We’re a few days away from the end of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. In what appears to be a transparent attempt to curry favor with Donald Trump, CBS announced plans to end The Late Show last year, and Colbert is making the most of his final week on the air. Tonight, for instance, Bruce Springsteen will be one of Colbert’s guests. Colbert hasn’t yet announced the guests for Thursday’s grand finale. Last night’s episode featured an all-star lineup, and Colbert got to perform with one of his musical heroes.
Gabbie Gonzalez, a popular lifestyle TikTok personality, has been charged alongside her father and a Hawaii surf instructor for allegedly hiring a hitman targeting Jack Avery, a former member of the defunct boyband Why Don’t We.
India’s Godless have spent more than a decade sharpening their death metal into something ruthless, precise, and increasingly severe. Their new single, ‘Architect of Torment,’ doesn’t abandon that foundation so much as drag it into a darker room and lock the door behind it.
Built on tightly controlled aggression, jagged, rhythmic turns, and a suffocating atmosphere, the track finds Godless leaning harder into tension without losing the surgical force that has defined their sound. It is death metal with its muscles clenched: violent, focused, and mean enough to leave a mark.
The accompanying video captures the song in its rawest possible form. Filmed live during Godless’ co-headlining set at the Wacken Open Air Pre-Party in Bangalore, the clip documents the band’s first-ever performance of ‘Architect of Torment.’ No concept-piece overreach, no cinematic padding, no digital fog machine nonsense. Just a death metal band throwing a new song into a crowd and letting the room absorb the impact in real time.
“‘Architect of Torment’ feels like a progression for us, leaning into a darker, more sinister atmosphere without losing the core of what Godless is,” the band tell Decibel. “After over a decade of locking into a sound, it felt right to push things further and see where it goes.”
That sense of forward motion is all over the track. Godless still sounds like Godless, but there is a heavier shadow over the riffs this time, a more oppressive weight in the way the song moves. Consider this less a reinvention than a tightening of the screws.
Watch the exclusive premiere of ‘Architect of Torment’ below.
156/Silence are back with a new record, the follow-up to 2024’s instant classic ‘People Watching’, and it’s set to be just as discomforting and direct.
Titled ‘From A Distance’, it is set for release on September 04 via Pure Noise Records.
The artwork looks like this:
Whilst the tracklisting is more like this:
1. Control Burns 2. No Arms 3. Order & Entropy 4. Swept From Under (Call of The Void) 5. An Early Exit 6. Collateral (ft. Tony Castrati of Crippling Alcoholism) 7. Cannon Fodder (ft. Mike Hranica of The Devil Wears Prada) 8. Secret Room 9. Proxy Idols 10. Phoenix Dies 11. From A Distance (ft. Alex Reade of Make Them Suffer) 12. After Dusk
The first taste of the album, ‘No Arms’, is out now and showcases how the band are delving into different sonic pools without ever losing any of their atmosphere or audacity. Pulling from the most chaotic and calloused parts of nu-metal’s underbelly, with plenty of gruelling riffs and frenzied howls, it is the sort of song that sucks you into its spiral and refuses to let go. Not content with conquering chaotic hardcore and gritty post-hardcore, it’s clear that the band are on route to take over every base that they can.
The band had this to say about the song:
“No Arms is about being without a way to protect yourself and what belongs to you. Being alone and afraid, not having any means to control the situations that befall on us. The overwhelming feeling of being helpless until we’re not. Until somebody saves us.”
The band will be making a return to the UK and Europe as support for The Devil Wears Prada later this year. Here are all the dates:
OCTOBER
07 – MÜNCHEN Backstage Werk 08 – BRUSSELS Schlachthof 09 – HAMBURG Docks 10 – EINDHOVEN Effenaar 12 – VIENNA Szene 13 – PRAGUE Archa+ 14 – COLOGNE E-Werk 17 – ANTWERP Zappa 18 – PARIS Élysée Montmartre 20 – BRISTOL Electric Bristol 21 – LEEDS Project House 23 – LONDON Brixton Electric 24 – MANCHESTER New Century Hall 25 – BIRMINGHAM Institute 1
photos by Gustavo Diaz Denver, Colorado-based metalcore group UNDER AUBURN SKIES will release their blazing new EP, Diminisher Of Hope, on July 17th, today unveiling the recordâs cover art, track listing, preorders, and a video […]
At a glance, Pre-Historic Metal presents as just another entry in Darkthrone’s heavy metal revelry. The pitchfork on the album cover and the invisible orange pose (ha!) would be tongue-in-cheek if unapologetically worshipping metal hadn’t been the Norwegian duo’s schtick for over 15 years. As Dennis J. Seese wrote in his review of the record, “it seems to be a digest of Darkthrone’s 20-odd album career.” He was referring only to the title track, yet Nocturno Culto and Fenriz healthily call back to their former selves and potential would-be’s, different Darkthrones from different timelines who, by butterfly effect, conceived the band as a thrash metal, doom metal, or even hard rock outfit. The concept of heavy metal and Darkthrone’s personal relationship to it is their raison d’être, developing into a meta-textual experiment. To enjoy Pre-Historic Metal is to enjoy metal itself. The group’s latest record to be recorded in Chaka Khan studio is, then, a brick in the Darkthrone edifice. It proclaims that the structure is here to stay.
