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So, 2026 is off to a heavy, extreme and violent start. And there’s been a load of new noise bubbling up from the underground. The start of the Year Of The Fire Horse finds a delivery of nasty death, some far-out space voyages, and some greasy, knife-wielding biker-psych. 

There’s also a load of car-based carrion, thanks to California death metal legends Exhumed and the aptly-titled Red Asphalt. Named after a series of traumatising driver’s ed films that aimed to teach road safety by showing the gory outcome of driving like a dick, it finds them setting their frenzied onslaught to tales of life and death on the road, zombie bike gangs, cars used as weapons, and basically ending your journey covered in blood. This being Exhumed, there’s a punked-up, reckless energy to Unsafe At Any Speed and Crawling From The Wreckage that turns the whole thing into a total riot. In a car or not, whiplash is very likely.

There was a pleasant surprise earlier this week when Belgian diabolists Possession dropped The Mother Of Darkness out of nowhere. Nine years since 2017’s excellent Exorkizein full-length, and seven since they last put out anything at all, it’s a return as welcome as it is (appropriately enough) possessed. If anything, the absence has only made the heart more evil, and a morbid, ecstatic violence hangs in the atmosphere. Everything in their satanic death attack sounds even more charged with demonic energy than before, sounding like it was recorded in a crypt, particularly during the wild blasts of Exhulted Hearts and The Black Chapel. Cry-Shine-Die starts all mid-paced and atmosphere building, until it kicks in halfway through and it feels like catching fire. A very welcome return from one of the finest bands in the metal underground. 

There’s been some talk about Cryptic Shift over the past couple of years. The Leeds band’s sci-fi obsessed prog-death got them noticed with 2020’s Visitations From Enceladus debut, and with Overspace & Supertime there’s a weight of expectation. Fans of Voivod’s futurism and Blood Incantation’s space-death will dig just how nakedly they go into big ​’70s prog jazz-outs among the heaviness, but theirs is done in a way all of their own, often quite suffocating and prone to atonal oddness rather than gazing at the wonder of infinite stars. In fact, good as they are with a surge of metal speed, it’s the side-quests into this strangeness that prove most engaging here, a musical maze in which to spend decent time getting lost and misplacing your mind. 

At the other end of the death scale, Brazilian cult Fossilization​’s second album Advent Of Wounds finds them digging into murky atmospheres. Time on the road with U.S. deathsters Father Befouled has by their own admission rubbed off on them, and here they’ve brought in that ossuary-lurking sense of dread, as well as crushing, doomy touches of early Anathema and Paradise Lost. You can never have too much of this stuff, as exemplified by Dead Congregation, Krypts, Incantation or Grave Miasma, and here Fossilization prove they’re worthy of standing among such esteemed company. 

For those wanting some good, ​’90s-styled brutality that recalls the likes of Malevolent Creation or earlier Immolation, then Posthumous Imprecation, the debut from St Petersburg quartet Void Monuments will do you right. There’s a purity to The Devilish Prophecies and Decapitate The Saints that will stir something in fans of the very core of death metal, with a classic guitar crunch and Morrisound-ish production, but isn’t a simple homage, either. This isn’t studied, it’s just imprinted from a clear obsession with this stuff.

Staying in the void, we have LA trio Voidhämmer and their Noxious Emissions demo. If that title doesn’t give you an icky taste of what to expect, tracks called Rotting In Excrement and Coffin Leakage will. They play that wonderfully sewery and squidgy stripe of death metal that shits in the same bowl as Autopsy. The no frills production that gives the bass plenty of room to swing gives it a nasty energy, as does a burst of punk on the fantastically-named Cadaveric Bloat. Noxious, indeed, but you’ll want to take a huff. 

The approach of Canadian one-man black metal outfit Sanctvs couldn’t be more different. On his second album De l’Abîme au Plérôme (From The Abyss To The Plemora), Xavier ​‘Mortheos’ Berthiaume delivers six tracks of high-minded black metal that’s even more imposing when you consider he plays every instrument himself. Describing it, he says it’s ​“an elegy to our own mortality, a dirge to the passing of time and the changes it inevitably brings”. These reflections are carried out with all the dignity and gravitas such a weighty topic deserves, to both chilling and inspiring effect.

Finally, we have The Ecstasy Of Möld by Canadian instrumental stoner sleazeballs The Death Wheelers. This time around, they’ve added a little bit of ​’80s metal tang to their grubby sound. Fans of Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats, Electric Wizard and Church Of Misery will dig the sense of seedy, B‑movie wrongness that hangs over the whole thing, while titles like Blood, Bikes And Barbiturates, Homicycle Maniacs and Get Laid… To Rest add to the tone in the absence of lyrics. There’s a lot of greasy rock’n’roll, some dirty psych, and on The Heretic Rites Of Count Choppula, a dollop of spaced out, shark-infested surf guitar. Wheely good stuff.