Friends, thrashers, metalheads, lend me your ears! OverKill, the most consistent metal band on the entire planet, is back with their 18th (yes, I said 18th ) full-length album, The Grinding Wheel. If you are new to metal and/or are unfamiliar with OverKill, and somehow you have made your way to this review, then stop! […]
I’ll get right to it- Indiana’s Invasion have been around a while, plying their war themed death metal since 1999. They started as a more Swedish styled band and really got my attention with 2002s Bezerk Artillery Barrage, one of my early reviews back in the digital metal.com days. At the time, a US band using the Stockholm sound was virtually unheard of. They followed it up with 2010 Orchestrated Kill Maneuver, another slab of Swedish styled chainsaws. But then the band went quiet for a while. 8 years later we have Destroyers of Mankind and the band has now leaning on their American heritage for a far more USDM styled sound. I caught up with Peter Clemens Invasion founder and a busy man involved with many other projects.
Germany’s Kreator really needs no introduction and despite a few mishap albums in the 90’s, for me, remain the best German Thrash Metal act to this day. I will venture to say I remember when Endless Pain was released in 1985 and 1986 brought about my favorite album by them, Pleasure to Kill. ’92-99, is […]
One of the more revered names in European brutal death metal, and the primary name in Maltese death metal, Beheaded have been around since the mid 90s and have released 4 fine albums of brutal/technical death metal, with a near classics in 1998s Perpetual Mockery and 2002s Recounts of Disembodiment. I have not heard 2012s […]
Lord K Phillipson, the founder of The Project Hate MCMXCIX, is and has always been one of the most outspoken and opinionated dudes in metal. Ever since we started conversing around 2003s Hate, Dominate, Congregate, Eliminate in the Digitalmetal.com days. From the internet, labels to illegal downloads, The man has always had something to say. And right now he has a lot to talk about as the The Project Hate collective has just unleashed their 11th album, Of Chaos and Carnal Pleasures to the masses. Amd yet again the release is a fan funded, digital only release as Lord K continues to spurn the industry and record labels.
Aided by the whimper of Whitechapel’s Mark of the Blade, once the genre’s flagbearer, deathcore appears to be on a hard downswing. Even for me, a staunch fan of the genre, other than a hand full of EPs (Falsifier, Pathways) little has really blown me away recently or even over the last year or so. But here […]
Well, here we are at the start of a fresh new year. And while New Years is usually a time for bright-eyed, wishful optimism and wistful reminiscence, the global political and social climates have the world at unease. Yet despite a near blastbeat-pace of bummers and deaths, 2016 gave us another year of stellar extreme music.
Teethofthedivine soldiered on in 2016 as well, with some new faces on the team (though our distaste for digital promos hasn’t changed a bit). We also experienced a growth spurt on social media, so if you’re not following us yet, why the hell not? ‘Cause while other sites seem content to feed you with celebrity blogs, lists of ‘top 10 albums from 1993 which which had llamas on the cover’ or so-called humor pieces, TOTD just did what we do best: reviews, reviews, and reviews. One review every week day for the whole year. That’s 300+ reviews, folks.
We hope to add more interviews, features, and contests in 2017, and we do it all for you guys – our loyal readers, sharers, likers, and listeners. So keep on keeping it real in 2017, as it might be the last year the earth continues to spin. We’ll do our part to make sure metal stays as relevant in 2017 as it has been in the decades before.
So with much ado, here are the hand-picked releases that the TOTD staff enjoyed in 2016. Given the thousands of releases that assaulted our collective senses last year, hopefully we’ll introduce you to a few new favorites. And as always, stay tuned for our Fillings and Cavities feature, where we’ll shovel even more death, destruction, blackened weirdness, and melodic wonders into your willing ears.
