Doom metal – Page 3 – 7th Level Music

Review: Blackwater Holylight – If You Only Knew EP

Blackwater Holylight excel at writing, singing, and playing haunting songs that take doom rock into spectral places. Now, with their new EP If You Only Knew, the band take their doom rock into the shoegaze realm and the results are excellent.

Sarah McKenna‘s rainfall-like electric piano opens the EP on “Wandering Lost.” It matches the sorrowful guitar from Mikayla Mayhew as lead singer / bassist Sunny Faris reminds us that we all suffer at some point, and we can sometimes find solace in that. The song kicks into grand metal riffs in the second half, with drummer Eliese Dorsay putting down beats that Nordic metal bands would love.

“Torn Reckless” is a gorgeous shoegaze track that caught me by surprise. Faris sings about standing on the precipice of a relationship and not sure if plunging off it or backing away is the right decision. Mayhew’s guitar sounds like its being pumped through a dozen half-blown amplifiers.

“Fate Is Forward” is pure 1990s (good) alt-rock with its bursting guitars and quiet-loud-quiet verses and chorus. It’s almost a forgotten Failure track, and it’s impossible to choose who shines the most on it, but why should you bother? Just let it wash over you like a rolling thunderstorm.

Finally, I did not have “Blackwater Holylight covers Radiohead.” on my 2025 bingo card, but they’ve done it with a beautiful version of “All I Need.” They keep the buzzing synths and add more guitar fuzz. Faris’ version of Thom Yorke‘s vocals make the song open its heart a bit more and, yes, make it sexier.

This is one of Blackwater Holylight’s best records, and a great sign of good things to come as they continue to explore and expand their sound.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Andi at Terrorbird Media!]

Slumbering Sun are “Together Forever” on their new single from their upcoming album.

Austin band Slumbering Sun share the first single from their forthcoming sophomore album today via Invisible Oranges. Hear and share the single “Together Forever” HERE. (And, now on all DSPs.)

Slumbering Sun also plays SXSW on Thursday this week at the annual Stoner Jam.

Hear and share the band’s debut full length The Ever-Living Fire via Bandcamp and Spotify. Watch and share the video for “Dream Snake” via YouTube.

Slumbering Sun is a powerful new melodic doom entity formed by members of underground mainstays Temptress, Destroyer of Light and Monte Luna. Their resulting sound explores broader melodies and sonics than their other bands, inspired as much by Celtic folk standards as by doom, grunge and shoegaze.

Slumbering Sun makes music for crazy romantics. Keegan Kjeldsen, James Clarke, Kelsey Wilson, Garth Condit and Kelly “Penny” Turner joined forces in 2022 in order to weave a dreamy kind of doom that would incorporate shoegaze, grunge and prog. All were friends in the Texas metal scene, assembled from bands in Austin & Dallas, who sought to elevate the love and camaraderie they’d found over the years into an artistic vision.

After releasing their debut, The Ever-Living Fire (2023, #20 debut on Doom Charts), Slumbering Sun played their first show at Stoner Jam during SXSW, embarked on a series of regional tours, and capped off the year with an appearance at Ripple Fest. The band spent all of 2024 making their second effort, Starmony, in between touring the Midwest, and releasing their single “Out of the Blue & Into the Void” — a brilliant mashup of Neil Young’s and Black Sabbath’s classic tracks. With no plans to slow down, and the band intends to make more metalheads than ever pound their fists and cry about their exes.

Starmony will be available on limited edition LP and digital on May 6th, 2025. Orders are available HERE.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Dave at US / THEM Group.]

Blackwater Holylight announce new EP, “If You Only Knew,” with its first single – “Wandering Lost.”

