A melodramatic and aggressive black metal record, touring the touchstones of the best contemporary black metal.

It’s just a bit of a mess of a record

Diamanda Galás reissues coruscatingly brilliant and extreme debut album The Litanies of Satan.

Another instalment of ambitiously exploratory, tightly controlled, and above all, furiously exciting music.

Flower-themed brightness, brevity and directness give the record an invigorating and mind-expanding potential.

Overall a worthwhile addition to the discography for Nocturnal Depression, though for newcomers to the band I’d probably refer them to the earlier touchstone albums.

Complicated, weird, heavy, tight and uncompromising but also cerebral, curious and accessible. All praise that this record has received already is definitely well deserved.

A furious but brief equinox storm, the sounds evoking complex swirls and riptides.

No quarter-second is wasted when some seriously densely organised noise could be forced into it.

Ancient trees falling, icebergs toppling into the ocean, molten rock crackling as it cools, it’s difficult to imagine a more impressively epic way of crashing about.

Botanist appear from the undergrowth with Ecosystem, an intriguing new record of their trademark zithery, plant-supremacist black metal.

All in all, an excellent new step for the band, extending their previous accomplishments with a noticeably complex, faster interlocking riffs matched to the existing harmonic intensity and sinisterly animated drumming, all serving to crowbar open the portals and let the elder gods in.

Tomb Mold’s new album Planetary Clairvoyance is cosmic-themed, bottom-heavy growly death metal with unusual flourishes.

Another welcome instalment of the band’s stinging originality of vision.

Macedonian Lines, the new record from California’s legendary Yawning Man, is a blissfully laidback yet rock solid set of instrumental jams.

Roky Erickson died this weekend in Austin at the age of 71, having created some of the most urgent, influential and truly psychedelic music of the 20th Century. But the traditional tale of hippie acid casualty whose light burned brightly but briefly, tells only half the story.

Suffice to say this hour slab of blackened doom will darken your day and righteously attest to the end of the world.

The record is a sprawling multifaceted thing that gets better each listen,… You’ll be wandering around in search of your own head by the end of it.

Mord’A’Stigmata explore further territories from their black metal headquarters on new full-length Dreams of Quiet Places.

A powerful statement both personal and timely, the album deals with complex and important realms of vulnerability, difficulty, accountability, and our responses and responsibilities.

Stunning as in a powerfully affecting piece of art, and simultaneously in the sense of getting hit in the head by a blunt object.