This is actually not that slow by the standards of the subgenre, but this is still doom propelled by low thudding chords that have time to make their impact felt, with the patterns of the riffs coming out more in repeated listens. – By Owen Coggins

This is a carefully and subtly crafted ambient drone record. A floating, anaesthetic, cotton wool dream of grey-to-white ambience. – By Owen Coggins

The proceeds of this record will go to the conservation of the Madagascan Aye-Aye: do an image search for that, and you’ll see a photo album of what you’ll look like after giving this record your deserving attention. – By Owen Coggins

Happy Canadian National Drone Day! – By Owen Coggins

‘Svartkonst’ perhaps isn’t quite as distinctive as that, but it’s certainly enough to raise anticipation for their UK live début later this year. As expected of Hypothermia, this is a powerful portrait of powerlessness, a stark vision of emptiness. – By Owen Coggins

Owen Coggins took another pilgrimage to Tilburg to attend his third Roadburn Festival. “Another triumphant year rewarding all pilgrims to the riff-filled land.”

Evocative, introspective and well-balanced, this is a promising debut exploration of ambient drone textures and transitions. – By Owen Coggins

I suspect most fans would gladly trade in the first and last tracks for a single, stark Urfaust classic like the title track. – By Owen Coggins

This iconic Transilvanian band deserve their reputation for innovatively incorporating both an archaic lost-world folk romanticism and a sense of epic black metal rage. – By Owen Coggins

“There’s a fair few people up here who have come alone, keeping their own brooding thoughtful company, in tune with the sombre excursions, perhaps exorcisms, in these dusty tales of world-weary experience.” – Owen Coggins reports back from seeing Mark Lanegan live.

This music seems designed for listening in a car that’s old enough to have a cassette player, on an empty road with no clear destination. – By Owen Coggins

Alkerdeel let loose a reanimating wanderer in industrial grit and slime, while Nihill go from strength to strength in their uncompromising vein of sinister experimentation: two richly dark and intriguing forays into black metal’s wild border country. – By Owen Coggins

In a musical world where ‘black metal’ so often means post-rock with tremolo picking, Verderf summons an intense, malevolent claustrophobia in its noise-rusted mastery of metal extremism. – By Owen Coggins

This is the soundtrack of blissful, elegiac, drifting disinterest, floating out into deep space in slow forgetfulness… – By Owen Coggins

Venus Armata’s shadow alchemy calls up magickal spectres and the real, secret, dark faerie tales while commanding the full force of industrial grime and filth. – By Owen Coggins

With this record Sloath have proved their sound is so distinctive and pleasingly dirt-encrusted, I’d happily sit through their versions of Ennio Morricone soundtracks or nursery rhyme covers. – By Owen Coggins

That’s what I’m thinking about when I leave late Sunday night… the strangely shaped scalene riffs, the ludicrous detonations of shredding, Shimura Koji’s heavy-hitting coda to his Acid Mothers career on drums, a final magnesium flare, the wheels finally come off, bits and pieces of debris finally clanging to a halt, leaving only the echoes of the endless riff following everyone home. By Owen Coggins

There might be ‘a serpent coming’ in Primitive and Deadly… but from another perspective it looks like Earth themselves returning to the serpent that eats its own tail. – By Owen Coggins

You might appreciate this album. That’s a matter of complete indifference. You might love depressive black metal. It doesn’t care about you. – By Owen Coggins

Listening to the two 45-minute tracks of V is like trying to imagine your own burial under the Himalayas. – By Owen Coggins

Each separate piece of Gold is a small but sacred object, turned over, contemplated, turned again in Carlson’s tattoo-sigiled hands, as if studied intently for hidden insights in the reflections striking out from each angled facet. By Owen Coggins