Greetings, Decibel readers!
Have lots of great death and heavy metal in store for you this week. Hopefully these tunes prepare you to endure having to hear “Shipping out to Boston” over and over again when you go out on Monday. Hope you have a Happy St. Patrick’s Day regardless! (They should be playing this song instead, btw.)
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Dessiderium – Keys to the Palace
Pure, relentless power and glory! Alex Hadded knows where it’s at: an excellent balance between epic and sweeping compositions with enough edge and grit to still be brutal. I’m not even sure what to call this. Power death metal? It kind of works!
Stream: Apple Music
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Nite – Cult of the Serpent Sun
No time to explain, get in the car, we’re going for a haunting. And this fist-pumping beast will be our soundtrack, and our guide.
Stream: Apple Music
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Rwake – The Return of Magik
The magick has returned, because Rwake has returned. As the band says, the album contains “Arrangements carefully and thoughtfully built in layers over a period of years lend mystique and a feeling of building toward a cathartic release. There is no box into which the material might fit other than one with the band’s name on it.”
Stream: Apple Music
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Sanhedrin – Heat Lightning
Heavy metal thunder! And lightning! This is the Brooklyn-based band’s fourth album, following up on 2022’s Lights On.
Stream: Apple Music
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Wombbath – Beyond The Abyss
A good buddy of mine has an analogy he likes to apply to this kind of death metal: a machine just grinding away, like breaking rocks or something. Basically bands that sound like Grave, Vader, and Fleshcrawl. Wombbath is, of course, a longtime contemporary of those bands, churning and smashing sonic boulders into death metal noise with every release.
Stream: Apple Music