Not your typical blast of feral screeches into the uncaring night, a record that injects a spark of life – even joy – into a field that so often is too intransigent.

A worthy addition to the clinical dismemberment school of death metal. Sounds fun, right?

Rife with darkness and a profound sense of desolation, this is the sound of a band genuinely enjoying themselves.

A brilliant demonstration that black metal can be multi-faceted, a swirling, alluring, enrapturing madness from the mysterious trio.

The machines are here – is this the start down a very dark path, or a view towards a gentler world of aid and compromise?

Monuments To Absence is a testament to the harsh beauty Fen brings to the black metal scene.

An epic wall of sound that pulls the listener helplessly in – but is it music?

The chameleonic Japanese trio join forces with the anger-fuelled industrial hellscape decorators from New York for a blistering ride of a record.

Walking that delicate knife-edge of being rooted in history, yet talking bold leaps forward too, one of black metal’s great innovators returns to where it all began.

The unexpected return of one of the most extreme bands to ever crawl out from under the rock labelled doom – time for the most desolate atmospheres conjured in slow motion.

A twisted, nightmarish world of dissonant blasting and relentless aural violence.

Paying homage to the music they grew up loving, Dirk Serries and Justin K Broadrick produce a magical ride.

[ B O L T ] have delivered an exquisite album that is all about emotion, a piece of art that tugs deep inside: wondrous and sublime.

Black metal tackling weighty emotions, with a dash of levity. It’s loud, it’s fast, it’s angry, but they appear to have a lot of fun cajoling it all into a single story.

A record that leaves the listener exhausted, scared, but most of all enthralled by the sheer malevolence displayed.

Four friends flit from progressive metal into black, death, and the mercurial post- territories to scratch an itch.

An exciting new band crashing into the doom scene with a fresh twist on the expected cornerstones.

Thunderous, earthquake-inducing doom, the kind where vases fall off shelves and innards quiver from the force of the soundwaves emitted.

Liturgy are a polarising band and their fifth LP, being an attempt to write an opera, will surely do them no favours in changing opinion. However, the record is incredible in how, for the most part, the quartet manage to pull off the impossible. Surely, the most ambitious album of 2020?

Lunatic Soul pushes new boundaries through Mariusz Duda’s personal reflection.

It’s been ten years since Miriam Clancy’s last album, Magnetic, was first released. In between then and now she moved from New Zealand to the US with her children and started writing her next album. Astronomy was released on September 27th and represen …