Metal 3130 Items

Classic debut album by Tool!

Finally back on vinyl!

Official reissue of the second studio album by the Armenian-American heavy metal band System of a Down.

In the kitchen of the Byron Bay home of Winston McCall stands a refrigerator, adorned on one side by a quote from Tom Waits: “I want beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” This, the Parkway Drive vocalist says, is a pretty good summation of himself. It holds true, too, as one of the guiding principles behind Darker Still, the seventh full-length album to be born of this picturesque and serene corner of north-eastern NSW, Australia, and the defining musical statement to date from one of modern metal’s most revered bands. Darker Still, McCall says, is the vision he and his bandmates – guitarists Jeff Ling and Luke Kilpatrick, bassist Jia O’Connor and drummer Ben Gordon – have held in their mind’s eye since a misfit group of friends first convened in their parents’ basements and backyards in 2003. The journey to reach this moment has seen Parkway evolve from metal underdogs to festival-headlining behemoth, off the back of close to 20 gruelling years, six critically and commercially acclaimed studio albums (all of which achieving Gold status in their home nation), three documentaries, one live album, and many, many thousands of shows. While Darker Still remains irrefutably Parkway Drive, it finds the band sonically standing shoulder to shoulder with rock and metal’s greats – Metallica, Pantera, Machine Head, Guns N’ Roses – as much as it does their metalcore contemporaries. “I wanted a classic guitar tone for this record,” explains Ling, who credits much of his inspiration to the connection his riffs have with a crowd in a live setting Emerging from the darkness of the past few years, this is the true face of Parkway Drive: redefined and resolute, focused in mind and defiant in spirit. Tracks 1.

Physically tethered to this reality, yet creatively unmoored from any earthly restraints, Holy Fawn freely slip in and out of metal, shoegaze, electronic, alternative, and rock as if inhabiting multiple states of sonic existence all at once. Blazing new trails both seen and unseen as well as heard and unheard (but always felt), the Arizona quartet continue to cover uncharted territory on their second full-length offering, Dimensional Bleed.

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept.

Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut album. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over forty minute runtime, the album displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.

Këkht Aräkh is the Ukrainian project founded in 2018 by Dmitry Marchenko. Originally released on the Finnish label Livor Mortis in 2021, Pale Swordsman goes to even greater extents in building a bold and atmospheric sonic palette, and it's now seeing a worldwide reissue via Brooklyn label Sacred Bones. For the sound design of the album, Dmitry was inspired by The Stooges' Raw Power to deliver a more soft sounding album, decisively less "metal". Traditional black metal song structures still persist in songs like "Night Descends" and "In The Garden". However, their rawness and fast tempos is quickly cut through by dark ambient passages in "Amor" and "Intro" and softly played desolate ballads like "Nocturne" and "Lily". The crown jewel is the album closer "Swordsman", a track that displays a superb gothic sensibility, a poem recited over a deeply melancholic piano melody. "The Christian concept of a person ridding themselves of evil to find inner peace or to be able to leave this world safely has become the core inspiration for the song." Dmitry explains "However, this is not the only reading possible. I purposely avoid specifics in my lyrics so that the listener can always give the song their own meaning." The inspiration for the concept of the album also came from David Bowie's The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. "I really enjoy it when an album tells a story about some character so I came up with one." says Dmitry when explaining the origin of the Pale Swordsman. The character is portrayed on the striking album cover art - a figure sitting aloof with a sword and a rose in each hand - and clearly symbolises the romantic juxtaposition of belligerence and fragile beauty that permeates the album's sound and atmosphere. Pale Swordsman delivers a foreboding yet bittersweet melancholy through poetic lyrics, soft interludes, raw and distorted guitars, eerie drums and harsh vocals - a fragile yet potent mix that successfully amplifies the ambience.

Half Speed MASTERed

Tool's debut EP!

Of all things, it’s laughter that pervades Mamaleek’s Diner Coffee, the San Francisco metal deconstructionists’ sonically crushing ode to the humor found within catastrophe, American diners, and “the little things.” Featuring a mix of live performances, samples, and field recordings, Diner Coffee laughs through its harsh songs in an attempt to reflect the camaraderie found at the heart of global calamities and changing personal situations. It’s an homage to the quotidian set to the backdrop of the mythologized, sanctuary-like properties of a diner, reveling in irony-less nostalgia.