Except, Nocturno Culto revealed to me that may not be the case. In our conversation earlier this week, he told me that he doesn’t know how many albums Darkthrone have left in them. The sun is beginning to set. He didn’t reveal any concrete plans moving forward, only that he and Fenriz have discussed how to end their careers.
Given that, Pre-Historic Metal now comes across as a toast to one of the best pairings in heavy metal history, a reflection on the artists that shaped Darkthrone and their continued investment in heavy metal. Try to name a more sincere embrace of all that metal offers than Darkthrone, their lack of live performances and regular album output being more authentic signs that metal is healthy and worth celebrating than any geriatric reunion tour. It’s too soon to call Pre-Historic Metal a swan song. After all, they have a few more albums in the tank. And given how hard Darkthrone have clung to life, it’s entirely possible my romanticizing will age like a dead rat under a couch. But, Pre-Historic Metal is yet further proof of how Darkthrone turn the mundane, dingy, stinky, and proletariat into the romantic, often through primitive means. Nocturno Culto describing their recording set-up similarly feels idyllic, and it’s perhaps the best image to remember Darkthrone by when they do finally take their boots off in the ring. “One guitar and drums and without any metronome and anything. So we are just a two-man band recording in the studio.”
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A few years ago, you said,“Arctic Thunder is an album born out of Fenriz and I talking about the slight changes we should make because we felt that The Underground Resistance was our peak performance.”That’s interesting because I felt that Pre-Historic Metal is somewhat of a continuation of The Underground Resistancein some ways.
It’s right, because the journey we had from The Cult is Alive up until The Underground Resistance involved the way we recorded and where we were recording. We felt that, when we discussed after The Underground Resistance, the main focus was not really the riffs, but the arrangement of the songs because we could float out in a crazy little bubble. But, we thought that we might get it together and make it a bit more understandable. That was our thought. But again, we are again discussing things that we can and should do.
I mean, three times during Darkthrone’s life, we have discussed changes. The obvious one was, of course, after Soulside Journey and Goatlord, and next was after The Underground Resistance. And we, now, for the third time, we had this chat again after Pre-Historic Metal. So we have some, we have some juicy plans for the next album that we will record in a couple of years time.
So how did that chat go after Pre-Historic Metal?
I was basically thinking about doing things very differently. Simplify it a bit more. Only having one guitar. We’ll see how it goes, because when you only record one guitar it changes a lot of things, like the way you write music. So, it will be more primitive. We have a plan. I think we are going to work towards it and see how it ends up. Because one thing is for sure and that is that we don’t know how many albums we have left. Is it one, is it three? Maybe at maximum? I don’t know. It’s difficult to say. But what is definitely for sure is that we are not going to release 20 more albums. So we’re talking about around three more albums maybe.
We are using all our time and effort to create music for Darkthrone. No doubt that Darkthrone is some kind of a live project for both of us and it keeps us sane somehow. So for us, it’s very important. I mean, we are not very serious guys as individuals, but when it comes to the music, we are very serious.
Are you thinking about ending it just because it’s so much energy that you want time to yourselves?
That’s one way to put it. At one point you have to meet the end of the road, but we will make sure that we can 100 percent be behind our albums. Given all the time we’ve been around and all the albums released, it’s been quite a journey, but at some point it has to end. We are not resigning just yet, but time goes by. We have some albums left in us, so we are going to continue, but we’re going to make some changes and explore the last leg of Darkthrone.
You’ve been in Darkthrone longer than you have not been in Darkthrone. Is it weird to think aboutwhat your life is going to be like when the band isn’t there anymore?
