This is slamming, blackened, avant-garde death metal and utter chthonic chaos of the highest order.

A fantastic, visceral and traumatising drag through the hellscapes and forbidden places of one’s mind and one listen will reveal your truest darkness and how you embrace its magnificent, soulless blackness.

It’s a merciless skullfuck of an album with nine spine-shreading tracks ready to get you windmill moshing and face-planting brick walls.

I cannot praise Ash in Realms of Stone Icons enough and will be keeping an eye out for whatever this band puts out in the future.

Krüller is industrialised mayhem pushed through a time hole and spat out into a cybernetic future where the crushing of bone underfoot is as natural as a bird song once was.

Noktvrn lets in a little light into the void-blackness of Der Weg Einer Freiheit’s masterful catalogue and finds a new path to catharsis.

Each track takes you through a portal of dissonance into wicked abodes of horror and abyssal landscapes.

Their music contains many elements that are shotgun-blasted into your ears and are absorbed into the chaos of your twitching head.

The Humming Mountain thrives on its subtleties more than its face-melting moments. Those little nuances make the album sparkle a little more.

Riffs swell into a rhapsody of emotion, icy chills of bleakness washes over you and that pleasing shudder is the purging of all troubles to be carried away in the wind.

These five cavernous monstrosities take on a similar flow, melting into one lump of death-spewing, abstract blackened doom replete with churning, avant-garde chaos and crawling, bleak despair.

The blastbeats keep Wreche within black metal’s grim grasp but beyond those traditional sounds awaits the stargazing shimmer of post-black, thick with dreamy ambience and steeped in releasing purge in the form of Morgan’s agonising vocals.

Zos Ethos is wild, rabid and untethered black metal ready to drag your soul through the blazing flames of existence.

Every once in a while you discover a band who truly captivate you with their sound and ethos. VOW will be that band.

I Have Seen The Light, And It Was Repulsive is a devastating, claustrophobic slab of beat-your-face-until-its-pulp death metal.

Deconsecrate is a fearless mini hurricane of genre-twisting sound, both straight-up death metal and at times experimental, blackened metal with a few interspersed prog glimmers.

The Doorway may be a hard listen for some but for others this is a glimpse into as perfect as savage audial terror can get.

This EP will satiate fans until a new album comes and likely gives die-hard supporters a glimpse into Mayhem breaking the barriers of what they are perceived to be and taking a dive into what inspired much of their early output.

The three tracks on offer here ride the darkness of misery with a meditative calmness, injecting sincere and stunning beauty into the blackest of sound and emotion.

The entire album floats blissfully through weightless ease and gleaming audial brightness as each song captures another strikingly beautiful glare from this multifaceted diamond.

Interpolant take technical death metal and aspects of djent into a dystopian twilight of glowing synthesiser-driven metal, with these elements especially coming to the forefront of sound.