Mamaleek embodies this ethos on and off the record. Originally two anonymous brothers, the past few years have seen Mamaleek adding members and venturing into live performance. Diner Coffee, following in the footsteps of 2020’s Come & See, features new, unfamiliar, unknown voices—including expanded experiments with horns, woodwinds, and strings and a Bay Area-local blues harmonica player who improvised recorded selections during practices. The resulting tracks touch on signifiers from black metal, blues, ambient, and more.

Diner Coffee simultaneously represents the band’s artistic progression and the state of the world. Taking a surprisingly optimistic perspective, Mamaleek once again puts forward a project of left-field, wholly unique compositions, eluding easy categorization and furthering their abstraction of genre.

“The group cloaks its music in the kind of warm, hypnotic distortion that defines shoegaze, and underneath that haze is a style that’s conceptually abrasive yet altogether beautiful.” —Forbes

In the kitchen of the Byron Bay home of Winston McCall stands a refrigerator, adorned on one side by a quote from Tom Waits: “I want beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” This, the Parkway Drive vocalist says, is a pretty good summation of himself. It holds true, too, as one of the guiding principles behind Darker Still, the seventh full-length album to be born of this picturesque and serene corner of north-eastern NSW, Australia, and the defining musical statement to date from one of modern metal’s most revered bands. Darker Still, McCall says, is the vision he and his bandmates – guitarists Jeff Ling and Luke Kilpatrick, bassist Jia O’Connor and drummer Ben Gordon – have held in their mind’s eye since a misfit group of friends first convened in their parents’ basements and backyards in 2003. The journey to reach this moment has seen Parkway evolve from metal underdogs to festival-headlining behemoth, off the back of close to 20 gruelling years, six critically and commercially acclaimed studio albums (all of which achieving Gold status in their home nation), three documentaries, one live album, and many, many thousands of shows. While Darker Still remains irrefutably Parkway Drive, it finds the band sonically standing shoulder to shoulder with rock and metal’s greats – Metallica, Pantera, Machine Head, Guns N’ Roses – as much as it does their metalcore contemporaries. “I wanted a classic guitar tone for this record,” explains Ling, who credits much of his inspiration to the connection his riffs have with a crowd in a live setting Emerging from the darkness of the past few years, this is the true face of Parkway Drive: redefined and resolute, focused in mind and defiant in spirit. Tracks 1.

Iron Maiden are pioneers of the new wave of British heavy metal, becoming hugely successful in the early 80’s. The band released a series of UK and US platinum and gold albums, including their 1980 debut album ‘Iron Maiden’ and 1981's ‘Killers’. This is them on their first world tour, the last one with lead singer Paul Di'Anno, who was kicked out of the band after this tour for his extreme drug abuse. Throughout their career, the band's style has remained largely unchanged and despite a lack of mainstream radio airplay they have remained consistently popular.

From their formation back in 1986, to becoming one of Norways’s finest musical exports (with a number of highly revered black metal masterpieces released in the early 90’s helping to solidify their legacy), Darkthrone has continued to evolve and challenge in equal measure, throughout their illustrious recording career spanning over three decades. And now, the ever-productive duo of Nocturno and Fenriz continue their own metallic saga with a new selection of fine, vintage sounding headbanging classics in the making.

‘Astral Fortress’ is itself a swift follow-up to 2021’s ‘Eternal Hails’ opus, as a result of Darkthrone’s consistent and ongoing writing process, which has been in force for some years now. For Darkthrone does not sleep - it only waits.

Carried on the brisk wind of eager rock, with foundations in black, thrash, doom and heavy metal, ‘Astral Fortress’ is the latest album of stellar, eclectic old metal in the Darkthrone odyssey. With a seemingly endless dungeon full of heavy metal influences channelled through Darkthrone’s dynamic riff-machine, plus also with many increasing inspirations taken from their own past catalogue, Darkthrone has truly become its own beast within the metal world. Even though sprinkled with atmospheric touches such as synthesizers and mellotron on ‘Astral Fortress’ to great effect, the Darkthrone sound remains stripped down to the core; always primitive and organic.

