Reviews
Records the editors have actually sat with, scored out of ten. A high mark is an argument, not a favour, and the write-up has to earn it.
Kamelot — Dark Asylum
Three reviewers who agree on nothing else about this record agree about one thing, and it is a mixing decision. Angry Metal Guy, The Progres...
Ministry — The Squirrely Years Revisited
Some context you need before the first note. Al Jourgensen has spent four decades disowning Ministry's early synth-pop records, and he did n...
Cryptopsy — An Insatiable Violence
Matt McGachy told Blabbermouth what the plan was before anybody had heard a note of this thing.We really wanted to make a groovy record, and...
Saxon — Wheels of Steel
Biff Byford has never dressed this up. The first album, he told Louder years later, had sold about twelve thousand copies, mainly to people...
Malevolence — Where Only the Truth Is Spoken
A hardcore band from Sheffield that started its own label because no label would do it properly has now made a record in Dave Grohl's studio...
Vader — De Profundis
The Polish quartet from Olsztyn had one studio album and one live record behind it when it entered Studio Modern Sound in Gdynia in May 1995...
Blackbraid — Blackbraid III
The verdict first, because the record deserves a straight answer rather than a lap of honour: this is the most assured thing the project has...
Killswitch Engage — The End of Heartache
Every band you saw in a van between 2005 and 2010 was chasing this record. Some of them knew it. Most of them thought they had come up with...
Paradise Lost — Gothic
Picture the room, because the room explains the record. Academy Studios in West Yorkshire, the winter of 1990 turning into 1991, five men in...
Behemoth — The Shit ov God
On 29 January 2025 the band released a single and, with it, the title of the album it came from, and the reaction to those four words occupi...
Blind Guardian — Nightfall in Middle-Earth
Count the tracks before you argue about anything else. Twenty two are listed. Eleven are songs. The other eleven run between twenty one seco...
Sodom — The Arsonist
No triggers. No samples. No plug-ins on the snare. The drums went to tape the way drums went to tape in 1986, and the man who decided that h...
Godflesh — Streetcleaner
Put this on and listen to what is missing. There is no fill. Nowhere in fifty two minutes does anything speed up because a human being got e...
Emperor — In the Nightside Eclipse
In July 1993, four musicians from Notodden carried their equipment into a Bergen concert hall that Eirik Hundvin had converted into a studio...
Whitechapel — Hymns in Dissonance
Two albums ago this band was writing about childhood trauma with clean vocals and acoustic guitars, and doing it well. This one opens with a...
Napalm Death — Scum
Nobody agrees how long "You Suffer" is. The Bandcamp listing says four seconds. Other pressings say three, or one, and the figure that gets...
Lacuna Coil — Sleepless Empire
The argument this record walks into is one the band cannot win by volume alone. After nearly thirty years and a stretch of albums that drift...
Morbid Angel — Altars of Madness
Eighteen months. That is how long American record shops waited for the album that rebuilt American death metal, because Earache put it out i...
Werewolves — Die for Us
Australia's most savage death metal band, Werewolves, returns with their fifth studio album, Die For Us. Known for their relentless brutalit...
The Obsessed — Gilded Sorrow
The Return of The ObsessedAfter a seven-year gap following Sacred, Wino returns with Gilded Sorrow, an album that merges 70s hard rock with...