Metal 198 Items

Quorthon was a Swedish musician. He was the founder and songwriter of the band Bathory, which pioneered the black metal genre and is credited with creating the Viking metal style. A multi-instrumentalist, Quorthon wrote the music and lyrics on all of Bathory's albums and performed vocals and guitars. Originally released in 1997, Purity of Essence was the second full length studio album released by Quorthon as a solo project. Featuring 23 epic tracks split across a double CD - this version has been dedicatingly transcribed to vinyl and is available here as a massive heavyweight double LP.

Classic Cover. "Inri" is the 1987 debut album by Brazilian extreme metal band Sarcofago. "Inri" would become the unofficial staple of the emerging extreme metal subgenres, and today it still stands as one of the most iconic and influential releases of the decade, if not all time. It’s been impersonated, emulated, and ripped off countless times, yet there’s something about makes it stand head and shoulders above the countless imposters it spawned.

One of the earliest and first experimental/ambient projects to join the ranks of Sentient Ruin and turn it into the multi-headed abomination we strive to be(come), Italian black ambient/death industrial demon Clavicvla is back with its most perverse and deranged work yet, once again in proud partnership with illustrious French ambient/industrial colleagues Cyclic Law. From the artwork to the titles and themes, the intent of new full-length offering Degeneracy of the 5th Density is clear: worshiping and glorifying perversions, deviancy and immorality in their every form and shape. With these nefarious intents sole mastermind Ittiel has orchestrated the rise of this third aural plague of his around a creeping miasma of monstrous sepulchral ambience reeking from the ruptured bowels of oblivion, unfolding a forty-five minute sonic nightmare of absolutely omnipotent repulsiveness. Dark ambient, black industrial, ritual drone, noise and subsonic horrors of all kinds are distilled by the demiurge into a sonic morass of total suffering and terror, and ritualized into a soundtrack to every broken soul's most hidden, vile and foul impulses.

Octagon is the eighth studio album by Swedish extreme metal band Bathory. It was released in October 1995, through Black Mark Productions. It continues the retro thrash metal style of the previous album, Requiem. It was reissued in 2003, with the first two tracks combined and "Winds of Mayhem" outro added.

The third instalment of SIX Feet Under's highly successful Graveyard Classics cover album series! SIX Feet Under puts their classic influential death metal styling's on some of the rock and metal classics that inspired the members of SIX Feet Under to pick up guitars in the first place!

"The Force" is the second studio album by English thrash metal pioneers Onslaught, originally released in 1986. More successful than their previous album, "Power From Hell", The Force is considered a thrash metal classic by fans and critics. Fast paced drumming, a huge variety of riffs from tremolo picked insanity to chugging heaviness, and a vocal performance that truly gives the genre a good name! Influencing bands such as Exodus, Slayer and Metallica, Onslaught played a big part in defining the death metal genre!

Re-issue of the debut album of one of the greatest black metal bands of all time!

Onslaught, the British thrash metal band, formed in 1983 by guitarist Nige Rockett and drummer Steve Grice, initially drew influence from the second wave of Punk bands. In 1984 Jase Stallard and Paul Mahoney joined and The band began to write more Heavy Metal songs than their original punk sound. This was mainly influenced by the early releases of Thrash Metal bands. The output of this was the 1985 release of Power from Hell on the Children of the Revolution record label.

“Power from Hell” came into a time when satanic imagery was labelled "childish Venom worship" and Black Metal was a swear word terrifying musicians labelled as such. Their convincing powerful Black Thrash is as enjoyable in 2007 as it was in 1985 – Every song on this Blackend re-release is Thrash with class!!!

Re-issue of Raw Noise's 1999 'The Terror Continues' on amazing limited edition RED Vinyl!

American technical brutal death metal absurdity Edenic Past join Sentient Ruin for a vinyl release of their synapse-twisting first ever LP Red Amarcord. Formed by Colin Marston and Nicholas Mcmaster of Krallice fame along with vocalist Paulo Paguntalan of Encenathrakh, on the surreal debut offering Edenic Past unfold an absurd and ultra-brutal hallucination of futuristic aural atavism that touches lows of knuckle-dragging sonic primitivism and brutality and peaks of masterful ambient avant-garde deconstructionism that will be both too much to handle or understand for the average “slam” knuckle brains, and too fucking brutal and ignorant for the average elitist prog nerd. Perhaps standing as the most imaginative and visionary “slamming” technical brutal death metal releases ever conceived, with Red Amarcord Edenic Past redefine the outer limits of brutal death metal and set an unprecedented foot in the future for the genre.

