Albums of April 17 and 24, 2026

The most interesting albums of the week(s)!

Avarice, Nequient‘s third full-length, was released on Nefarious Industries. Nequient make music influenced by Dillinger Escape Plan and Converge with extra death metal influence. With their music existing somewhere between metallic hardcore, death metal, and grindcore depending on the track you’re on, this band keeps the listener guessing through odd riffs, tempo changes, and complete stylistic collapses. The resulting album is both exciting and fresh.

The middle minutes of “Splenetic And Moribund” show what Nequient is capable of. Nequient start off the track with a similar frantic energy to their previous songs. The riffs are dissonance and the vocals energeitc, the performances are eye-opening. But then the bottom falls out. The middle minutes of the track are spent in sludgy muck, exploring a much slower, more tone-based approach to the song’s style. The transition is jarring. Nequient pull off both sections of music equally well, and maintain interest before building back up to the chaos that started the track just in time for the next song to start. Avarice is a wild celebration, and it’s one that’s worth checking out if you are at all into this style of music.

Blessed Be The Dark was released on Dying Victims Productions. As with most releases from this label, Demon Spell give the listener occult blues-based heavy metal with clean vocals and a throwback production approach on their debut. Demon Spell‘s biggest strength is how fun they are. Yes, the riffs are memorable, the octave shifts in the vocals are impressive. But I find myself just smiling and nodding along more than anything.

Demon Spell work in the small space between authentic and sloppy. Some of the vocal jumps are smooth as hell, but some have a bit of strain as the vocalist barely hits the upper octave. Some of the drum fills are tight, but some are messy and momentarily lose the beat. However, Demon Spell always err on the side of authenticity. All of the human moments add to the experience and none actually feel like mistakes.

A Cry For The Slain was released on Apocalyptic Witchcraft. The album’s Scottish folk music brings to mind Scáth Na Déithe (who I know are not Scottish) and Primordial (yes, again, not Scottish). Proper opening track “The Caoineag” starts with triplet guitar lines trading fours with vocals that bring more hardcore shouting than I was prepared for. Cnoc an Tursa play with grandiose earnestness, like they’re trying to make you feel the wind on the mountains. The result is more of an emotional appeal than a technical one.

That doesn’t mean that Cnoc an Tursa can’t play their instruments. Many of the riffs sound impressive, and while the songs sometimes get stuck in repetition in order to get through the lyrics, the performances are enough to keep the music from sounding stale. But that misses the point. Cnoc an Tursa do an excellent job at conveying emotion, and after all memories of drum fills or vocal inflections are gone, the power of A Cry For The Slain lives on in heartache and hope.

Sulphur was released on Disorder Recordings. Bringers Of Disease play pulverizing black/death with no space to breath, like a grumpier Goatwhore. The band doesn’t seem too concerned about melody. Most of the riffs continue few or even one note, with a greater focus being put on distortion and rhythm. The vocals similarly exist in two places: low and murky, and high and shrieking.

Bringers Of Disease‘s music still works for a couple reasons. One is the style that the band members bring. While there aren’t a lot of different notes in the guitars, the repeated notes are still played with a drive towards a climax at the end of the verse. The vocals have surprising range within their self-imposed confines, which leads to each track sounding fresh. And the songwriting doesn’t really ask for more than this. The music is dense, not in a heady way but in a claustrophobic way. Sulphur‘s sharp focus and refusal to explore add to the closed-coffin feeling, and make moments like the opening of “First Born Of The Dead” where an actual guitar melody is played feel like shocking turns into another universe. Brings Of Death took their style to an extreme conclusion and succeeded.

Imperatrix Sanguinis was released on Dominance of Darkness and I have almost nothing to say about it. This is black metal. Look at the cover art and you know what it sounds like. The lyrics are apparently about Elizabeth Bathory, and that isn’t exactly some new shocking thing in the world of black metal. Blood Countess play their style well though. Well-played songs more than make up for any lack of originality.

Two Dances For The End Of Days was released on Road To Masochist Records. This is a short drone/industrial project, featuring two tracks that build over their runtimes from nothing to slightly more than nothing to the absolute crushing weight of the universe and back to nothing. The songs are dark and eerie. This sounds like the soundtrack of Eraserhead if the film was instead a slasher horror movie made jointly by Wes Craven and Trent Reznor.

Rhythm drives Two Dances For The End Of Days. The music is sometimes painful and sometimes grooving, but the entire run time of the two songs either adds onto or exists in opposition to the beat that’s established in the opening minutes. The emotional punch outsizes the releases runtime by a fair amount.

On the Promise of the Moon was released on Profound Lore Records. Reeking Aura‘s last album, 2022’s Blood and Bonemeal was a solid death metal release that didn’t make its way into my regular rotation despite excellent vocals from Will Smith. On the Promise of the Moon exceeds Blood and Bonemeal in every way. This album’s harsh riffs contain plenty of variability while reinforcing the band’s vicious death metal style. Will Smith’s vocals are as amazing as they always are. The songs are dynamic and intense. This is everything I wanted from the band.

What surprised me the most about On the Promise of the Moon was how catchy the album can be. Riffs were stuck in my ear for days after listening. This isn’t the dense, complicated music of other associated projects like Afterbirth, it’s a varied and large album without many blemishes. If you’re at all into death metal there’s no reason not to give this a listen.

Decathexis was released on Apocalyptic Witchcraft. The promotional material compares this to Anaal Nathrakh and Morbid Angel, but I don’t hear that comparison much at all (the Gorguts comparison works better than I thought, which I realized after taking the excuse to listen to some Gorguts for the first time in a while). Hebephrenique approach their music with more post-metal influence and a more contemplative, softer bent than those two bands. That isn’t to say that this is Cult of Luna or something, you’re still getting dissonant death metal with plenty of punch on Decathexis.

Hebephrenique keep a brisk pace when moving along their directly-constructed songs, and still manage to make the listener completely lost. I enjoy the band’s tendency to move into a sonic space, completely exhaust their idea within a limited space over the course of a few repetitions, and then move to something completely different. Many times a melody ties together the different parts of a song, but not much else. This is entertaining weird death metal, with less layers than that style can sometimes have.

Doodswens was released on Svart Records. This debut record runs through quite a few emotions. The standard black metal riffs are interupted with riffs that contain jumps outside the norm. Otherwise, Doodswens gives the listener mid-tempo black metal that will sound familiar.

What works best here is focus. Many songs stick to traditional structures. The songs themselves are entertaining, but work better as one album. That gives Doodswens time to get the listener fully into the world that they are building, at which point everything clicks.