‘Astral Fortress’ was recorded at Chaka Khan Studios in Oslo, the same location used for the ‘Eternal Hails’ album, with Ole Øvstedal and Silje Høgevold.

Ghost is the name of a devil worshipping ministry, that in order to spread their unholy gospels and, furthermore, trick mankind into believing that the end is ultimately a good thing, have decided to use the ever so popular rock music medium as a way to achieve their ends.

Wormrot return with their most stunning work to date! Following on from 2016's critically acclaimed album 'Voices', Wormrot's 4th studio album 'Hiss'. The Singaporean trio features the same line up as 2016's Voices with Arif (Vocals) Rasyid (Guitar) and Vijesh (Drums) and is without doubt their most ambitious and creative work to date. Having already made their mark as one of Grindcore's biggest names, Wormrot are intent on bringing Grindcore back to the masses with a sonically stunning record of wildly unhinged and downright feral noise.

Coming with a 28 pages booklet.
Ghost, one of the most esteemed and celebrated rock bands in the world today return with their fifth psalm, Impera, fronted by the newly anointed Papa Emeritus IV. A dozen songs take on themes of isolation and demigod worship, as well as colonization of both space and mind. And all with the infectious hooky brand of rock their fans have grown accustomed.



The new leader Papa IV, has stirred yet is not shaken. Building himself up to lead Ghost to further global domination. In his way are not only the vestiges of a global plague but his confidence as the person to deliver on the promise and messages of these songs. As we head into our third year of these ‘20s. the world is poised for new hope and new direction. And for this, legions of Ghost fans await Papa IV’s first moves.

Gothenburg, Sweden trio Monolord is a rare breed: a band both encompassing and transcending genre; a vortex of heavy rock density that consumes all others. Their thunderous, tuneful heft has built a rabid international fanbase in short order since their 2014 debut. But 'Rust', the band's third full length, truly exemplifies why some refer to them as the Nirvana of doom. Monolord's enveloping, syrupy sludge is a vibe, it's a state of mind. Not riffs for riffs sake, but a collective buzzing, rattling and rumbling thats more total environment than collection of songs. Together, guitarist/vocalist Thomas Jger, drummer Esben Willems and bassist Mika Häkki create a massive, dynamic sound with ultra-low frequencies serving as its fourth member.

There’s a real sense of loss on Brooklyn experimental black metalists Scarcity’s debut album Aveilut, an inescapable presence of the realities of death. Multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-Myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble since Branca’s passing) wrote Aveilut while processing the sudden deaths of two people close to him, tracked it while caught in Beijing’s first lockdown of 2020, and finished it while surrounded by the overwhelming plague visuals of New York’s early Covid peak. Back in Brooklyn, vocalist Doug Moore (of Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) soon found himself in the midst of an equally bleak lockdown experience—living next to a funeral home when New York City was America’s Covid epicenter. From conception through development, tangible death surrounded Aveilut. The result of such a profound closeness with death is this grief-stricken release, which takes its name from the Hebrew word for mourning. 72-note octaves, alternate tunings, psychoacoustic phenomena and macro-phrases embody the hugeness of loss, the inexplicable space of death’s void that Randall-Myers faced both on a personal and existential scale. Together with Moore’s gripping vocal delivery and stark lyrics, the album takes the form of a hyperobject, an entity with such vastness and reach that it’s difficult for the human mind to comprehend. Consisting of one 45-minute composition, the music is black metal roughly in the vein of Jute Gyte, Krallice, Mare Cognitum, and Enhare—with hefty doses of post-Branca microtonal guitar abuse, and a cinematic scope that draws on Randall-Myers’ work with orchestras. Aveilut’s mathematical abstraction and lyrical focus on the greatness of the void breed raw emotion, attempting to represent a catastrophe, the vastness and inevitability of things outside one’s control, as well as a direct expression of grief, a kind of requiem. Though born of Randall-Myers and Moore’s intense intimacy with absence, Aveilut is an attempt to present a harrowing universal representation of death’s true form.

