Get your Carol Baskin outfit on! It’s Our favorite Halloween and Horror Themed Tracks!!!

It’s that special, spooky time of year again, and we at Teeth of the Divine are here to help you have your best Halloween possible!

Click ahead to check out some of our favorite Halloween-themed and adjacent tracks featuring monsters, killers, graveyards and all the scary, blood-curdling shit that makes us smile with sadistic glee!

Times are weird. There’s a new virus, a worldwide pandemic and quarantines. Whole countries are locking down, including pubs and restaurants and toilet paper is the new economy!!!! Could the situation be any more metal???

We here at Teeth of the Divine are again drowning in releases, good and bad. It’s gotten so bad that we even told the water department to scram because, honestly, who has time for watery showers when you can simply shower in metal and bathe in righteousness? But even then, the sacrifices to our personal hygiene and well being isn’t enough to cover all the goddamn metal we receive daily. Thus we’re looking for a few good headbangers that know how to spell somewhat coherent sentences to share their educated opinions about today’s hottest and ugliest releases.

As usual, we will be taking a little break here at Teethofthedivine .com for the Holidays. Whatever ever seasonal celebration you celebrate, we hope you have a safe holiday season. The elves here at Teethofthedivine will be let off for a few days from providing you with top notch reviews and features so we can recuperate from 2018’s amazing onslaught of metal, and allow the dedicated TOTD staff some time with their families or homeless shelter roommates.

When the almost 10 year old Sauna Open Air went bankrupt in 2013, the old punk capital of Finland, Tampere was to go without a hard rock/metal festival. A different organizer came in and scooped up the slot, and thus the South Park Festival was born — named after Eteläpuisto, the park it’s held in, and not the television show (though that would be an entertaining event as well!) So, third year in, how did the festival go this time around?

It happens every year. In the mad shuffle to painstakingly put our year-end lists together, stuff gets missed. Whether they were sent to us after the fact, slipped through the cracks, or were simply overlooked, a number of killer releases found themselves in year-end limbo. A few of our staff compiled a list of the praise-worthy releases that missed the cut for our year-end 2015 feature, which means you should still consider them to be some of last year’s best.

2015. Another, goddamn, year over already. And how’d it end? With a major downer with Lemmy going somewhere else. Who do we have left? Ozzy? Rob? Alice? Anyone else? Damn. It wasn’t all that bad of a year though, even if the world seemed to become even crazier than 2014 — if Fox News is to be believed. Plenty of good music got released and what we’ve got here is a top list of metal related stuff that Teeth of the Divine’s staff handpicked themselves. Unlike most of our corporate overlords, we don’t outsource our opinions, enslave some poor bastards and build safety nets around them just in case they decide to call it quits. Actually, that’s not true. We’re not a hive mind, we enslave people to write for us but we sure as hell aren’t spending any of our huge advertising revenue to keep them alive. Ha! Anyway, browse around and find some worthy stuff you might have missed!

While summer 2015 didn’t met all the expectations, there was at least one constant in that equation; Wanaja Festival held in Hämeenlinna, Finland. Again, its inclusion on a heavy metal site is questionable at best and totally schizophrenic at worst, as most of the artists on the bill aren’t necessarily singing about Satan or promoting safe sex with dead people. But as always, there’s at least a band or two that gives us an excuse to attend the festival and live to tell about it on a heavy metal website. So gather around for some egotistically driven babble about the experience from few months back — when the weather was actually still nice.

The fine Canucks up in Canada’s Blast Head Records are in a giving mood as summer is right around the corner… probably because they never see the sun, right? Anyways to celebrate the upcoming warmth, the label is giving away 10 CDs, yep, ten CDs. And here is the great thing: YOU (or whomever wins) gets to HAND PICK the CDs from Blast Head Records’ releases!!! No questions, no judgement, no getting CDs you might not be interested in. Just 5 CDs each to two randomly picked lucky winners.

The Teeth of the Divine crew wishes you happy holidays (or whatever) and the best of mosh for the year 2015.

