Amon Amarth – The Allfather Awakens (Metal Blade Records) [Matt Bladen]The Vikings Are Coming! Or that’s what they would have you believe, but did they ever go away? For me Amon Amarth have been at or near the top echelon of the metal world for a long time, whether it’s the massive Viking rows at their shows, the live battles on stage, they have become a must see live act, however many don’t mention the music as much.
This is probably become Amon Amarth have found a niche and stuck with it, it’s melodic death metal that often edges into power metal, with lyrics taken from Norse mythology. This often means that it can be catchy and folky but equally heavy and brutal, it means that Amon Amarth have become a gateway band for youngsters getting into heavy music.
Which is entirely admirable, however for me, they haven’t done anything too different with their music since
Twilight Of The Thunder God, so will
The Allfather Awakens change that? Well if you just listen to
We Rule The Waves, then absolutely not, chuggy riff made for rowing, a stage friendly bounce and easy shout along chorus, it’s Amon Amarth 101, which isn’t a bad thing but they’ve got a set full of tracks like this.
Thankfully they do try to make a couple of changes with
Upphaf, their first ever acoustic track, translated stanza from poem Völuspá, it’s a great but if breathing room that showcase a different side of the band and there’s even some throwbacks to their earlier days as the riffs feel rougher and with a bit less shine to them, as if the death is coming back to the melo, or something on
Die With A War Cry.
Thirteen albums under their belt, Amon Amarth are at a point where they don’t really need to change anything, however with their acoustic track and some of the doomier sides on this album they still can experiment but with
The Allfather Awakens, Amon Amarth stick to their undeniably successful Viking metal template.
7/10Butcher Babies – Night Bloom (Judge & Jury Records) [Keith Boswell]The new line up from the Butcher Babies is to due release their first album,
Night Bloom, since
Til The Worlds Blind was delivered in 2023. The ten track album, due for release on the 2nd October 2026, is delivered through the Judge And Jury Records label.
This nu metal band, has taken the opportunity through a reduction in personnel, to deliver a less hardcore edge to proceedings, indeed Heidi Shepherd can be seen as a light wisp of steam above a thick deluge of baseline soup below. The album vocals are often more delicate than previous endeavours although band collaboration still provides a variety of vocal emphasis throughout.
On first listen the album seems very devoid of a great deal of musical individuality when progressing from song to song. The melodies and rhythmic / lead guitar often get lost in the deluge of a pounding, unrelenting baseline. It must of course be mentioned, at this juncture, that the album has a good deal of intensity and attitude which is some way reduced from previous Babies offerings.
Further investigation identifies one or two songs that have individuality and even some chorus hooks to delight the listener.
Songbird is one such contrasting track that provides a little respite and delivers some interesting futuristic undertones which reminds me of a science fiction film, very atmospheric and adds to the song’s quality.
A further song in a similar vein, in terms of individuality, is
Black Clouds Over Georgia. The guitar playing, coupled with at the emotional lyrics at beginning of this song is a very much needed breath of fresh air, it’s very melodic in nature and I absolutely love it!
However, this detour from the norm only lasts for 30 seconds at best. Although the lead guitar does make further in roads into the track later on, the song would be much better if more use was made of it, making a good song into an excellent one in my opinion.
For me, this album hasn’t really hit the spot, too much repetition, reliance on a deep baseline and not enough individuality between the tracks has left me somewhat disappointed. This album will appeal to die hard fans and but has left me wanting something different.
6/10Spirit Possession – Cathedral Speech (Sepulchral Voice Records/Profound Lore Records) [Yasmin Mason]
Black metal meets thrash metal! Hailing from the US,
Cathedral Speech is Spirit Possession’s third release and my first introduction to the duo’s work. Described by their record label ‘as their most piercing, deranged, and narratively epic form yet’ , I’m definitely intrigued…. but does ithe album live up to its description? Well yes…. I think it does.
Cathedral Speech, the title track, kicks off the 80s horror film vibe immediately. the drums and guitars building in intensity, giving way to a moment of calm, before the pace builds again.
Backward Commandments provides a short respite with an instrumental interlude before we’re off again. Halfway through
Hanged Angels As Patternwalls and I feel like I’ve been sucked into a black metal vortex of frenetic riffs and demonic vocals, only to be spat back out by the abrupt ending of track 5.
Tracks
Second Liturgy (…Impossible Exits…) and
Trinity Possessor (…In Ten Thousand Hells) don’t disappoint either, alternating between those fast, thrashy riffs and sections which are almost hypnotic in places. The whole album conjures up nightmare vibes. In the best way. At almost 44 minutes long, this is not a short album, yet I’m disappointed when it finishes.
I think it’s safe to say that parts of this album would absolutely not be out of place on a 70s or 80s horror film soundtrack. This is an album to listen to in the dark. Turn it up loud, turn off the lights and see where your imagination takes you. It’s raw, it’s old school and it’s great fun.!