Caligula, the new album from Lingua Ignota, takes the vision of Kristin Hayter’s vessel to a new level of grandeur, her purging and vengeful audial vision going beyond anything preceding it and reaching a new unparalleled sonic plane within her oeuvre. Succeeding her self-released 2017 All Bitches Die opus, this new one sees Hayter design her most ambitious work to date, displaying the full force of her talent as a vocalist, composer, and storyteller. Vast in scope and multivalent in its influences, with delivery nothing short of demonic, this is an outsider’s opera; magnificent, hideous, and raw. Eschewing and disavowing genre altogether, Hayter builds her own world. Here she fully embodies the moniker Lingua Ignota, from the German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, meaning “unknown language” —this music has no home, any precedent or comparison could only be uneasily given, and there is nothing else like it in the contemporary realm. Working closely with Seth Manchester at Machines With Magnets studio, Hayter strips away much of the industrial and electronic elements of her previous work, approaching instead the corporeal intensity and intimate menace of her notorious live performances, achieved with unconventional recording techniques and sound sources, as well as a full arsenal of live instrumentation and collaborators including harsh noise master Sam McKinlay (The Rita), visceral drummer Lee Buford (The Body) and frenetic percussionist Ted Byrnes (Cackle Car, Wood & Metal), with guest vocals from Dylan Walker (Full of Hell), Mike Berdan (Uniform), and Noraa Kaplan (Visibilities). Caligula is a massive work, a multi-layered epic that gives voice and space to that which has been silenced and cut out.

In the kitchen of the Byron Bay home of Winston McCall stands a refrigerator, adorned on one side by a quote from Tom Waits: “I want beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” This, the Parkway Drive vocalist says, is a pretty good summation of himself. It holds true, too, as one of the guiding principles behind Darker Still, the seventh full-length album to be born of this picturesque and serene corner of north-eastern NSW, Australia, and the defining musical statement to date from one of modern metal’s most revered bands. Darker Still, McCall says, is the vision he and his bandmates – guitarists Jeff Ling and Luke Kilpatrick, bassist Jia O’Connor and drummer Ben Gordon – have held in their mind’s eye since a misfit group of friends first convened in their parents’ basements and backyards in 2003. The journey to reach this moment has seen Parkway evolve from metal underdogs to festival-headlining behemoth, off the back of close to 20 gruelling years, six critically and commercially acclaimed studio albums (all of which achieving Gold status in their home nation), three documentaries, one live album, and many, many thousands of shows. While Darker Still remains irrefutably Parkway Drive, it finds the band sonically standing shoulder to shoulder with rock and metal’s greats – Metallica, Pantera, Machine Head, Guns N’ Roses – as much as it does their metalcore contemporaries. “I wanted a classic guitar tone for this record,” explains Ling, who credits much of his inspiration to the connection his riffs have with a crowd in a live setting Emerging from the darkness of the past few years, this is the true face of Parkway Drive: redefined and resolute, focused in mind and defiant in spirit. Tracks 1.

Montreal, QC black metal band Spectral Wound play virulent towering melancholic black metal. With their new album “A Diabolic Thirst”, which follows 2018’s “Infernal Decadence”, the band take their own methodology of Quebecois black metal through vicious sonic layers that culminate in six triumphant ferocious hymns where blood freezing melodies and harsh yet massive overtones bring a decadent and euphoric flow to this glorious masterwork the band have conjured. Another black metal triumph emanating from Canadian soil, one exposing once again the richness of Quebec’s unparalled black metal scene, “A Diabolic Thirst” not only captures that pure classic melodic black metal essence that was eminent in the late ‘90s/very early ‘00s but also serves its purpose today as a masterowk of glorious blackened magnitude.

Finally back on vinyl!

Official reissue of third studio studio album by the Armenian-American heavy metal band System of a Down.

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.

Long overdue reissue of Mortal Sin’s classic thrash metal debut ‘Mayhemic Destruction’, originally released in 1987, with extensive liner notes and contributions from the band.

The brand new KEN mode album NULL pressed on black vinyl is a guaranteed contender for Album of the Year!NULL, KEN mode's brand-new aural abrasion, may be the group's quintessential statement of mental collapse and despair made sonic, a direct psychological reaction to the collective experience of the last two years. Drawing from desperate noise and industrial sonics, the band has mixed in a decidedly more devastating tone to their already pointed metallic hardcore influenced extreme noise rock.

