Est. 2025
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2 reviews
Ensanguinate
Death Saturnalia (With Temples Below)
SI · Soulseller Records · 2026
Four Slovenian thrash veterans make filthy, 80s-rooted blackened death on their second album, an occult tribute to Kali, Lilith and Ereshkigal. Riff after riff, played with real conviction, exactly as raw as it means to be.
There is a very particular kind of extreme metal that has no interest in sounding clean, and Death Saturnalia (With Temples Below) is a proud example of it. Ensanguinate, four musicians from Ljubljana who came up through the Slovenian thrash scene before forming this band in 2020, make blackened death metal that worships at the altar of the late 1980s: Aura Noir, Nifelheim, Repugnant, early Morbid Angel and Celtic Frost, the filthy end of the tradition where atmosphere comes from grime rather than gloss. Their second album is a monument, in their own words, to the female form in occultism, invoking Kali and Lilith and the Sumerian death-goddess Ereshkigal, and it sounds exactly the way a record with those reference points should: hot, dense, and caked in dirt.
Gavran
The One Who Propels
NL · dunk!records · 2026
A Rotterdam post-metal band comes back from a guitarist's near-fatal illness with five long, cathartic pieces on dunk!records. Wall-of-sound catharsis that mostly earns its scale, with one track where the loudness fights the emotion.
Some records you cannot really separate from the circumstances that made them, and The One Who Propels is one of them. Gavran, from Rotterdam, spent years in an involuntary silence after guitarist Freek van Rooyen fell seriously ill, the kind of pause that ends most bands quietly and without announcement. That it ends instead in five pieces of this size and this intensity is the first thing worth saying about the album. The second is that you would sense the weight even without the backstory. This is music made by people who had good reason to think they would never make it again, and it moves like it.
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