The leaves are gone, the snow has fallen, and the Christmas decorations are showing up. That only means one thing: The great American tradition of gluttony awkward family gatherings…namely…Thanksgiving. To celebrate, the fine folks at Clawhammer PR have teamed up with Teethofthedivine and Comatose Music, Kaotoxin Records, Orchestrated Misery Recordings, and Unspeakable Axe Records to present a massive, 10 CD giveaway to celebrate Turkey day.

When weighing up my options of which album to cover for my first contribution to The New Classics feature I was pleasantly surprised by just how downright overwhelming the task of narrowing down a pivotal album to highlight. Not through any shortage of quality options, but rather the sheer magnitude of landmark and game changing albums that have dropped during a very fruitful post-millennium decade. Personally, when the year 2000 rolled around I was still in my late teens and on an upswing of discovery since breaking my extreme metal cherry a couple of years prior. Of course I had plenty of catching up to do as my appreciation for heavy metal took on an entirely new dimension, with one ear scouring the landmark early wave of extreme metal, and especially death metal’s storied past, while the other was planted in the (then) here and now.

Even if the Finnish summer does its best impression of having a bipolar mental condition by throwing hail out every other day, there’s one thing you can count on in June and that’s Tuska Open Air Metal Festival held at the capital of Finland, Helsinki. The 17th Tuska was fighting an uphill battle with the visitor count being somewhat stagnant as the mainstream heavy metal boom is starting to wind down after Lordi’s Eurovision victory in 2006. World economy hasn’t improved much either and a lot of different things like Zirconium and Tony Little’s latest ab machine are fighting for people’s spending money. So how do Anthrax, Dimmu Borgir and Emperor fare in a tight spot?

For this summer’s festivities, Teeth of the Divine sent a festival reporter to the Finnish farming headlands to visit the Nummirock 2014 Festival. The festival is held around 330 kilometers north of Helsinki, away from any major city or municipal, annually on and around the midsummer day, during which time the country is often on a nation wide hiatus and a booze binge. So come on in, educate yourself and see how bands like Behemoth or W.A.S.P handled their business.

It seems like every year is the better than the last and 2013 was no exception. From anticipated reunions like Gorguts and Carcass to the rise of so-called hipster metal in mainstream circles thanks to bands like Deafheaven, to grizzled veterans like Suffocation, every aspect and sub-genre of metal was firing on all cylinders. As usual, the TOTD staff had to be beaten into getting their lists submitted in time, and luckily, the many new staff members understood the imminent threat of physical violence.

This year we have even included a few ‘celebrity’ lists from some of the people responsible for making and releasing 2013’s great material, so be sure to check out the last page to see what folks like Kevin Quiron of Deicide voted as his favorite albums of 2013. As usual, thank you to all of YOU, the readers of this intimate little site, and stay tuned for more great metal in 2014.

Without further ado, we give you the 2013 Teethofthedivine.com staff picks:

The announcement of the Ghoul Tour was a very exciting moment for the american fans of Dir en Grey. With the Japan-based band’s last US Tour canceled due to the hospitalization of their vocalist Kyo, it had been been a decent number of years since the last US show. Famous for their on-stage self-mutilation, shocking performances, and otherkin-identifying fanbase. Dir en Grey would also be supported by Dagoba, a metal band from France, who had released their fifth full-length album, Post Mortem Nihil Est earlier in the month. It was clear that this event simply could not be missed. On the day of, I set off to attend the show with high expectations.

“I wasn’t even supposed to be here today!” insisted Dante in Kevin Smith’s Clerks and being in the middle of a cold, breezy 10th Wanaja Festival on Friday, July 19th — held in the historic city of Hameenlinna, Finland — I thought the exact same thing. And, the weather wasn’t the only thing on my mind since the lineup made me question my own priorities as well. The metal bands could be counted with three fingers and all of those three would make an appearance on the second day. Yet, following my life patterns like the rats in that Paul Simon song, I still had asked if I could come. I didn’t hear back until just right before the festival’s D-Day when they said “Come on in”, so after shuffling my obligations around and trying to make it all work, here I was.

