Here are all the new releases for November 17th through 23rd. Releases reflect proposed North American scheduling, if available. Expect to see most of these albums on shelves or distros on Fridays.
See something we missed or have any thoughts? Let us know in the comments. Plus, as always, feel free to post your own shopping lists. Happy digging.
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New Releases 11/17 – 11/23
Opeth — The Last Will & Testament | Reigning Phoenix Music | Progressive Rock + Progressive Death Metal | Sweden (Stockholm)
Mikael Åkerfeldt’s death metal growls return after more than 15 years and steal the hype from everything else The Last Will & Testament brings to the Opeth table. Their reintroduction is just one piece of the record, itself a concept album concerning a ghost and his family in the 1920s inspired by Succession. Also of note is that this is the heaviest Opeth record since Watershed, though it’s slotted in the progressive metal camp, and boasts appearances from Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson and Europe’s Joey Tempest. Overall, it pushes Opeth forward by combining their early intensity with the artistry they’ve cultivated over the last decade.
–Colin Dempsey
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Sign of the Jackal — Heavy Metal Survivors | Dying Victims Productions | Heavy Metal | Italy
Sign of the Jackal keep 80s speed metal alive on their third LP, specializing in greasy and energetic bar band rockers like “Breaking the Spell”. It’s warm to the ears, yet just rough and fast enough to remain dangerous.
–Colin Dempsey
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Kruelty — Profane Usurpation | Closed Casket Activities | Death Metal + Hardcore Punk | Japan (Tokyo)
This Japanese trio have performed on bills with Undeath, 200 Stab Wounds, Dying Fetus, Full of Hell, Gatecreeper, Mortiferum, and Terminal Nation within the last calendar year, so you can say that concerts are their thing. Unsurprisingly then, the only connective tissue between each meter on Profane Usurpation is how it makes a live audience move. If a section doesn’t make you two-step, then it’ll make you mosh. Songs can feel disjointed as a result, but that critiques dampens the louder you play this EP.
–Colin Dempsey
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Maat — From Origin to Decay | FDA Records | Technical Death Metal | Germany (Berlin)
Entering into the world of sour-faced and densely-recorded death metal are Maat, whose latest record can be best summarized as Nile and latter-day Behemoth having a baby. They won’t receive any points for originality, but they adequately synthesize the larger death metal sound of the past decade outside of the OSDM revival.
–Colin Dempsey
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Immortal Force — Mystic Seance Unrealities | Horror Pain Gore Death Productions | Death Metal | Canada (Vancouver, British Columbia)
The Carcass and Napalm Death covers included on Immortal Force’s debut indicate exactly where the group aligns themselves musically. This is crusty and primitive death metal minced up with hardcore punk and fat bass lines. It’s as if it just came out of a wine cellar, where it’s been encased since 1989.
–Colin Dempsey
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Ante-inferno — Death’s Soliloquy | Vendetta Records | Black Metal | United Kingdom (Scarborough, England)
On their third record, Ante-Inferno thread the needle between miserable and engaging black metal. While that could be chalked up to the gauzy atmosphere, that’s not the meat on the bones here. The group possess a vigor that cuts through the thickly-layered guitars. Furthermore, vocalist Kai Beanland, whose responsible for the album’s focus on depression and mental illness, tries to tear her vocal chords on every track. The result is depressive black metal that’s unusually assertive.
–Colin Dempsey
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Golgothan Remains — Bearer of Light, Matriarch of Death | Dark Descent Records | Death Metal | Australia (Sydney)
Chronicling a centuries-old romance between numinous star-crossed lovers, this fiercely intense EP convulses like a colossal maggoty biomass, its undulant purge fluctuating between fusillades of scalding pyroclastic flow and portentous, churning doom, recalibrating Ulcerate’s apocalyptic calculus into diabolic flesh, and the abyssal desolation that comes with foiled coitus.
–Spencer Grady
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Stenched — Purulence Gushing from the Coffin | Me Saco un Ojo | Death Metal | Mexico
Death metal steeped in sewage: everything from the drums to the vocals feels like it’s coming from underneath a three-foot pool of filth. Stenched’s slithering riffs come quicker than expected given their atmosphere, lacing their old-school appeal with blistering menace.
–Ted Nubel
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