Category: news

Today, Italian folk / black metallers Duir reveal the new track “Del giorno.” The track is the third to be revealed from the band’s highly anticipated second album, Catarsi, set for international release on June 26th via AOP Records. Hear Duir‘s “Del giorno” in its entirety HERE at AOP Records‘ official YouTube channel. Duir is an atmospheric folk / black metal band formed in 2013 by MK, aiming to […]

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And it’s the first time on wax for one of those releases.

The post Carnal Forge’s “Firedemon” & “Please… Die!” Vinyl Reissues Due In October appeared first on Theprp.com.

Featured on The Summer Slaughter Tour 2026 Part II Today, Texas’ blazing death metal fivesome CREEPING DEATH are proud to announce they have officially signed to BLKIIBLK. The signing follows the recent announcement that CREEPING DEATH will be featured on The Summer Slaughter Tour 2026 Part IIalongside Hatebreed, Terror, Incantation, Gates to Hell, and Torture. […]

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He returns to the U.S. this week after a run of European stops. Continue reading…

Born on the windswept western coast of Norway, the brainchild of vocalist Terje Singh Sidhu, Sinsid are the living embodiment of raw, powerful heavy metal. Infusing everything they do with their genuine, burning passion for metal music, the band have been honing their craft and sharpening their weapons of war for fourteen years, delivering magnificent live performances […]

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There is an argument to be made that choosing to self-title your fifth album is an act of either supreme confidence or delusion, with very little room between the two. For Khemmis, the Denver-based doom metal quartet who have spent the better part of a decade building one of the most singular bodies of work in contemporary heavy music, the answer is clearly the former. Khemmis – arriving eleven years after the band’s first tentative steps on their 2013 EP of the same name – is not a statement of reinvention. It is something rarer and more difficult: a band arriving at the fullest expression of what they have always been.

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The context matters. Hunted (2016) made the international case for Khemmis with a Decibel Album of the Year that proved the band’s alchemy of funeral-paced doom and melodic heavy metal harmonies was not a novelty. Desolation (2018) showed them willing to stretch the template toward something rawer and more rollicking. Deceiver (2021) represented the sharpest execution of their mature sound – economical, emotionally exhausting, precise. With that record as the immediate predecessor, the question was always whether Khemmis could move forward without simply repeating themselves. They answer it on track one.

The album is structured as a ritual – not metaphorically, but architecturally. “Invocation of the Dreamer” opens the ceremony; “Benediction Tones” closes it. The vocabulary is deliberate: invocation, benediction, sacrament. Guitarist and vocalist Ben Hutcherson has described the record as “an invocation of the joy of heavy metal, as a ritual,” and the opening track’s lyrical content bears this out with an unsettling density. The speaker summons something through music itself – black candles, an altar perfumed with sage, an offering written on “perdition’s final page,” the cardinal directions invoked like the casting of an occult circle. The line “In my dreams a chord resounds / Struck in silence, ringing out / Sacrament of sacred sound” makes explicit the album’s thesis: the act of playing heavy music is the ritual, and the ritual is transformative. “Breathe unto me / Pull the tether from my throat / Insanity rides a hope that swallows me” – hope, here, is not comfort but an overwhelming force, something that undoes the speaker entirely. For a band whose previous work leaned heavily into the weight of loss and suffering, framing surrender to music as the path through is a quietly radical move.

What follows is not, however, a triumphant procession. The ritual requires confrontation. “Beneath the Scythe” arrives second in the tracklist and operates at a psychologically darker frequency than the opener’s ecstatic self-offering. The imagery – a faceless figure stalking through durum fields beneath a harvest moon, “fathers kneeling, performing rites that make him real” – literalizes the transmission of generational trauma through ritual repetition. The scythe figure is not supernatural; it is psychic inheritance made flesh. The most devastating passage in the song is also its most precise: “So many years ago / The child now fades / But repeats in my bones / The bargains I’ve made / To conceal the pain.” The wound does not heal – it echoes. The chorus complicates this further, because the armor that shelters the speaker is also the thing that costs them: “This armor curled cuts the flesh away / Stealing fire from my heart.” The protection and the damage are the same structure. Read against the album’s ritual arc – invocation through benediction – “Beneath the Scythe” establishes what must be faced before any benediction is possible. The ceremony is not clean.

