Review: Castle Rat – The Bestiary
“The Bestiary” feels like a fever dream carved from stone and smoke, where heavy metal’s past is reborn as mythic theatre. It’s imperfect, sprawling, and utterly sincere and honest.
Music
Review: Heretoir – Solastalgia
“Solastalgia” feels like the year’s slow descent into silence, with fallen leaves, fading light, and the ache of something ending. It may waver in pacing, but its sincerity and sense of place make it linger long after the air turns cold.
Review: Blackbraid – III
Blackbraid “III” strikes like a ritual lived out loud, a blackened odyssey that binds ancestral echoes. Its greatest strength is how it never lets the listener settle in its tension and its haunting voice.
Review: Ravager – From Us With Hate
“From Us With Hate” roars with enough speed, fury, and classic riffing to satisfy thrash purists, even as it occasionally leans too heavily on familiar blueprints.
Review: Nightbearer – Defiance
“Defiance” is a hammer blow wrapped in poetry, part chainsaw-death, part atmospheric lament, testifying that Nightbearer are more than just worshippers of old Swedish death—they are its sharper, angrier evolution. The album stumbles just a few times in pacing and mix, but even those stumbles are over terrains of riffs and ideas worth stumbling over.
Review: Blossom Decay – Sorrow Falls
“Sorrow Falls” thrives on contrast, swinging from violent breakdowns to brittle interludes that feel like open wounds briefly exposed. It’s raw, uneven, and imperfect, but Blossom Decay’s honesty and urgency make it an EP worth bleeding with.
Review: Ingrown – Idaho
“Idaho” hits like a punch to the teeth and then tends your wound with surprising nuance, mixing pulverising riffs and speed with touches of folk, personal history, and community pride. It’s relentless and unforgiving, yet those cracks in the armor make the intensity hit harder.
Review: Solfatare – Asservis par l’espoir
“Asservis par l’espoir” is a bleak and ambitious debut that balances dissonant black metal with moments of fragile melody, all carried by anguished French vocals that cut like a knife.
Review: Svdestada – Candela
“Candela” is an album that never hides its scars, a raw collision of blackened crust and emotional upheaval that claws at you rather than invites. It falters in pacing and clarity, but its honesty and ferocity keep it burning long after the noise fades.
Review: Backstabbed – Self-Fulfilling Tragedy
Listening feels less like being invited to a performance and more like being locked in the same collapsing room the band are thrashing through. The EP doesn’t so much ask for your attention as it claws at you with its fingernails. That is both its undoing and its appeal.