It’s very difficult to think about because it will be very, very strange and I don’t know how I am going to react to it. I’ve been in this band since I was 16 and now I’m 54, so it’s been a long time. My brain works very strangely because I can remember small details from long ago and so much is imprinted in my mind. It’s a nice thing to walk down the memory lane sometimes. But the band has always been about looking forward. And I think we are not such a band that would, let’s say, tour with some specific old albums because when we are done in studio, we are always thinking about the next stage.
We’ve been like that since basically Soulside Journey. I mean, we kind of joke around a bit with the saying we only had one ambition in the demo days and that was to record an album. So we recorded Soulside Journey and after that, we didn’t really have any ambitions. Even though it was an intense period, making Soulside Journey and Goatlord, but after them, our guards were a bit down. We didn’t really care that much. We just wanted to play what we felt was the right thing for us to do.
Have there ever been times when you feel like there are changes you should make to your music, but they’re different from what you want to play?
Not really. It’s always been very strange, but Fenriz and myself have always been a bit on the same page. Even though, let’s say back in 2007, for example, there was a distinct difference in how we made songs, the style of the songs and everything, but I think we have always been on the same page when it comes to an album and what we want that album to be like.
I am making songs as a guitarist, so I start with basically nothing. All the inspiration can come from a lot of things, but I don’t think about musical inspirations. It can also be a gust of wind or something that can trigger some kind of thought process. So you never know. But now, I’m set on our plan for another album and I will eventually try to dig into it, but I have another band as well that I’ve been working with for two and a half years, so a lot of my time has been going into that. For me, as a guitarist, that is a very different thing.
Are you playing guitar in the other band, too?
Yes, but it’s more of a classical, heavy, hard rock, metal thing, which is really fun to play on the guitar. So I mean, I won’t say Darkthrone isn’t fun to play guitar, but that’s a whole different matter. Darkthrone is the giant in my life which is always right behind me and whispering things in my ear daily. It’s a bit more nerve-racking. Also, when Darkthrone are in the studio, it takes a lot of energy because we are working really hard. It’s not really fun in that way. I mean, after a couple of days, we can be a bit more secure on where we are heading. But the first two days are difficult and stressful. We are becoming experts at doing some things on the fly in the studio, so it demands a lot but the result is that we don’t get bored of our own albums.
How did the team at Chaka Khan studio affect Pre-Historic Metal?
I mean, a lot of things we have been doing our entire time with Darkthrone are just coincidences. When we recorded ourselves from 2005 until 2019, it was a lot of coincidences in terms of where I put the microphones, the sound, and everything. At Chaka Khan, there’s a lot of good equipment there, like vintage equipment. So instead of having a plugin for echo on the vocals, we use an old tape echo machine from the ‘70s. It’s much harder to control a lot of things like that. But we think that is a good thing.
I think that this is something which is really important to us, and we joked about it in previous interviews some years ago that one shouldn’t review our albums when it comes out because we don’t play contemporary music. So you have to review it in 15 years. It’s a joke, yet also, there’s something to it for us because we want our albums to last. Let’s say, if you put on Pre-Historic Metal in 10 years, you couldn’t pinpoint which decade it’s from, really.
That makes it interesting for Darkthrone as a whole, because you’ve had so many changes over your career. Like, if someone looks at Circle the Wagons in the year that it came out, they might think it’s too different from who you were. But, with more context and hindsight, they can see how Darkthrone developed and where you guys were at that time.
Absolutely. It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to that album. But actually a couple of months ago, I listened to the Fuck Off and Die album and realized it is really good. I mean, I know that it’s one of my favorite albums because there was something about that time period that was really good and, in the midst of people trying to define what black metal is, I don’t know what it is, but I thought that the Fuck Off album is a lot more black metal than other black metal.
It’s hard to describe, but it’s really harsh and the lyrics are really harsh. It was a different period than now.
Years ago, you said that being in Darkthrone is hard and it’s always been hard. What are some of the difficulties that you usually associate with being in Darkthrone?
It’s back to the stressful studio sessions, and it’s also on a deeper level. Darkthrone has been haunting us for so many years and without it, it would be, I don’t know. It’s difficult to imagine my life without that band. I wouldn’t say it’s a curse, but it’s more of a lifeline somehow, to have it, but it’s difficult to balance everything all the time. And I mean, we are not even playing concerts, so who am I to complain?
Going back to Chaka Khan, how do you think it would have been different if you got to work with them when you were younger, like if it was in the early ‘90s or late ‘90s, if you got to work with that team?