Blackwater Holylight crafts music that offsets airiness and immediacy. Today [February 26, 2025], the Los Angeles, CA band announces their new EP, If You Only Knew, out April 18, 2025 via Suicide Squeeze Records. Though it clocks in at just four tracks, the EP traverses countless cosmic peaks and sludgy valleys. The band has also shared the single “Wandering Lost,” premiering on FLOOD Magazine, which gradually evolves from atmosphere to heaviness. Over the course of almost seven minutes, metal, shoegaze, and psychedelia coalesce. The song was slowly conceptualized while Blackwater Holylight was working with acclaimed producer Sonni DiPerri (Animal Collective, DIIV, Suzanne Ciani) in Los Angeles, and mimics the mysterious, sometimes painful chapters of life by shifting between multiple movements. Like all of Blackwater Holylight’s material, there is an ample dose of beauty to be found beneath “Wandering Lost”‘s snarling exterior.

On “Wandering Lost,” singer, guitarist, and bassist Sunny Faris shares: “‘Wandering Lost’ came to us in pieces throughout a handful of weeks in Los Angeles. The four of us intentionally wanted this song to have multiple parts to tell a story that takes you on a journey throughout. This song is very special to us because it represents us as musicians individually and is a perfect reflection of what we’ve created as a group. It’s a song about wandering through the chapters of life, curiosity, and the connection we all have to each other through the unknown of how it will all unfold.”

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Andi at Terrorbird Media.]

Review: The Death Wheelers – The Ecstasy of Möld

First, I need to give The Death Wheelers a thumbs-up for the Ennio Morricone joke with titling their new album The Ecstasy of Möld. The Death Wheelers are big fans of cult films and cinema in general, and the riff on Morricone’s classic “The Ecstasy of Gold” from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is brilliant.

As is the album. Opening with the short but heavy “Loud Pipes Take Lives,” and a man declaring he’ll purify the world with blood, the album lets you know right away that this is going to be a wild ride. Need further evidence? Well, the thrash metal banger “Homicycle Maniac” (which my computer’s autocorrect wants to write as “Hemicycle Maniac,” which works just as well) will convince you. “Hella Hammered” continues the thrash metal shredding, proclaiming that the motorcycle gang of the band’s moniker are a “bunch of real psychopaths.”

“Un Pneu Dans La Tombe — Aide Musicale À Mourir” dips a bit into psychedelia before it turns into a riff-raging rocker. The title track claims “There is only one ecstasy…Death!” and then launches into pounding punk rock. “Blood, Bikes and Barbiturates” has more heavy cymbal crashes than I could count.

“Bleu Nuit (Les Plaisirs De La Chair)” is one of the trippiest tracks on the record as the band goes looking for pleasures “more primitive” than what you’d find in a strip club. The groove on it is top-notch. The distortion and reverb are cranked on “Way of the Road” for you and your neighbor’s enjoyment (and don’t miss the salute to Led Zeppelin in it).

“The Heretic Rites of Count Choppula,” apart from having a great title, adds touches of horror-surf rock to the album that show another side of The Death Wheelers you didn’t expect at first, but think, “Oh yeah, that tracks.” when you hear it. Finally, “Get Laid…to Rest” ends the album on a Pink Floyd-like mind trip to give your brain a chance to reset after all the chaos you just heard.

It’s another fine instrumental rocket blast from The Death Wheelers. Get in on this roadtrip or get the hell out of the way.

Keep your mind open.

[I might reach ecstasy if you finally subscribe today.]

[Thanks to Daniel at RidingEasy Records.]

Verbian share “Não vai o Diabo Tecê-las” from upcoming album.

Porto, PT trio Verbian shares the first single from their forthcoming new album on Lost Future Records, Casarder today via Decibel Magazine. Hear and share “Não vai o Diabo Tecê-las” HERE. (Direct on all DSPs HERE.)

Heavy Blog is Heavy recently launched the official video for “Não vai o Diabo Tecê-las” which features an impressive live-in-studio version of the song HERE. (Direct YouTube.)

Verbian understands that evolution is essential to heavy music. And so is commitment to revealing profound emotions and letting artistic expression take your music wherever you dare to go.