Re-issue of Year OF NO LIGHT's album 'Ausserwelt'!! Year OF NO LIGHT's lengthy, sprawling compositions of towering walls of guitars and sombre synths irradiate a sense of dire solemniand spiritual gravity, and couldn't be a more fitting soundtrack for such grim medieval scenarios. But there is also the element of element of absolution transcendence in the face of death. Year Of No Light sound dense, rich and lush and yet somehow starved and deprived. “There's a thread running through all of our albums”, the band comments, “an exploration of the sensitive world that obeys a certain telos, first fantasized ("Nord") and reverberated ("Ausserwelt"), then declaimed as a warning ("Tocsin"). The deeper we dig, the more the motifs we have to unveil appear to us. Yes, it's a bit gnostic. This album is invoked after the Tocsin, it's the epiphany of the Fall”.

Heavy music’s evolution has always been a murky swamp of sub-genres. So, combining Thin Lizzy’s glistening twin guitar harmonies with Melvins-grade sludge and a hearty dose of proto-metal psych probably shouldn’t sound so revolutionary as it does in the hands of L.A. quartet Deathchant. But theirs is a special, transcendent sound. Waste, the band’s sophomore album and first for Riding Easy Records, is anything but. The thirty three-minute, seven-song blast flows seamlessly from song to song, aided by droning segues, while simultaneously slithering between genres and moods. Rumbling noise, chiming guitar melodies, bluesy boogie, Nwobhm thrash, COC grunge and punk fury all rear their head at times, sometimes all at once. Though one wouldn’t be able to tell by the concise structures and well-crafted songs, a lot of Deathchant’s music is improvised, both in the studio and live. That’s not to suggest their songs are jammy— they’re very tightly organized compositions. But the four musicians have that special musical telepathy that allows them to keep the song structures open-ended. “Improv is a huge things for us and always has been,” singer / guitarist T.J. Lemieux says. “The musical freedom to look at the other dudes in the band and be able to take things wherever we want to go is magical. I like the feel of flying off the hinges.” Likewise, the band itself is similarly amorphous in its membership. “We run the band with an open door. No lineup is definitive,” Lemieux explains. On Waste, the lineup is: Lemieux, George Camacho on bass, Colin Fahrner on drums, and John Belino on second guitar. Waste was recorded live in a rented cabin in the mountains of Big Bear, CA. “We packed a big-ass van and set up in the living room and kitchen,” Lemieux says. “Tracked it live, with overdubs after.” The whole album was recorded over two separate weekends, engineered by Steve Schroeder, who also recorded the band’s 2019 self-titled debut album. “I’d say it has sort of a DIY LA punk aesthetic,” he adds. “Very ironically going hand in hand with a classic metal vibe: Thin Lizzy, Judas Priest, classic Deep Purple, Uriah Heep and other melodic heavy rock bands.”

Demos & Live assault from legends of UK punk/metal Sacrilege! Contains the first two ’84 and ’85 Sacrilege demos alongside a remarkable set from the eminent Ambulance Station Squat on Old Kent Road in London, 1985

Mamaleek seeks to weaponize the tropes of blues, jazz and black metal through an understanding of their respective formal structures. Known for flouting genre conventions, the band’s newest album Come & See, marks yet another degree of separation from their black metal roots. Here Mamaleek draws inspiration from post-war public housing—specifically Chicago’s notorious Cabrini Green housing project—seeking to analyze the emotional impact of the spaces one occupies, the surreal forces behind the appearance of physical reality, and the residues they leave behind. This is the band’s third full-length album for The Flenser, and their first release written and recorded with a full band.

Founded in 2008 in the Bay Area by two anonymous brothers, Mamaleek has explored a vast sonic territory on the edge of a genre often renown for its aversion to change. Their expert utilization of left-field samples and unconventional instrumentation, and their insistent drive to experiment continues to set the band apart from their peers.

Stunning 180g gatefold Vinyl

limited edition 180 gram vinyl

Rockabye Baby! transforms timeless rock songs into beautiful instrumental lullabies. The soothing sounds of the glockenspiel, vibraphone, melltoron and other instruments will lull your baby into a sweet slumber.

