Through a carreer spanning over nearly 30 years Amorphis has always been more or less synonymous with quality, but with their 13th studio album entitled 'Queen Of Time' our neighbours from east introduces us to a masterpiece that has exceeded all my expectations and to my ears it's by far their best album to date. The opening track 'The Bee' is simply an amazing composition that immediately sets the...

Norwegian symphonic black metal veterans Dimmu Borgir are returning to the limelight with their long awaited 10th studio album which also marks the bands 25th anniversary. The album is entitled 'Eonian', which means something like 'Everlasting' and the lyrical theme deals with how humans releate to the concept of time. I know a few Dimmu fans who haven't been too happy about the the way the music has taken...

'Invader From Beyond' is a concept album and third full lenght offering from German based Damnation Defaced. As far as i recall I haven't heard any of their previous albums yet, but I'm sure I will check out both after having heard this one. Damnation Defaced is a death metal band, but not a traditional one since their style mixes elements from several of death metal's sub genres. The...

Deathcore is normally not my preffered musical territory, but I'll gladly make an exception for US based Shadow Of Intent and their latest release entitled 'Reclaimer'. Shadow Of Intent is actually so much more than just anonther deathcore band, and their music is an exciting blend of several music styles such as death metal, symphonic metal, power metal, deathcore and a touch of black metal. Their 2016 album 'Primordial'...

The Faceless mastermind Michael Keene has gathered a completely new line up for 'In Becoming A Ghost', the fourth in line of The Faceless studio albums, including Abigail Williams' Ken Sorceron on vocals, The Zenit Passage's Justin McKinney on guitar and Bryce Butler on drums. The Faceless are normally referred to as a technical death metal band, but theres also plenty of progressive metal elements in their sound while...

With their previous album Embryo clearly stated that they would be a force to count on when it comes to melodic death metal, or I should probalby say symphonic death metal since their music is more in the vein of bands like Fleshgod Apocalypse or Septicflesh than for instance the Gothenburg way of meodic death metal. Embryo doesn´t take the symphonic elements to such extreme heights as those two...

Boston based Scaphism are back to follow up their 2012 debut with a brand new effort entitled 'Unutterable Horrors'. Since then the band has been through several line-up changes, but now the new line-up has been completed and a deal has been inked with Horror Pain Gore Productions. Scaphism's music is basically riff based, old school death metal with a few hints of thrash. Straight forward, in-your-face death metal...

Sometimes the technical death metal genre gets criticized for only producing bands being technical for the sake of technicallity, and in some cases the critics are right to a certain degree. Fortunately this is not the case with Canadian band Deity. On their self-titled debut album they have managed to keep focus on songwriting, good riffs and song structures as the main objective, while individual brilliant technical skills are...

Dutch death metal act Apophys has been around since 2012 and ‘Devoratis’ is their sophomore album. Featuring members of God Dethroned and Toxocara this is a band with both experience and a clear vision and approach to their writing – song structure above technicality. The music is technical indeed, but you can clearly hear that composing good and well-arranged songs is their main objective. ‘Devoratis’ is a concept album,...

Infected Dead is a technical death metal band, heading from the rotten shores of the River Medway in Kent, UK, and ‘Archanic Malevolence’ is their debut album. Consisting of only six tracks including an intro and a play time of 27 minutes it’s probably more correct to define it as an EP rather than a full album. The material is both complex in structure and brutal, but yet both...