Back in 2009 Long Island’s Painted In Exile released a killer 3 song EP called Revitalized. Riding the popularity of bands like of Between the Buried and Me, Protest the Hero, The Human Abstract, Periphery, Born of Osiris etc, the band was a experimental fusion of shredding metalcore, deathcore, mathcore, jazz, prog metal and even […]
In 1987 Death firmly put the stamp of the death metal genre on the map with the release of their debut Scream Bloody Gore album. I received it on vinyl as a birthday gift that year and it is an album all us old bastards have memorized front to back. Once again Relapse Records […]
Talk about one of the most anticipated metal releases for 2016. The hype for Hardwired… To Self-Destruct has been through the roof. I preordered this special 3cd edition some time ago and it never reached me. My post office could not find it and it was never delivered, yet I paid for it. Score: Rini […]
Two months ago the Zurich, Switzerland duo Bölzer achieved somewhat of a Herculean task when they premiered the first advance track from their debut full-length “Hero”’. For a few weeks prior the storied halls of heavy metal social media had been in a tizzy over the first material to surface from Metallica’s imminent new album and […]
It’s rare I get to have the pleasure of reviewing all the releases from an active band. Cognitive are one such band. I reviewed their ep, The Horrid Swarm and interviewed guitarist Rob Wharton several years ago. The band dropped their self-titled debut 2 years ago and I was pleasantly surprised to hear more technical […]
I can remember cruising through my local record store some 20 years ago as a young teenager and blindly purchasing Testaments Souls of Black solely on the cover art. It was a rewarding purchase to say the least, and so began my admiration for one of heavy metals finest acts. What I now have […]
More often than not, supergroups are a collective of guys or gals trying to get out side the box and deliver something more outside the realm of their full time endeavors as the folks try and spread their creative wings or whatever. But sometimes, one only need look at the members involved and get a […]
Nine years is a mere nanosecond compared to the endless expanse of space and time, but that’s how long it has been since Mithras’ last full album, Behind the Shadows Lie Madness. That was my #1 album for 2007, and it still gets frequent play (its album cover also still gets regular desktop background honors), as there […]
Summer is finally dead. Someone clever might shout ‘Winter is coming! Winter is coming!’ from the top of their still-attached heads, but we here at Teeth know that Game of Thrones references are so last season. Instead, we’re talking about a quantum leap to stranger days back in July. July, when we went to Tuska Open Air Metal Festival in Helsinki and lived to tell about it. So come with us, and longingly remember three days of sun, rain and heavy metal.
If there’s one thing that’s mothertruckin’ hot right now, it’s nostalgia. And what could be more nostalgic than vinyls? Satan probably. Teeth of the Divine teams up with Boris Records and Clawhammer PR for a giveaway that combines both of those things. Yes, you read that right. One randomly picked winner gets his hands on one (1) 12″ and three (3) 7″ releases from the following bands: Vimur, Hellgoat, Cloak and Mangled. And what do you have to do to participate and perhaps—if Lady Luck is willing—get your filthy hands all over these records? Just fill a form right here, right now.
Opeth’s 12th album is upon us, and as promised, Sorceress is their heaviest in years – certainly since Watershed. It is also their best since then. The pendulum has not swung back to 2008, though. This is still not a metal album, per se – certainly not the progressive death that made them so beloved […]
It’s been a busy couple of years since Italian death metal act ADE released their widely acclaimed second effort, Spartacus on Canada’s Blast Head Records in 2013. The band has switched to a label a little closer to home with Xtreem Music and undergone a significant line up change, with only two members from Spartacus remaining. […]
Germany’s Equilibrium has resided atop the viking/folk metal hill for a while now, with 2005s Turis Fratyr and 2008s Sagas remaining two of the very top albums in the genre. And while Rekreatur was a transitional solid release after a line up shift, the band stormed back with Erdentempel in 2014. So now here with album […]
Mr. Matt Calvert’s overall goal must be be to have his Dark Descent label put every underground label out of business. Blood Incantation are yet another special band, that he found a few years ago. 2015 saw the band put out a pretty killer 4 song ep, Interdimensional Extinction. I am new to the Blood […]
Musician, artist and writer Alex CF has provided some of my favorite, emotional moments in music over the last few years. From Fall of Efrafa‘s Warren of Snares trilogy, to the incomplete Light Bearer saga, to the more recent Anopheli and Archivist releases, his deep concepts and various takes on crust/d-beat and post rock have been, […]
Defeated Sanity return to us with an unorthodox dual e.p. release. As they should. With a discography of stellar releases they have an earned reputation for reaching beyond the death metal abyss and fans expect more from them than even the nearest band to their rank. Last we heard from these dastardly villains was 2013’s […]
Granada Theater, Lawrence, KS on July 17th, 2016. The dog days of summer can be grueling in the midwest, when the air is so chokingly thick with humidity that there is seemingly no place to hide from it. This is a time period when the earth is so scorched and disgusting that living underground seems like a good idea. You become a sluggish sack of goop, everyone reeks of sweat and body odor, and doing anything outdoors (even breathing) sucks. Appropriately, this is exactly when kings of rot Carcass chose to come to Kansas, on the very first stop of their One Foot in the Grave tour, along with support from Crowbar, Ghoul, and Night Demon.
While Texas is more know for its brutal death metal and pure black metal, lying amid the reeds is Vex. Vex are neither. Instead, the band plays a form of hybrid between atmospheric black metal and melodic death metal. They have been around since 1999 but only have three albums under their belt — including the just released ‘Sky Exile’ on Eiwaz/Bindrune Recordings (a perfect fit) and those with a taste for more progressive, organic metal, will find a lot to like about them.