Musically, the track is among the most complete Khemmis have written. The dueling guitar solos of Hutcherson and Phil Pendergast – a signature device the band has refined across every record – are deployed here with particular emotional economy, and the bass interlude from David Small, making his recorded debut with the band after joining in 2022, opens a space that makes the track’s emotional center breathe. Small’s integration into the rhythm section alongside drummer Zach Coleman has clearly been transformative; where prior albums occasionally felt like the bass was present rather than essential, Khemmis gives the low end genuine weight and dimensionality. Pendergast and Coleman have both relocated from Denver since Deceiver – Washington and North Carolina, respectively – and recorded this album at Flatline Audio with producer Dave Otero in full-immersion sessions that Coleman describes as more focused than anything the band had done previously. That focus is audible throughout.

Across the album’s eight tightly sequenced tracks, the band moves through every register they’ve developed over their career without overstaying any of them. “Corpsebloom Garden” and “Carrion King” deploy the galloping momentum that Khemmis have occasionally used to devastating effect – Hutcherson’s guttural vocal at its most abrasive – while “Grief’s Reverie” and “Tomb of Roses” lean into the melodic, emotionally resonant register where Pendergast’s clean vocal work is at its most affecting. “Gilded Chambers” opens with a burst of Coleman drumwork that may briefly disorient listeners expecting the band’s more measured pacing, and the decision to keep that intro exactly as Coleman conceived it in pre-production – Hutcherson’s reported response: “Don’t fucking change anything” – is the right one. The record’s cover art, an esoteric oil painting by Christopher Remmers, marks a departure from Sam Turner’s barbarian iconography that had defined previous releases, and fits the album’s more explicitly ceremonial register. It is, as Hutcherson puts it, “celebrating the capital H, capital M of Heavy Metal.”

That phrase sounds like a boast. In context, it reads as something more earned. Khemmis have not made a record about heavy metal’s power in the abstract – they have made a record that enacts it, structurally, lyrically, and sonically. The ritual opens with an invocation, descends into confrontation, and closes, presumably, in benediction. That arc is not triumphalism. It is catharsis in the actual sense of the word – something worked through rather than around. “The memory cries at the door / Longing just to be whole” is where “Beneath the Scythe” leaves you, and where the record’s journey begins in earnest. Eleven years in, Khemmis have learned that the most honest thing heavy music can do is refuse to resolve too easily. Khemmis does not resolve too easily. It earns it.

“Eleven years in, Khemmis have written a record about joy that doesn’t pretend the darkness isn’t the price of admission.”

Khemmis’ self-titled album comes out June 12th, 2026, on Nuclear Blast.

Track	Duration
Invocation of the Dreamer	4:46
Corpsebloom Garden	4:28
Grief’s Reverie	4:26
Beneath the Scythe	5:55
Gilded Chambers	5:38
Tomb of Roses	5:04
Carrion King	6:21
Benediction Tones	5:23

Khemmis Tour Dates:
06/19 – Vancouver, BC @Rickshaw Theater ^
06/20 – Seattle, WA @ Substation ^
06/21 – Portland, OR @ Aladdin Theater ^
06/23 – Sacramento, CA @ Starlet Room ^
06/24 – Berkeley, CA @ Cornerstone ^
06/25 – Santa Cruz, CA @ Felton Music Hall ^
06/26 – Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room ^
06/27 – San Diego, CA @ Brick By Brick ^
06/28 – Pioneertown, CA @ Pappy & Harriet’s ^
06/30 – Phoenix, AZ @ Nile Theater ^
07/01 – Cottonwood, AZ @ Queen B ^
07/02 – Albuquerque, NM @ Sister ^
08/27 – Chicago, IL @ Thalia Hall %
08/28 – Louisville, KY @ Portal %
08/29 – Atlanta, GA @ Garden Club %
08/30 – Asheville, NC @ Eulogy %
08/31 – Columbia, SC @ New Brookland Tavern %
09/02 – Philadelphia, PA @ Underground Arts %
09/03 – Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere %
09/05 – Baltimore, MD @ Labor Daze %
09/08 – Columbus, OH @ Ace of Cups %
09/09 – Detroit, MI @ Sanctuary %
09/10 – Indianapolis, IN @ Black Circle %

Social Links: Website | Facebook | Instagram | Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple Music

The post From Invocation to Benediction: Khemmis Earns Its Own Name – Album Review appeared first on Antihero Magazine.