On this album, they’ll enjoy Metallica’s biggest anthems without the pesky earplugs you didn’t bother to wear growing up. We’ve turned down the volume from an eleven to a two, and made the bed ourselves. Say your prayers little one. Tonight the sandman will be gently rocking you to sleep with these essential masterpieces of rock n roll.

SECOND ATTACK was CROSSFIRE’s second album

Over the course of a couple of years in the mid-1970s, several musicians from the St. Louis, Missouri area gave notice to club and festival crowds that they were there to rock the house down. Their cover and original songs were accentuated by a bedrock rhythm section, heavy guitar riffs and tasty solos, topped off with powerful vocals. Rockers that witnessed them agree—Back Jack created solid songs and high-energy performances.

Beginning in 1971 as Trellis, the band members changed their name to Back Jack when they saw the bumper sticker that Kim McKinney’s dad, Jack McKinney, distributed during his election bid for the Mayor of Pacific, Missouri, home of the core three-piece band: Kim McKinney, Mike Collier, and Hans Myers (rip).

The 1974 version of Back Jack was active from very early 1974 to late-fall of 1974. The core three-piece band, Collier, McKinney, and Myers, recorded several tracks during their tenure and four of those tracks are included on this release. Temporary band members not on the recordings were Gary Reed (piano, Rip), Greg Witt (guitar, keyboards), Paul Cockrum (guitar), and Bill Niehoff (drums).

The four-piece, 1975 version of Back Jack was a merging of members of Back Jack 1974 (Mike Collier and Kim McKinney) and another local band, Osage Lute (Jeff Ballew and Mike Lusher). They were active from late-fall of 1974 to late-summer of 1975. Four of the tracks on the Back Jack LP were recorded by these four musicians.

Who’s to say if we’re to believe Pablo Picasso’s theory that “art washes away from the soul the dust from everyday life”, However, only a fool would deny the simple processes of guitar string to amplifier or microphone to magnetic tape/WAV file can be more than merely a hobby or an idle pastime. This is a cathartic endeavour that reflects and refracts the daily joys and tribulations to elevate and elucidate. Such is the case with the second solo album by Kavus Torabi, The Banishing.

Who’s to say if we’re to believe Pablo Picasso’s theory that “art washes away from the soul the dust from everyday life”, However, only a fool would deny the simple processes of guitar string to amplifier or microphone to magnetic tape/WAV file can be more than merely a hobby or an idle pastime. This is a cathartic endeavour that reflects and refracts the daily joys and tribulations to elevate and elucidate. Such is the case with the second solo album by Kavus Torabi, The Banishing.

When 'One-Armed Bandit' was released back in 2004, the album propelled Zornik to the top ranks of De Ultratop and De Afrekening (StuBru). The Limburg-based group had already staked their claim in the Belgian rock scene with their debut album 'The Place Where You Can Find Us' and a finalist position in Humo's Rock Rally. However, with the release of the album 'One-Armed Bandit' in 2004, the cult status of the Limburg band led by frontman Koen Buyse became an even greater success story. The album, featuring singles like 'Scared Of Yourself', 'Goodbye', and 'Believe In Me' sold over 100,000 copies... on CD. Now, in celebration of the album's 20th anniversary, it is exclusively available on 2LP vinyl for the first time!

Ritual Clearing have returned, building off of the cold depravity of their 2020 demo and now unleashing their debut full-length effort, Penitence. Continuing their unholy alliance with Eternal Death, this new record showcases six epic tracks of dark, brooding black metal. The band's noble influences they displayed across that well-received first demo—Bathory, Sacramentum, and Lord Belial—have been built upon and refined here, revealing riff labyrinths not unlike the cult '90s work of Sorhin but further fleshed out by bouts of nearly hardcore-punk mania and especially a raw hideousness not unlike their American brethren in the Black Twilight Circle. Still, Ritual Clearing and clearly their own masters, and the alternately linear / darting depths of Penitence open wide to devour the listener in hypnotic, harrowing splendor. Still as melodic-yet-cutting as ever, it's not surprising that the album was written during the grim landscape of the global plague; there's an undeniable sense of dread across Penitence, laced with a resigned melancholia (sickly) colored by opportunely timed acoustics. Fucking Riffs for days, Ritual Clearing provide this offering as the overture to a sick and dying world. Edition of 100 copies.