All the technology and equipment has changed so much over the years, so it’s hard to say. We were lucky on A Blaze in the Northern Sky because that was recorded in a studio nearby where we lived, and it was a good studio really, but they hadn’t any team or technician there so they hired in people they knew were good. The first guy we got in that studio was on A Blaze in the Northern Sky. He was really serious, really professional. So it’s amazing to listen to A Blaze today in all that chaos. The album is really well-balanced, sound wise, which is, to me now, amazing, because this guy didn’t know anything about what we were doing. But he had his restrictions. If Fenriz really wanted a really powerful floor tom that was going to blast all over the place, this guy was like, “No, no, we can’t do it this.” He was really serious about his craft, which was good for us.
The next year we got back to the same studio and then they hired another guy that didn’t know us and we didn’t know him, but he had no boundaries at all. It was like we had to stop him from being too extreme. Fenriz wanted the really powerful floor tom again, and you can hear it on Under a Funeral Moon. This new guy had no limit on how powerful that floor tom could be, so we had to stop him for a while. So everything was different because back then it was all recorded on tape. Today, I think the last album we recorded analog was in 2003 or ‘04, I think it was Hate Them. Everything afterwards has just been all recorded digitally. The good thing about Chaka Khan is all the things in the studio are analog. It’s only where the music is recorded that is digital.
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I want to talk about “So I Marched to the Sunken Empire” because it doesn’t sound like any other Darkthrone song.
The last, I don’t know, six or seven years, I’ve been getting into how to work synthesizers and, and so all the sounds you are hearing on Darkthrone are my own. It’s not a preset. I’m building those sounds from scratch. And actually, that “Empire” song, I made those two themes as some kind of a death march or something. I didn’t know what to do with it. I was holding on to it for a while because I wanted to see what could be used in my funeral. I showed Fenriz some of it and he liked it, so I thought we should record it. And I’m happy now that I also recorded the guitar on there, because at first, the people in the studio said it’s so good that I didn’t need to add guitar. But the next day, I felt I had to record a guitar there because was going to make a difference. So, I’m glad I did that.
Synthesizers have never been a big part of Darkthrone. It’s only been the past few albums, especially on the longer songs from Astral Fortress andIt Beckons Us All……that you guys have really started using them.
Yeah, and I think synthesizers are really great because you can enhance the songs, but you have to do it tastefully and not right in your face. So we have to do it carefully, otherwise it will sound not like Darkthrone. So you have to do it very carefully.
In what way would synthesizers sound not unlike Darkthrone, in your opinion–if they were too in your face?
Well, it also comes down to how the synthesizers sound. What kind of sound are you going to show to people? Because it’s a big difference. I’m more of a ‘70s synthesizer guy. We want the organic, good sound. I use an ARP synthesizer, which is very difficult to manage. It’s almost too much for me because when I got that synthesizer, I couldn’t even get the sound from it. I will also use a Korg synthesizer.
So what made you want to use them more?
We tried a bit on, what is the name of the first album we did with Chaka Khan? I can’t remember.
Eternal Hails……, it’s from 2021, isn’t it? Yeah, it’s after Old Star.
Yeah. On that album, we started to get into them because we went into Chaka Khan and we saw a lot of great synthesizers. So we got ideas straight away. And also they had a fully analog, what do you call this piano thing? What’s that? Anyways, they had a lot of good equipment. So that’s where we actually started to use the synthesizer as a tool for enhancing.
For us, it’s like a throwback to the ‘70s, basically, using synthesizers. For both Fenriz and I, both our feet are really planted in the ‘70s and early ‘80s metal. But, of course, there’s a lot of good bands of today as well. Even now, there’s a lot of things to explore about the ‘70s, because there was obviously an underground scene back then as well. You can use your whole life digging into that time of music. So, I mean, we are exploring different paths sometimes. Also in the ‘90s, we were very into the underground electronica stuff, which I still listen to, actually. We can go back to Klaus Schulze and stuff like that, but I was more thinking of the early ‘90s with Eat Static and acts like that.
Despite their differences in background and approach, Yungblud (Dom Harrison) and Machine Gun Kelly (Colson Baker) were onceclosecollaborators, and they occupy more or less the same cultural space. They’re both celebrity “rock” guys who don’t really rock but have ingratiated themselves within the upper tiers of the music industry and are embraced by iconic elders for some reason. So perhaps it’s no surprise that they’re feuding. Territorial pissings, you know?