Architects have delivered their 10th studio album; an arena-ready opus entitled, the classic symptoms of a broken spirit , the follow up to their 2021 breakout album For Those That Wish To Exist, which hit #1 on the UK sales chart. Finding yourself with a UK Number One album and selling out arenas is enough for some to repeat a winning formula. Architects however, are forever moving forward. "It was definitely validating and felt really cool for like a day," recalls drummer, producer and songwriter Dan Searle of hitting the top spot with For Those That Wish To Exist. "For a lot of the bucket list things you reach in any career, there's a momentary gratification then you're like, 'What next?' You just move on. By the time the album came out, my head was already in the mindset of 'broken spirit'. That was where I was at." Searle notes how it was their albums Lost Forever/Lost Together, All Our Gods Have Abandoned Us, and Holy Hell that really "cemented what the band was about" and "took them to a new level" as a rock powerhouse and leaders of the UK's metalcore scene - making it all the more "daunting" to reinvent themselves on the records that would follow. "I wanted to make this album with a different aesthetic. We were enjoying working with the synths and doing stuff that we hadn't done before." As a band who never stop writing, the kernels of the songs that make up the classic symptoms of a broken spirit were already in progress before the ink had time to dry on the artwork of their last record. Architects were on a creative roll, and the record was born of that creative freedom. Produced by Dan Searle and guitarist Josh Middleton, with additional production from frontman Sam Carter at Decon's Middle Farm Studios and their own Brighton Electric Studios before being mixed by Zakk Cervini, the band were buoyed by finally being back in a room together after their last album was made mostly remotely due to Covid restrictions. The result was something altogether more "free, playful and spontaneous," Searle explains. Carter agrees: "This one feels more live, more exciting and more fun - it has that energy. We wanted it to be a lot more industrial and electronic. That was the main mission. They can sit side-by-side: Mr. Electronic and Mr. Organic."

Këkht Aräkh is the Ukrainian project founded in 2018 by Dmitry Marchenko. The debut album Night & Love was initially released on the Finnish label Livor Mortis in 2019 and it's now seeing a worldwide reissue via Brooklyn label Sacred Bones. Dmitry's intent to experiment with standard black metal canons previously seen at play in Through the Branches to Eternity EP (2018) solidify further on Night & Love, he mentions "back then I had an idea of combining Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger type of black metal with early Internazionale or Croatian Amor vibe." Described as ambient or atmospheric black metal, this debut presents Këkht Aräkh's signature dichotomy of harsh traditional early Norwegian black metal and the more ethereal and delicate melodies. On the other hand the lyrics are romantic and melancholic, clearly influenced by a stark Gothic imagery, and serve as an extra layer of mystery to the already suggestive body of work. The album beings with a soft acoustic intro in "As the Night Falls_" before descending into the raw and raucous "Elegy for the Memory of Me" and "Den Venstre Hånd På Den Hoyre", both songs that are drenched in the more traditional black metal style of raspy, high-pitched vocals, dense, tremolo- picked riffs and fast paced drums. It is however songs like "Night" and "Love" that really set this album apart. "Night" is a softly spoken word ambient track that with a beautiful piano synth work that permeates throughout it aids in the romantic delivery and conjuring of imagery of the night. "Love" is a spellbinding and melancholic song, equal in its romanticism but one that displays a deeper sorrow and tenderness supported by calming field recordings of trickling water. The intertwining of black metal, dark folk and ambient repeats itself, culminating in a quietly hummed outro "...And Never Ends (Eternal Love)" that alludes to and completes the album's first track.