Cosmic Key Creations proudly presents the 2023 repress of the deluxe double LP edition for the 3rd album from Gothic doom pioneers Theatre OF Tragedy. The album that cemented the band's status as a household name. This re-issue comes with a 12 panel booklet on LP size containing exclusive liner notes by the producer, previously unpublished pictures and extensive interviews and liner notes. The release includes 4 special bonus tracks. The ultimate edition for a very special and unique album that has stood the test of time... The entire release is mastered for vinyl

"In Search of Sanity" is the third studio album by English thrash metal band Onslaught, originally released in 1989. With several changes in the band's line up, including the addition of legendary Grim Reaper vocalist Steve Grimmett and their longest song to date "Welcome to Dying", the album contains a more polished sound than previous Onslaught albums. "In Search of Sanity" was incredibly successful, peaking at #46 in the UK charts while the single "Let There Be Rock" peaked at #50, a great accomplishment for an underground thrash metal band!

Founded 1988 in Stockholm/Sweden, Dismember were among those responsible for Death Metal's big break through. The debut album, Like An Ever Flowing Stream from 1991, clearly showed that Dismember are an uncompromising band which resulted in their rise to cult status and within a short period of time the album took the scene by storm. Extensive touring with bands like Death, Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse showed that Dismember are a live force to be reckoned with and the number of fans grew steadily. The band then released the 5-track EP, "Pieces", and went out on tour again with Napalm Death and Obituary. They played for thousands of fans throughout Europe thus reinforcing their status as one of the best live bands on earth. Dismember set a new path and in 2004, they released their sixth studio album titled Where Ironcrosses Grow which sounds close to Hate Campaign and is heavily inspired by Iron Maiden and Autopsy. Their seventh album The God That Never Was followed in 2006, continuing in the style of its predecessor.

For something to be “ecstatic,” the feelings and emotions it evokes must transcend what one tends to experience most regularly in their lives. Ecstatic joy isn’t just happiness; it’s a feeling of jubilation which impacts one emotionally and in a metaphysical, arguably spiritual sense too. Although it has long been associated with connotations of the dark and macabre, extreme music has the ability to be a powerful mode of expression for these feelings of absolute bliss, overwhelming love, and awe-inspiring sublimity. Extreme emotions no less and those which black metal quartet Agriculture evokes with its ecstatic subversion of the subgenre’s tropes. What was initially a meeting and subsequent series of jam sessions between Kern Haug and Daniel Meyer, two musicians in the Los Angeles underground noise scene, would eventually manifest as a shared vision to portray the sublimity of the human experience through the vehicle of heavy music. Following the additions of veteran guitarist Richard Chowenhill and bassist / vocalist Leah Levinson to the band’s lineup, this idea would crystalize into the “ecstatic black metal” backbone of Agriculture’s music, first heard on the band’s 2022 debut EP, The Circle Chant. With Agriculture’s self-titled record and first full-length LP, it’s abundantly clear that the band’s use of heavy music to showcase the most resplendent emotions and moments of the human experience has a far deeper meaning. Woven between the flurries of soaring tremolo picking, crescendoing guitar harmonies, celebratory screamed vocals, thoughtful improvisation, and meditative atmospheric passages is the record’s mission statement to experience the wonders and joys of both the esoteric and physical world.

After the mind blowing success of Witchcraft's Legend (2012), mastermind Magnus Pelander outdid himself once again with the band's 2016 offering Nucleus. Combining what made it's predecessor the modern classic it quickly became as well as elements of the band's earlier days makes Nucleus a melancholic, raging, fragile, melodic and at times noisy masterpiece filed somewhere between classic rock, doom and ambient music.

With a renewed line-up (Rage Widerberg on drums and Tobias Anger on bass) the band sounds more hungry and powerful than ever. In combination with the thrilling, yet very down-to-earth production by Pelander, Philip Gabriel Saxin and Anton Sundell, Nucleus throws you in dreamy sonic landscapes that will mesmerize and haunt you alike.

Svart Records are proud to re-release Nucleus on black-, green- and Svart exclusive purple/turquoise marble vinyl on May 19th.

2xLP Black Vinyl + Book.

Heavy metal? Glam? Hard rock? Make your own fuckin' call, you poser. We're not gonna do it for you. Bound for Hell is early `80s L.A. rock as it actually was: a California cataclysm of drunk and horny headbangers, dressed in sharp, shiny, leather androgyny and fire, kicking crowds in the teeth to clear the way to that one big shot. This 2LP set delivers 21 tracks by 21 artists in an ephemera-stuffed gatefold, plus 144-page hardbound book detailing the Sunset Strip's most razor-sharp heathens. Drumsticks burned. Hands were severed. Faces bled. Heavy was Hell for a half decade and it was a long, long way down.