Slayyyter’s blaring, serrated, knowingly trashy new LP WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA is one of the best albums of 2026 thus far, and it’s blowing the fuck up. She’s been making culty club-pop for years now, but this is the record that’s finally taking her over the top. Case in point: Slayyyter gave her first-ever televised performance on Tuesday night’s episode of The Tonight Show, and she made the absolute most of it.
More often than not, those artists who truly push the envelope and come up with something new to offer are not to be found at the top of the charts. Even within the underground metal scene, it is more common for those who play it the safest and stick to traditional modes of stylistic expression to rise to the top of the fray.
It is within those gray areas where one established subgenre begins to give way to another that those rare moments of radical innovation become commonplace, like a mythic borderland between rival kingdoms where the inhabitants are various hybrids of both sides. This is where Massachusetts-born stoner/doom quartet Elder has stood for much of their 20-year history.
Following a traditional beginning that resembled the fuzz-steeped stylings of Sleep and Electric Wizard, merging that very same psychedelic approach to heavy rock/metal with a strong progressive rock element that is fairly similar to where Mastodon went in the late 2000s. Their 7th and latest studio album, Through Zero, continues along the same creative trajectory, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes heavy music without warping to another universe in the process.
Ironically enough, while this album largely breaks with the established orthodoxy of emulating Black Sabbath’s pioneering work on Master Of Reality and Vol. 4 respectively, it affirms much of the same creative spirit that made said founding fathers of the stoner/doom style’s catalog so diverse. The free-flowing structure and extended lengths that the lion’s share of the songs on here enjoy run parallel to the extended jams that were a prominent feature of Sabbath’s eponymous 1970 debut album, complete with loosely grounded and technically prominent contributions from drummer Georg Edert and bassist Jack Donovan that resembles that of Ward and Butler in their prime.
On the other hand, the dreamy keyboards and wandering progressive riff work provided by guitarist Mike Risberg and guitarist/vocalist Nick DiSalvo falls much closer to the Sabotage and the wildly experimental stuff that followed until the end of Ozzy Osbourne’s original tenure with Sabbath in the 70s. Throw into the equation a modern production that accentuates a heavy punch rivaled by a dense yet spacey atmosphere and a vocal performance out of DiSalvo that’s smoother and less abrasive than Ozzy’s nasally bellow, and the highly contemplative and occasionally trippy character of Through Zero comes into view.
From one extended excursion through the lofty realm of the human experience to the next, this is an opus that takes its time to set up its point before getting it across, yet not a second is wasted on anything superfluous. The opening foray “Sigil To Ruin” goes on for over 10 minutes yet has a continuing sense of haste within its dream-like atmosphere, matching droning keyboards with an up-tempo rocking drive out of the guitars and rhythm section, and shifts seamlessly between airy light interludes and pummeling heavy grooves.
A similar trend continues within an even faster and bouncier feel on the rich progressive banger “Capture/Release”, which clocks in at just over 8 minutes, and along with the similarly long and animated title offering “Through Zero”, really plays up the progressive rock side of their hybrid approach in a manner that would make Genesis and Yes proud.
The technical showmanship reaches a clear apex on the extended 10-minute epic “Strata”, which all but sounds like the band tracked their parts while floating among the clouds, and the easy atmospheric flow turned punchy rocking crescendo in 8 minutes “Sight Unseen” proves a formidable instrumental take on progressive rock. Basically, the only entry that comes close to being a song in the conventional sense is the closing acoustic ballad “Blighted Age”, and even then, there are plenty of moving parts to keep things interesting.
If nothing else, the example that Elder has established with Through Zero is that breaking the rules doesn’t necessarily entail throwing out the rulebook entirely. There is a very coherent character along for the ride with all of the quirky twists and turns that this post-60s psychedelic bus makes on its journey through inner space, resulting in a series of songs that are generally too long for rock radio but internally consistent and potent enough to capture the imagination of any heavy rocker willing to stick around past the 4-minute mark.
Whether one prefers a sonic punch to the gut via a bottom-heavy groove or the fluid, jazzy noodling that was all the rage during the early to mid 70s, this album manages to do it all without sounding completely retro. At the end of it all is an album that isn’t too far removed from the sound that has allowed the likes of Baroness and Pallbearer to make big names for themselves, and while Elder are by no means newcomers to the scene, this has all the right elements to break through to new horizons in more ways than one.
Release Date: May 22nd, 2026 Record Label: Blues Funeral Recordings Genre: Heavy Psych Rock
