One of the forefathers and icons of punk rock and heavy music, Iggy Pop, has teamed up and collaborated with Joshua Homme (Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal) to release a new album in March, 2016. Titled Post Pop Depression, the album will be released by Loma …

California’s power shred act Exmortus would have fit right in on Mike Varney‘s Shrapnel Records in the late 1980s, if not for the band’s double bass drum and extreme metal vocal styling. On 2016’s Ride Forth, the band proves there is beauty in all sorts of precision: the hyper-realist creates …

Folky acoustic guitar and fiddle introduce listeners to the eponymous 2015 release by Sweden’s metallic and mighty Manegarm. A definite change of pace from 2013’s Legions of the North, featuring many more quiet, acoustic, moody moments, the new disc brings a welcome dynamic back into metal. As with Manegarm’s previous …

Baltimore’s long-disbanded Pessimist reunited in 2014. As a celebration of the re-grouping, the band has decided to re-release three albums. The first reissue, Slaughtering The Faithful, was re-mastered, then released on Halloween, 2015, by Obscure Records. Pessimist was a premier blackened death metal band on the East Coast late last …

Hailing from a decidedly unfrostbitten San Francisco, the blackgaze Deafheaven has released its latest five song album, titled New Bermuda. Ranging from a drain cleaner caustic to a gentle caress, the five long-playing tunes on New Bermuda weave experimental, varied, smooth tapestries of sound. Deafheaven is one of a select …

Armed with an excoriating, blistering new album, titled Out Of Respect for the Dead, Sweden’s death metal monster Grave has returned. The now-legendary heavy metal genre that Grave upholds, Swedish death metal, often showcases downtuned guitars, a “buzzsaw” distorted guitar tone, mid-tempo to fast-paced songs, deep-pitched vocals, and lyrical storylines …

Sweden’s long-running death metal stalwart act, Grave, has returned with an aggressive, pummeling new album, titled Out of Respect for the Dead. The disc is a blistering marathon through nine tunes, ranging from mid-length to a nine-plus minute epic. Recorded, mixed, and mastered at the modern, digital Studio Soulless, Out …

For Arlington, Virginia band Deceased‘s devotees and collectors, the new 2 CD set, Cadaver Traditions, is a treasure trove of uncommonly-heard cover songs. Featuring 53, yes 53! full length songs, this set incorporates 2 albums of Deceased’s which were out of print, plus a collection of 17 previously-unreleased tunes. The …

Slovenian melodic black-death metal act Dalkhu has released its latest opus, Descend… Into Nothingness. The album contains seven songs, which are an intense mixture of death, black, and even folk metal elements. Guttural, brutal death metal vocals permeate “Pitch Black Cave”, and the other tunes. Like Jeff Walker‘s famed vocal …

Daylight, a self-proclaimed hard working pop-punk band from Barcelona, Spain, has released it’s latest offering, an album called One More Fight. One More Fight contains ten songs of pop-meets-rock-meets the melodic sensibility of punk, delivered on the gentler side. The album’s mix is contemporary, crisp, loud, and clear. The sound …

Welsh alt rock band Dream State have their debut, 5 song EP out, titled Conssquences. The band states that they draw inspiration from melodic hardcore, and the EP seems to back this up, with melodic arrangements, well-sung female vocals by Charlotte-Jayne Gilpin, and interesting instrumental breaks and tones. The band …

Munster, Germany is the hometown of modern melodic metalcore act Idle Class. The band’s newest album, Of Glass and Paper, contains eleven tracks of melodic, fairly fizzy music. This particular breed of music is oft panned as “the screamo stuff”. Wildly popular for heavy music, metalcore enjoys working with a …

Portland, Oregon’s Cemetery Lust are very sincere flatterers of the early extreme thrash metal invasion’s pillars: Slayer, Kreator, and a few others. On Screams Of The Violated, the revivalists’s eight song re-release, it pays homage to these forerunner bands in spades. To state this more plainly, these guys sound like …

A posthumous release for bassist Bones, Evil Army‘s Violence and War is a five track blast through death-thrash. These three Memphis denizens kick things off with a killer divebomb, letting listeners know they mean business. They’ve got a maniacal, rip your head off direction established right away. Songs range from …

A certain faction of the black metal fandom prefers raw, unpolished music, because it sounds more true or authentic to them. Ruach Raah, from Portugal, has arrived to add its spin on metal music to the genre’s already immense ranks. Hate Fanaticism, the band’s ten song album, is a mid-paced, …

A relic from extreme metal’s distant past, Monastery‘s Ripping Terror 91 demo seems to be part historical documentation and part nostalgia release. This trio of acclaimed musicians (Sinister‘s Aad Kloosterwaard and Ron van de Polder, plus Entombed‘s Lars Rosenberg) were still fresh faces in the death metal scene in 1991, …

Rough, raw, and reckless, Playfastordie by America’s Bandit is a crazy run through basement-ethic punk, powerviolence, grindcore, and hardcore. The entire presentation is ‘underground’, with a B level mix coupled to new-level punk musicianship. They’ve got the basic beats, chords, and screams down, but need a lot of work on …

Emerging from the shadows to release a full-length record for the first time in five years, America’s The Dead Weather has returned. The group’s third album, Dodge and Burn, finds a reinvigorated band which has embraced its scruffy rocker identity and strength. The quartet maintains a stellar connection, which is …

Ah, Exmortus heats up another day in metal-dom! Stark black and white imagery, a dragon, swords, horns, a battle, a horde, scantily-clad women, blood, and fire: these California natives have heavy metal’s best and brightest tropes fenced in and neatly dispatched. The quartet works diligently on their music, and the …

Schnitzel Records is an independent record label based in England. The label serves as an international platform for several high-profile artists, such as Ween, Nick Oliveri, and The Moons. Schnitzel also presses high quality vinyl records, for both initial runs and reissues. In this world premiere text interview, Iris speaks …