“Casarder speaks a little about the insecurities of artistic expression and personal exposure when it comes to fearing being judged for something that is somewhat outside of what is done in each artist’s niche,” the band explains. “This was the theme that also inspired the album cover.”

The distorted, anxious and surrealist visual style of the album’s cover art (see below, painted by artist Madalena Pinta) speaks perfectly to the album’s direct albeit melted psychedelic electronic post-metal. Riff after riff comes and goes, never wearing out its welcome, and instead pulling listeners along on a sonic journey through Salvador Dali landscapes of rock forms, pulled apart and reconfigured into mesmerizing new ones. The mostly instrumental album never lingers on a part too long, never wastes a note. It’s angry, driving and multilayered without sounding overly technical or indulgent.

Since their founding in 2015, the Porto, Portugal band’s music has continued to push forward and fuse genres from metal, rock, electronic, experimental percussion and more into a concise, powerful sound. Guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Vasco Reis was originally joined by drummer Filipe Romariz, with bassist/keyboardist/vocalist Alexandre Silva joining in 2017 to solidify the trio. Following Romariz’s departure in 2022, drummer/percussionist Guilherme Gonçalves brought an evermore hard-hitting feel to Verbian’s sound.

Verbian’s 2019 self-released debut album JAEZ was followed in 2021 by Irrupção on Italy’s Antigony Records. Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Verbian showcased Irrupção at venues like the Hard Club (Porto) and toured cities including Braga, Viana do Castelo, Santiago de Compostela, and Aveiro. Upon Gonçalves joining the lineup in 2022, the band toured cities like Toulouse, Clermont-Ferrand, Santander, and at the Romaria Cultural in Gouveia. They concluded the year with an Iberian tour alongside Catalan band Syberia, visiting Vigo, Porto, and Coruña.

Casarder was recorded with a different approach from their previous efforts. Produced by Verbian and Daniel Valente, the trio did all of the preproduction in the studio, live. “We then built a tempo map and after that we did overdubs,” the band explains. “But the biggest difference was that these were the first songs we wrote with Guilherme on the drums and we believe that is why it’s so different from the previous albums. He brought a new and fresh groove to our music, maintaining the heaviness.”

Casarder will be available on Limited Edition LP and download on March 21st, 2025 via Lost Future Records. Pre-orders are available HERE.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Dave at US / THEM Group.]

Bonnie Trash unleash “Hellmouth” from their upcoming album due February 28, 2025.

Today Guelph, Ontario hell-raisers Bonnie Trash share a new single and video, taken from their forthcoming new album, Mourning You, which is set for release on February 28th on Hand Drawn Dracula.

Mourning You finds Bonnie Trash, twins Emmalia & Sarafina Bortolon-Vettor, embracing a newfound sense of urgency. The album is, put bluntly, an album about death. Not death in the macabre, violent, or outrageous sense, but death as you or I might know it. A spectre lurking around the corner. Capricious, indiscriminate, and unexpected. Ordinary and all the more terrifying for it. Real. Fear in the eyes of a loved one about to die, and the fear in your eyes – staring back. This is sorrow not as a lingering bruise, but a gushing wound.

Following previous single, “Veil of Greed”, today they share the howling, urgent new track “Hellmouth“ – a song that evokes the gnarled claw of remorse gripping you in twilight’s terror. “I see you in my dreams every night,” Sarafina intones. Were it not for Emmalia’s blown-out Stratocaster, you might mistake those words for the chorus of an old doo-wop standard. The track launches off as a woozy siren song, before pummeling you with anthemic power chords for Sarafina’s self lacerating chorus: “Drag me to hell and back I go.”

