriz” Nagell return, rather quickly, with their more serious looking It Beckons Us All. As I expected this is another foray in Celtic Frost-inspired landscapes as the […]

DEICIDEBanished By Sin Reigning Phoenix Music (2024)Rating: 7/10 Florida-based death metallers Deicide unleashes its latest heap of satanic cheese and boy, is it fun! Sure, after their first two trailblazing albums – Deicide (1990) and Legion (1992) – the novelty of Deicide quickly wore off for me, but I’ve always jumped into subsequent releases and […]

MORGUL BLADEHeavy Metal Wraiths No Remorse (2024)Rating: 8/10 Following on from their 2021 full-length debut Fell Sorcery Abounds, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based sorcerers Morgul Blade return with Heavy Metal Wraiths, a dazzling record wrapped in cool artwork. Morgul Blade is somewhat clever in their musical structures due to the faint waft of blackened essence that hovers around […]

PRAYING MANTISDefiance Frontiers (2024)Rating: 8/10 It probably sounds a bit weird to call the 13th full-length studio album from these legendary New Wave Of British Heavy Metal rockers “lovely”, but that’s exactly how I felt when this record unravelled like a rich tapestry of metal melody. Okay, so the cover art is a bit grey […]

NUCLEAR TOMBTerror Labyrinthian Everlasting Spew (2024)Rating: 8/10 Almost a decade ago Baltimore, Maryland-based combo Nuclear Tomb teased out a 2015 single entitled ‘Kill The Clowns’ and then fell into silence, but then re-emerged three years later with a demo – Admission Of Guilt – which was followed by a brace of EPs – Succumbing (2019) […]

RAVAGESpider On The World Thrash With Power (2024)Rating: 8/10 With their first full-length studio album of new material since 2009’s The End Of Tomorrow, traditional Boston, Massachusetts-based metalheads Ravage return with a fine slab of melodic metal in the form of Spider On The World. Taking their name from original vocalist Alec “Al Ravage” Firicano, […]

EXTINCTIncitement Of Violence MDD (2024)Rating: 6/10 Although Incitement Of Violence is only the second full-length platter from these German thrashers since forming in 2003, it’s a timely reminder of how potent the Teutonic thrash scene is. Enjoy Extinct before they, err, become extinct again because this is a rousing, war torn effort bristling with angst […]

UPCASTI Self-released (2024)Rating: 5/10 Sounding like every other modern day generic thrash act, Russian band Upcast delivers a hostile but formulaic debut full-length that frantically throws the listener around for its duration only for said audience to get its energy back and move on to something else. From the opening chords it’s obvious that Upcast […]

SULPHUR AND MERCURYAlchemia Prophetica EP Time To Kill (2024)Rating: 7.5/10 I had not heard of Sulphur And Mercury before but couldn’t help but be drawn to this EP via the cover art. I wasn’t sure what to expect, I guess in my head I had some sort of stuffy mid-80s Euro metal weirdness, and at […]