Helsinki, Finland was a busy place on the last weekend of June 2013. Not only were there three, four or five festivals going in and around the city, but the streets were full of gay pride as well. For whatever reason, Tuska Open Air Metal Festival’s visitor count has been on the decline since the relocation from the Kaisaniemi park to the industrial zone — not that the other events around the town helped, quite possibly snatching a few casual listeners with acts like Green Day and Rammstein. However, Teeth of the Divine never abandons those in need, and thus we summoned ourselves to the 16th Tuska Festival where acts like King Diamond, Bolt Thrower and Testament graced the main stage.

Teethofthedivine is thrilled to add an actual, real live musician to its ranks. Hopefully this one will last longer than Ben Hogg (Beaten Back to Pure etc) god love ‘im. Frank was the vocalist on two Internal Bleeding albums (as you will find out below), and brings that experience as well as a ton of contacts in the scene and energy with him for reviews and interviews. Frank currently also writes for allabouttherock.com, but is bringing his background in the industry to our little site. Take a few minutes to meet the latest addition and actual veteran musician to the teethofthedivine. staff.

It’s been a mystery for quite some time as to why Goatwhore isn’t playing in front of sold out crowds in the larger theatres across America. After seeing them five times already in various cities, their shows are usually in smaller bar/club venues with anywhere from 30 to 100 people. And when they’ve been included on massive tours like the one when Celtic Frost reemerged with Monotheist and the one last year with Cannibal Corpse, Between the Buried and Me and countless others, Goatwhore was at the bottom of the bill.

After a year long hiatus, Tampere’s Sauna Open Air festival returned again in 2013 for a weekend that consisted of mainly Northern European acts like Nightwish, Children of Bodom, Opeth, Volbeat and Sabaton — with the only US visitor going by the name of Hatebreed. The festival also saw other changes. Instead of being ushered into a park setting, the party was held in a sports stadium and rather than doing three full days, there were only two. And we were there.

What happens when you discover a new band? You go see them play — that’s what. Noel Holmes discovered Nile and soon found himself at one of their live shows back in March 2013. This is what happened.

At the end of every calendar year, metal journalists spend months trying to put together the dreaded year end list. It’s a long, stressful and ever-evolving process that keeps us up at night as we order and reorder albums several times, fret over stuff we have too high on the list or stuff that got bumped off the bottom. We try to make the lists as extensive and inclusive as possible, but inevitably, stuff gets missed. Maybe an album was too obscure, got overlooked in the crowd, we didn’t hear it until too late, or simply never made it into our inbox. So some of the staff here decided to give you guys a late Christmas present and let you know about some releases that you need to hear in case you also missed it or like us, simply overlooked it or it just didn’t get coverage here. These are the mulligans that, in hindsight, deserve your attention and probably would have made our staff’s year-end lists if we weren’t so lazy and rushed by a tireless dictator. So rise, brush, floss and repeat as we drill you with our cavities and fillings from 2012:

UPDATE-CONGRATULATIONS TO PALLBEARER, WHO BY A SERIES OF COMPLEX FORMULAS AND CALCULATIONS WON THE TOTD STAFF ALBUM OF THE YEAR WITH ‘SORROW AND EXTINCTION’. ANAAL NATHRAKH’S ‘VANITAS’ TOOK SECOND PLACE, WITH DYING FETUS TAKING THIRD WITH ‘REIGN SUPREME’.

. Another year, another winter spent threatening physical violence upon the staff here to get their year-end picks in. Now that the dust has settled, here are the results – the definitive list of critical picks of 2012’s best and worst releases. It’s all here: top albums, top EPs, top songs, biggest letdowns and the woulda shoulda coulda’s, as hand-picked by the TOTD staff. Feel free to comment, critique and tell us your own favorites for 2012. Thanks to all you guys for reading our little site in 2012 and here’s to another epic year of metal in 2013. Salut!

Wintersun’s blood-bonded following has been clamoring for a US tour ever since their self-titled debut was released in 2004. 8 years later, our prayers are answered as the controversial album Time I is released alongside a worldwide tour with Eluveitie and Varg. Was it everything we hoped for?