From his guest-filled new album “The Singularity: Ekleipsis”.

The post Bear McCreary Debuts “Cool Kids” Featuring Members Of Guns N’ Roses & Red Hot Chili Peppers appeared first on Theprp.com.

Swedish progressive metal veterans Evergrey have released “The Burning Flame”, the final single from their upcoming fifteenth studio album, Architects Of A New Weave, which arrives on June 5 through Napalm Records.

The new track features a guest appearance from Dark Tranquillity, The Halo Effect, Grand Cadaver, and Cemetery Skyline vocalist Mikael Stanne, whose voice blends seamlessly with that of Evergrey frontman Tom S. Englund. Accompanied by an official music video, “The Burning Flame” showcases the band’s signature mix of melody, atmosphere and progressive heaviness while introducing a fresh dynamic through the pairing of two of Gothenburg’s most recognizable metal voices.

The release comes just ahead of a major opportunity for Evergrey, who will join Iron Maiden as special guests for two dates on the legendary band’s Run For Your Lives World Tour.

Discussing the new song, Tom S. Englund said: “We’re truly excited to release our new single, ‘A Burning Flame,’ featuring our friend and respected colleague Mikael Stanne. It’s an absolute honor to have him lend his voice to an Evergrey song. For us, this is the heart and soul of being a musician—building meaningful connections that reach new hearts through music. Every guest we’ve welcomed over the years has expanded our universe in the most beautiful ways, opening the door to new listeners and deepening the journey we all share. It’s a privilege we never take lightly.

“A Burning Flame” is a powerful, catchy duet shaped by genuine mutual inspiration. Mikael and I let each other’s melodies guide the next lines, allowing the song to grow into a seamless, ever-flowing river of emotion. To me, it feels like a dark yet profoundly beautiful conversation—raw, honest, and full of life.”

The band’s new album, Architects Of A New Weave, presented a unique challenge when it came to selecting singles, according to Englund.

“We’ve literally never had this much trouble picking singles. And honestly? That’s the best problem we could possibly have. Every song on this record is fighting to be the one you hear first—because we poured everything into making an album we’re flat-out obsessed with. Like always there are no fillers, no compromises, just twelve tracks we’re stupidly proud of and will be for the rest of our lives. Pre-order the album now and join the weave!”

The album features key tracks including “The World is on Fire”, “Leaving The Emptiness”, “Heaven”, “The Prophecy”, and the title track “Architects Of The New Weave”. Later in the record, Mikael Stanne joins Tom S. Englund on “A Burning Flame”, adding another dimension to the album’s emotional and musical depth.

Architects Of A New Weave was produced by Tom S. Englund and Vikram Shankar, while mixing duties were handled by Adam “Nolly” Getgood. Pre-order Architects Of A New Weave here.

Several expanded editions of the album will also be available. Bonus material includes the tracks “Heights” and “One Heart”, an album version of the 2025 standalone single “OXYGEN!”, a demo recording of “Longing”, instrumental versions of “Leaving The Emptiness” and the two new bonus tracks, plus a live rendition of “Falling From The Sun” from Theories Of Emptiness. The package also includes a continuation of “Ominous” from A Heartless Portrait (The Orphean Testament).

The post EVERGREY Unveils Final Pre-Release Single “The Burning Flame” Ahead Of New Album Arrival appeared first on Sonic Perspectives.

Metallica continue to break attendance records while out on their 'M72' World Tour in Europe. Continue reading…

With “The Burning Flame,” Swedish progressive metal masters EVERGREY share the last single from their upcoming fifteenth album, Architects Of A New Weave, which releases this Friday, June 5, 2026, via Napalm Records. On “The Burning Flame,” Frontman Tom S. Englund is joined by fellow Gothenburg icon Mikael Stanne (Dark Tranquillity, The Halo Effect, Grand Cadaver, Cemetery Skyline) in vocal duties, and […]

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