Updated reissue of Mortal Sin’s breakthrough second album ‘Face Of Despair, originally released in 1989, with extensive liner notes and contributions from the band. Newly remastered, the release features liner notes from respected metal writer Malcolm Dome who conducted new interviews with the band, and also from former touring drummer Steve Hughes, now a hugely successful stand-up comedian. Emerging from the Australian metal underground in the latter part of the ‘80s after forming in 1985, Mortal Sin quickly found global fame when their self- released debut LP ‘Mayhemic Destruction’ was picked up by major label Vertigo and re-issued globally in 1987. Follow up ‘Face of Despair’ was produced by Randy Burns (Megadeth, Possessed, Death, Nuclear Assault) and received global acclaim. The band toured Australia with Metallica on their ‘...And Justice For All’ tour, and also toured Europe with Testament , and then supported Faith No More on their ‘The Real Thing’ tour. The single ‘I Am Immortal’ and live video release ‘Face Of Mayhem’ helped the band gain wider acceptance. When vocalist Mat Maurer quit the band in 1990, Mortal Sin carried on and recorded a third album, ‘Every Dog Has It’s Day’, released in 1991. Mortal Sin remained sporadically active up until 2012. This re-issue has the full co-operation of the band.

Entombed was inducted into the Swedish Music Hall of Fame in 2014 with the following motivation: "Hard Rock is just as typical of growing up in medium-sized Swedish towns as football and mopeds. Hard Rock is Swedish folk music with studded wrist bands instead of tasseled garters. After two decades of Anglo-Saxon hard rock a Swedish band, Entombed, became one of the world leaders in death metal. A subculture that has spread throughout the world, mutated in various forms, and after 20 years continues to be just as vital. Entombed is part of the heavier internationalization of Swedish popular music - all categories." The band was founded in 1987 under the name of Nihilist. With its catchy, versatile but still rock-hard music Entombed pioneered Scandinavian death metal, which was different from its American counterpart mainly by the characteristic, chainsaw-like guitar sound. The special sound they got by tuning down their guitars three full steps (to C or less), by using a maxed-out Boss Hm-2 Heavy Metal pedal, in combination with a guitar running through a Boss Ds-1 Distortion Pedal. The debut album "Left Hand Path" was released in 1990 and followed up the following year with "Clandestine" and “Wolverine Blues” in 1993. For the 25th anniversary of Dclxvi To Ride Shoot Straight And Speak The Truth is finally reissued and packaged as the band originally intended it.

Half Speed MASTERed

Friends Of Hell draws from the most seminal of doom sources, saluting the great works of Pentagram, Candlemass, Saint Vitus and Cathedral along the way. But something nastier and grubbier lurks within the Friends Of Hell sound: a viscous, blackened streak that owes its leathery scars to Venom, Bathory and Hellhammer. The resultant hybrid makes perfect, horrifying sense, as songs like rampaging opener Out With The Wolves and the harrowing crawl of Gateless Gate conjure devilry, disgust and riff-driven destruction in equal measure. Heavy as hell but defiantly gritty and underground in spirit, Friends Of Hell avows that the old school is the only school. Not just one of the finest and fiercest doom metal records in recent memory, but also a subtly subversive twist on that arcane formula, Friends Of Hell once again confirms the timeless nature and the unerring, infernal power of The Riff.

“The vastness of everything is something that I think about a lot,” says Spelljammer bassist / vocalist Niklas Olsson. And it certainly shows in both the expansive, sludgy sounds and contemplative lyrics of the Stockholm, Sweden based trio. Following a five year break between their previous album, Ancient Of Days—perhaps fittingly spent pondering said vastness—Spelljammer is back with an album that perfectly bridges the band’s earlier desert rock leanings and their later massive, slow-burning riffs. Abyssal Trip (note: carefully re-read that album title) takes its moniker from the perpetually dark, cold, oxygen-free zone at the bottom of the ocean. The six song, forty-four minute album fittingly embodies that bleak realm with rumbling, oozing guitars intercut with dramatic melodic interludes. The songs take their time to unfurl, making them even more hypnotic. Likewise, the lyrics take a poetic approach to establishing the sonic scenery. The recording process for this album differs from previous releases in that the band—guitarist Robert Sörling, drummer Jonatan Rimsbo and Olsson—opted to capture the performances while holed up in the mental bathysphere of a house in the countryside near Stockholm. “The songs benefitted from the relaxed environment of being away from everything,” Olsson explains. Indeed, the album sounds confident and meticulously arranged, afforded by the band’s isolation. Sörling mixed the album and it was mastered by Monolord drummer Esben Willems at Berserk Audio. Abyssal Trip is, just like its title suggests, an epic tour through desolate zones which yields much to discover.