“Every reminder of what once was, feels like a sharp sword” the band comment. “But, even in the darkest moments, there’s always a path towards love. Remembering the warmth of their smile, as you scrape your nails towards the surface…”

“Hellmouth” video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEPFUHNzbrk
‘Mourning You’ album pre-order/pre-save links: https://ffm.to/mourningyou

A lifelong project christened in 2017 with the release of Ezzelini’s Dead, the band’s debut EP which found the pair mining the Trevisan dialect and archaic Italian folklore of their heritage to grisly effect. Where their first full length, Malocchio (2022), shrouded Bonnie Trash’s nightmares in dusky dreamlike reverb, ‘Mourning You’ is vivid and immediate. Emboldened by the addition of Emma Howarth-Withers on bass and Dana Bellamy on drums – whose thunderous rhythms sharpened 2024’s My Love Remains the Same EP into a fine-edged blade – Mourning You is less a post-mortem fantasia than a sudden, swift dagger to the heart.

Sarafina, the band’s singer and lyricist, has described the album as being about “losing someone you love. It’s about the horrors of grief, haunting you every day.” Inspired, largely, by the passing of Nonna Maria – who provided interstitial narration across the band’s early work – it’s these intimate details which render the songs on Mourning You so devastating. The record explores love and grief as kindred spirits. Grief as love with nowhere to go. Love determined by the fear of its loss. A blood pact. A life for a life. The gnarled claw of remorse gripping you in twilight’s terror.

Though inspired by the shocking iconography of horror shows, slasher flicks, and psychological thrillers, Bonnie Trash turns cinematic tropes on their head. Rather than fashioning nightmares into reality, the band paints reality as a nightmare, rife with pain, suffering, and gothic theatre. Bonnie Trash understands that everyday atrocities haunt the periphery of our lives. A black cloud looming on the edge of our vision. Curses abound. You can’t ward them off. You’d best make an unholy racket.

Mourning You is out February 28, 2025 on Hand Drawn Dracula. In mourning, all is lost.

Bonnie Trash live dates:
Feb 27 – Toronto, ON – Wavelength Winter Fest w/ The OBGMs, pHoenix Pagliacci, Cadence Weapon
Mar 01 – Guelph, ON – ArtBar
Mar 08 – Kitchener, ON – The Union

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Kate at Stereo Sanctity.]

Venamoris covers Scorpions’ “Animal Magnetism” for their newest single.

Venamoris, the heavy, brooding noir outfit who blend darkwave and metal, featuring Paula and Dave Lombardo, release their sophomore album, To Cross or To Burn, on Feb. 28 via Ipecac Recordings.

Alongside the album announcement, Venamoris unveil “Animal Magnetism,” a striking cover of Scorpions’ 1980 love song. The haunting rendition features a guest appearance from Dave’s former bandmate, Gary Holt (Exodus, Slayer). The song is accompanied by a Displaced/Replaced created video.

Dave reflects on the personal significance of including “Animal Magnetism” on To Cross or To Burn:

“The first rock concert I ever attended was on May 25, 1980, with Scorpions opening for Ted Nugent’s ‘Scream Dream’ tour. We (Slayer) had covered a couple Scorpions songs in the early years but I never would have thought of re-imagining one of their songs at that time. Now it seems like the most natural thing to do. I could hear Paula’s sultry voice, the song taking on a slightly industrial feel… and I could fully hear Gary Holt play this insane lead. It’s been incredible to see this idea come to life. To release this at the same time this iconic band celebrates 60 years is a perfect way for me to thank them for an inspiring first show in 1980 and for all that they have contributed since.”

The married duo teased To Cross or To Burn’s 2025 arrival with the 2024 singles “In The Shadows” and “Spiderweb,” which were praised for their unique sound – described by Consequence as “trip-hop style” fused with “the dark/folk metal of Emma Ruth Rundle and Chelsea Wolfe,” while Revolver has described the pair as “spellbinding.”

Paula, who wrote the album’s nine-original songs, offers insight into the album:

“To Cross or To Burn has taken us down a darker, very different path than our first album. There’s a confidence in this body of work. An overall vibe of heaviness that was unexpected. Verses of hard truths now bound in acceptance. The soul-searching continues.”

