Review: Jack Harlon & The Dead Crows – Inexorable Opposites (2026)
Melbourne’s Jack Harlon & The Dead Crows built their mythology around a drug-addicted gunslinger moving through a science fiction Western landscape.
Category: Reviews
Review: The Howling Void – The Glow Of A Distant Fire (2025)
The April 2025 release of The Glow Of A Distant Fire, the ninth full-length album by The Howling Void, the monolithic, San Antonio, Texas-based one-person project of Ryan Wilson, is less an evolution than a culmination of his symphonic funeral doom style, immediately asserting itself as a standard for the genre. While deeply rooted in the genre’s defining characteristics of glacial pacing and oppressive atmosphere, the album distinguishes itself by leveraging immense soundscapes, aimed for intense philosophical introspection.
Review: Pilgrimage – From Amber to Sun (2025)
Attention! Pilgrimage have unleashed their second album, From Amber to Sun, an overwhelming masterclass in Death-Doom Metal saturation. This cross-border alliance, anchored by musicians from Malta and The Netherlands, constructs sloe, monolithic structures of sound. Titanic low-end frequencies and ice-age tempos establish an immense, terrifying scale.
Review: Evoken – Mendacium (2025)
Evoken stands as one of the fundamental pillars of American extreme doom metal. Formed in 1992 (under the initial name Funereus), this New Jersey collective has spent over three decades helping to define the sound of funeral doom – a genre characterized by its glacial pace, overwhelming psychological gravity, and mournful atmosphere.
Review: Spaceship Landing: A Tribute to KYUSS (2025)
Released by the digital label Witching Cult, this twenty-track collection gathers a global lineup to honor the architects of desert rock. A map of fuzz and heat drawn anew, tracing the dry pulse of Palm Desert through bands scattered across the world: France, Italy, USA, Norway, Germany, Spain, Finland, Australia… what unites them is the enduring current that runs through Kyuss: that raw desert pulse carried forward in new hands, and reimagined under different suns.
Review: Death Has Spoken – Elegy (2025)
Formed in 2017 in Białystok, Poland, Death Has Spoken have grown into a reliable presence within the country’s doom/death scene. Poland keeps a firm grip on its doom offerings, and this band stands near its center – serious, unhurried, and fully grounded in craft. Now releasing their third full-length, Elegy, they sound mature, massive, direct, and always within reach.
Review: Hooded Menace – Lachrymose Monuments Of Obscuration (2025)
On their seventh album, Finland’s Hooded Menace take a more melodic turn. The shift feels unexpected yet earned, the kind that comes after years of refining one approach until it breaks open. The sound stays heavy and slow, but melody now carries the direction. It’s a subtle surprise, indeed: clear, confident, and fully integrated into the group’s language.
Review: Novembers Doom – Major Arcana (2025)
Across three decades, Novembers Doom have refined decay into discipline. Recording since 1995, the American band’s sound has aged alongside its voice, turning experience into structure. Major Arcana extends that evolution. The aggression that once tore through The Novella Reservoir (2007) now carries a steadier pulse, more deliberate, more aware of its own form.
Review: Der Weg einer Freiheit – Innern (2025)
Der Weg einer Freiheit return with their sixth full-length, released through Season of Mist. Across six albums, the Würzburg group have refined their own language within black metal. With Noktvrn (2021), they leaned toward nocturnal atmosphere and extended use of piano, pulling their writing closer to dream states. Innern moves in another direction, stripped down to fury and fragility, pushing deeper into the body.
Review: Paradise Lost – Ascension (2025)
Paradise Lost’s seventeenth album arrives as their most commanding release since Faith Divides Us, Death Unites Us. It does not attempt reinvention, but it draws together every strand of the band’s history into a single, coherent vision: the suffocating density of doom, the dramatic sweep of gothic textures, the grit of harsh vocals, and the melancholy of melody. What emerges is a definitive statement that feels alive, sharpened, and relevant.