8/10Colossloth – The Transformation And Resolution Of All Opposites (Cold Spring Records) [Rick Eaglestone]
Colossloth has never been a project content to sit politely in any one corner of the industrial underground. For two decades now, Wooly Woolaston has been sculpting noise out of Leicester with the patience of a stonemason and the temperament of a demolition crew, building his tracks not from conventionally played instruments but from samples, loop stations, and a steadfast refusal to follow anybody else’s rulebook.
He has described Colossloth as a one-man experimental outfit with no rules to recording or playing music, and you can hear that philosophy in every grinding, hammering second. What began as long-form guitar drone has mutated over the years into something harsher and more rhythmic, a sound that lurches between suffocating heaviness and passages that seem to rise clean out of the murk, with tribal rhythms and flickers of rave energy wired into its circuitry.
The journey here has been a long and stubbornly independent one. The earliest Colossloth releases date back to 2006, with the first album arriving via Belgium’s Doom Structure in 2008 and further outings on Doom Mantra and Dark Meadow before the project found its natural home at Cold Spring in 2015 with Outstretch Your Hand For The Impress Of Truth. Heathen Needles followed in 2017, Plague Alone in 2020, and then 2022’s Promethean Meat shifted the dial by introducing sampled live drums for the first time.
Last year’s The Harmony Knife went somewhere altogether more uncomfortable, building an entire album around the writings of Ted Kaczynski. It is a catalogue that rewards the curious and punishes the complacent in equal measure, and it has earned Woolaston a place among the more distinctive voices on a label whose roster reads like a who is who of the esoteric fringe.
Which brings us to album number six for Cold Spring, arriving, fittingly, as the project marks its twentieth year. This time Woolaston turns his gaze to Theta Noir, the enigmatic collective (part art project, part cult, depending on who you ask) preparing the ground for MENA, a goddess born of code. In their telling, her coming is the point at which the boundary between flesh and machine dissolves for good.
Having spent his last record in the company of a man who wanted to burn the machines down, Woolaston now sits among those who kneel before them, and the title’s promise of opposites resolved feels less like a slogan and more like a mission statement. Cold Spring bills it as an “automaton chant of cybernetic worship,” and that feels about right. Five tracks, just shy of forty minutes, no filler.
Encoded Divinity is the shortest thing here and wastes none of its five minutes on pleasantries. It works as a threshold rather than a statement, a signal crackling into life as though somebody has tuned a shortwave radio to a frequency that was never meant to be found.
Calculate Your Revolution tightens the screws, leaning on the rhythmic backbone that Promethean Meat opened and hammering it into something cold, repetitive, and relentless. It is here that the concept really takes hold, the loops taking on the quality of liturgy, the sense of a congregation marching in lockstep towards something none of them fully understand.
Awaiting MENA is the record’s heart, a nine-minute vigil that trades momentum for anticipation. This is Colossloth at its most patient, letting textures pile up like static electricity before a storm, and it is the track that best captures the unsettling devotional quality at the centre of the concept.
Undertow Atlas is the longest piece at over ten minutes, and the title is an apt one: this is music that drags rather than drives, pulling you beneath the surface and holding you there long enough for the pressure to become part of the experience.
Then Only Adrift closes proceedings with eight minutes that feel, at least by Colossloth standards, like a cautious exhale. If the album charts a journey from summoning to arrival, this is the aftermath, the moment the congregation looks up and wonders what exactly it has welcomed in. It is a smart place to end, offering no neat resolution despite the title, only the uneasy stillness of a world that has quietly shifted on its axis.
What impresses most about The Transformation And Resolution Of All Opposites is the discipline. Plenty of noise records mistake volume for vision, but Woolaston builds each piece with a clear sense of purpose, and the sequencing, from short opener to lengthy middle stretch and a closing drift, gives the album a genuine arc.
That said, this is not an entry point for the uninitiated. The pieces are long and dense, and much of the conceptual weight rests on knowing the backstory; go in blind and some of the subtler narrative intent may pass you by. But for anybody already tuned in to the Cold Spring wavelength, the rewards are considerable, and headphones and darkness are very much recommended.
It also feels like a natural culmination of everything Colossloth has been building towards. The drone roots, the harsher electronics, the rhythmic heft introduced on recent records and the increasingly pointed conceptual framing all converge here into what might be the project’s most cohesive statement yet. Twenty years in, there is no sense of an artist coasting, only one still asking awkward questions and following the answers wherever they lead.
The Transformation And Resolution Of All Opposites is abrasive, hypnotic and quietly unnerving, a record for an age in which the line between worship and code grows thinner by the day. Play it loud, preferably after dark, and try not to look too closely at the screen afterwards. 8/10