To Cross or To Burn is available for pre-order now with the collection available digitally, on CD and on both white and limited-edition red vinyl: https://venamoris.lnk.to/cross.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Monica at Speakeasy PR.]

Rewind Review: Windhand – Soma (2013)

I don’t know how I missed Windhand‘s Soma album until now. Shame on me because it’s another heavy, stunning part of their catalogue.

Garrett Morris‘ guitars on the first track, “Orchard,” sound like something is crawling out of the dirt while Dorthia Cottrell‘s vocals sound like they’re coming from a deep hole found under the floorboards of the cabin on the album cover as she contemplates death by gunshot – either hers or someone else’s.

Parker Chandler‘s bass crushes on “Woodbine,” a song about calling out to the devil out of desperation and the danger that comes with such a summoning. Morris’ guitar on “Feral Bones” is the sound of Rodan waking up from deep slumber inside a volcano. The song is about how time catches all of us sooner or later.

The acoustic “Evergreen” is a stunning showcase of Cottrell’s voice in a song about wishing a loved one could stay young, and alive, forever, but knowing that’s impossible. The massive “Cossack,” at over thirteen minutes long, has few lyrics, but no shortage of crushing riffs and spooky, heavy drumming from Ryan Wolfe. Morris’ guitar solo on it will stop you in your tracks.

Is that not enough doom for you? Well, the final track, “Boleskine,” is over a half-hour long. It stars with creepy wind sounds and simple acoustic guitar strumming, and then proceeds to come at you like the Blob or a Creeping Doom spell. You see and feel it coming, but you can’t stop it for about twelve minutes, when it drifts back into howling winds and lonely acoustic riffs. That’s just a fake-out, though, almost like a jump scare out of the shadows, because the massive riffs re-emerge from their sarcophagi and swarm you. It’s the kind of doom song that will overtake you.

The whole album will overtake you, but, as a doom fan, that’s what you wanted, right?

Keep your mind open.

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Top 25 live shows of 2024: #’s 15 – 11

The top 15 live shows I saw in 2024 range from doom metal to post-punk. Read on!

#15: The Well – Stubb’s BBQ – Levitation Austin, November 03, 2024

The Well never disappoint. They opened this night of metal at Levitation Austin’s main stage and set a high bar right away. The mix of older material with upcoming stuff from (hopefully) a new record landing this year was top notch.

#14: The The – Salt Shed, Chicago, IL, October 25, 2024

Here’s a band I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to see live. Matt Johnson returned with a new The The album and then a world tour. It was his first time in the U.S. in over two decades. They played two sets: The first being The The’s new album, Ensoulment, in its entirety and the second being a “time traveler’s set” of classic material. Johnson still sounds great.

#13: A Place to Bury Strangers – Stubb’s BBQ – Levitation Austin, October 31, 2024

Here’s another band who never disappoint. It was my girlfriend, Holly’s, first time seeing APTBS. I told frontman Oliver Ackermann (dressed, like his bandmates, as a vampire for Halloween) before the show that I envied her innocence. Her review? “I need a neck adjustment after that.” I don’t think I can sum it up better.

#12: Jon Spencer – Stockroom East, South Bend, IN, July 11, 2024

Holy $#!+. Jon Spencer and the rhythm section of The Bobby Lees played a forty-minute drive from my house. This small venue almost couldn’t handle their energy. The small crowd at this show got a great gift from them.

#11: Gang of Four – Far Out Lounge – Levitation Austin, November 01, 2024

Here’s another band I wasn’t sure I’d get to see live. This great set by Gang of Four was one of the top highlights of 2024’s Levitation Austin Music Festival for me. Everyone in this crowd was hyped to see them, and Jon King smashing a microwave with an aluminum ball bat was gold.