The Body and Big|brave are bands possessed of an unequaled ability to convey overwhelming weight with simplicity, repetition, and detailed sonic atmospheres; artists who continue to alter the definition of what it means to be a heavy band. The Body are consistently prolific while increasingly ambitious as untethered producers and collaborators. Big|brave shape sound with dense waves of guitar and feedback, minimalist and hypnotic crashes, and emotionally exacting vocal melodies. In collaboration, The Body and Big|brave shift the gravity of their compositions to woven layers of percussion and unspooling guitars that sprawl through stark frameworks of earthy folk. Their debut collaborative album Leaving None But Small Birds distills the two ensembles’ pioneering approach to heavy music into psalms for the forgotten, threnodies of lost love, and odes to vengeance.

Typical to The Body’s creative process, Leaving None But Small Birds was composed almost entirely in the studio at Machine With Magnets with engineer/producer Seth Manchester. The Body and Big|brave aimed to challenge themselves to craft a fully realized and cohesive work that strayed outside the boundaries of the music they make individually. The Body’s Lee Buford set up the initial challenge: collaborating to make an album that evoked the country and folk roots of The Band. Big|brave’s Robin Wattie compiled lyrics and melodic lines from across Appalachian, Canadian, and English hymns and folk songs. Select phrases were then reworked and precisely arranged to center the experiences of marginalized characters, victims of hardship, and those yearning for love within each story. The despair and empowerment of these traditional tunes draw remarkable parallels with each group’s focus on championing people often cast aside in history. Leaving None But Small Birds takes its name from the “Polly Gosford” lyric “He covered her grave / and hastened home / Leaving none but small birds / her fate to bemoan,” an image in traditional songs evoking the alienation and isolation of the persecuted. The Body and Big|brave, following a folk tradition, make each song their own through shifts in perspective and a synthesis of passages from kindred tales.

Leaving None But Small Birds transfigures The Body and Big|brave’s heft into a daring diversity of sounds unbridled and austere. The loping opener “Blackest Crow” implements gusts of violin and harmony against the bedrock of a droning riff and shruti box that subtly shifts timbre. “Hard Times” threads stories of indentured and child factory laborers through cascading trellises of rubato guitar as Wattie’s petitions are swallowed by the swell. The Body and Big|brave’s maximalist rumble looms at the fringes of each song as guitarist Chip King’s (The Body) staggering drones seep into their fabric with resolute percussion from Buford and Big|brave drummer Tasy Hudson punctuating with their steady current. Wattie and fellow Big|brave guitarist Mathieu Ball twirl repeating phrases around one another into restrained meditations that bend and shift incrementally. Hudson joins Wattie in harmonized duets and hockets across the album, enhancing the loneliness of “Once I Had A Sweetheart” and laying bare the raw brilliance of “Black is the Colour.” “Polly Gosford” froths with persistently rising walls of violin, guitar, piano and trudging toms that only capitulate after Wattie spins the tragic song of femicide into ghostly revenge with “She broke him, she tore him / she ripped him in three / because he murdered / her baby and she.”

Big|brave’s roots as a minimalist folk band and The Body’s love of old-time, country blues, and folk music enable the quintet to strike a formidable balance between sorrowful lamentation and uplifting resolve to weighty effect. Leaving None But Small Birds thatches together two monumental innovative forces that render the emotionally profound with lucid, devastating vitality.

Uncovering the intensity and the metal inherent in non-metal, the avant-garde and anti-traditionalist inclinations of Finland’s ORANSSI PAZUZU have always had transcendental goals at heart. Through the rabbit hole and out the other side to 2020 with the release of their fifth album “Mestarin kynsi”, (“The Master’s Claw”). Inking a deal with German-based industry giants Nuclear Blast, ORANSSI PAZUZU subvert the idea of world domination to open a conceptual discourse on indoctrination and propaganda itself. Their psychological nightmare evolves a philosophical and earnest tone, where occult future meets troubled reality.

A punishing, progressive post-hardcore unit based out of Chico, California, Hail THE SUN employs a lethal blend of blastbeats, breakdowns, and technical riffage. Wake, originally pressed on Blue Swan Records in 2014, was reissued by Equal Vision Records in 2017.