My top ten shows of 2024 include some old favorites and one final (?) tour. Come back tomorrow for more!

Keep your mind open.

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Bonnie Trash announce first full-length album, “Mourning You,” and offer its first single – “Veil of Greed.”

Today Guelph, Ontario hell-raisers Bonnie Trash announce details of their new album, ‘Mourning You’, which is set for release on February 28th on Hand Drawn Dracula. Along with the announcement they have shared the first single and video from the album, entitled “Veil of Greed”.

‘Mourning You’ is, put bluntly, an album about death. Not death in the macabre, violent, or outrageous sense, but death as you or I might know it. A spectre lurking around the corner. Capricious, indiscriminate, and unexpected. Ordinary and all the more terrifying for it. Real. Fear in the eyes of a loved one about to die, and the fear in your eyes – staring back.

Bonnie Trash is the horrorgaze project of twin sisters Emmalia & Sarafina Bortolon-Vettor, wedding post-punk’s steely-eyed austerity to goth rock’s brooding grandeur.

‘Mourning You’ finds Bonnie Trash embracing a newfound sense of urgency. A lifelong project christened in 2017 with the release of ‘Ezzelini’s Dead’, the band’s debut EP which found the pair mining the Trevisan dialect and archaic Italian folklore of their heritage to grisly effect. Where their first full length, ‘Malocchio’ (2022), shrouded Bonnie Trash’s nightmares in dusky dreamlike reverb, ‘Mourning You’ is vivid and immediate. Emboldened by the addition of Emma Howarth-Withers on bass and Dana Bellamy on drums – whose thunderous rhythms sharpened 2024’s ‘My Love Remains the Same’ EP into a fine-edged blade – ‘Mourning You’ is less a post-mortem fantasia than a sudden, swift dagger to the heart. This is sorrow not as a lingering bruise, but a gushing wound.

Bonnie Trash unveil their new project with this first single “Veil of Greed”. Emmalia’s gripping and unyielding guitar riff with all the icy malice of Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine introduces the urgency of the uncomfortably ordinary horror story that unfurls across the record. The song’s gruesome imagery – feasting on hearts with rotten teeth – finds Sarafina worshipping at the altar of her agony. “I bow down before you and I know / You feed.”

“When you lose the one you love so dearly, it’s a cut that’s so deep, it rips your heart out of your chest. You try to continue on, but you suffer and you bleed” the twins comment. “Grief is like an open wound that will never fully heal. It can consume you if you let it. Sometimes, it’s best to let it feed, allowing the pain to exist with the beautiful memories you hold close to your heart.”

“Veil of Greed” video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQzTivht8mE
‘Mourning You’ album pre-order/pre-save links: https://ffm.to/mourningyou

Sarafina, the band’s singer and lyricist, has described the album as being about “losing someone you love. It’s about the horrors of grief, haunting you every day.” Inspired, largely, by the passing of Nonna Maria – who provided interstitial narration across the band’s early work – it’s these intimate details which render the songs on ‘Mourning You’ so devastating. The record explores love and grief as kindred spirits. Grief as love with nowhere to go. Love determined by the fear of its loss. A blood pact. A life for a life. The gnarled claw of remorse gripping you in twilight’s terror.

Though inspired by the shocking iconography of horrorshows, slasher flicks, and psychological thrillers, Bonnie Trash turns cinematic tropes on their head. Rather than fashioning nightmares into reality, the band paints reality as a nightmare, rife with pain, suffering, and gothic theatre. Bonnie Trash understands that everyday atrocities haunt the periphery of our lives. A black cloud looming on the edge of our vision. Curses abound. You can’t ward them off. You’d best make an unholy racket.

‘Mourning You’ is out February 28, 2025 on Hand Drawn Dracula. In mourning, all is lost.

Keep your mind open.

[Don’t forget to subscribe while you’re here.

[Thanks to Kate at Stereo Sanctity.]