***Hallucinatory prog-infested bestial black/death metal horde Ch'ahom unchain absolute chaos-wielding sorcery with their debut full-length album Knots of Abhorrence, a triumphant arrival point of sorts testifying a long and transformative sonic journey started almost a decade ago, and now finally reaching its pinnacle and absolute consecration. Having started as far back as 2015 and existed for many years as a raw, bestial obscure war cult following in the steps of bands like Sadogoat, Blasphemy, Beherit, and Proclamation, in recent times Ch'ahom have been undergoing an expansive metamorphosis of their sound and songwriting, now juxtaposing a crisp and dense production quality to their primeval terrorscape, that exalts new elements incorporated from early 90's technical death metal in the vein of Timeghoul and Demilich, as well as from 70's UK prog influences derived from the band's peculiar interest in acts like Yes, Camel and Genesis. Ch'ahom's long running mesoamerican concept about pre-columbian rituals and death cults has also conversely benefitted from this recent sonic transfiguration, with their staple tribal contaminations and ornamental interludes (written and performed by the members themselves with traditional instruments) now assuming a whole new presence against the backdrop of the album's devastating scope and vision. Across it's sprawling forty-plus minutes and five dismal tracks, Knots of Abhorrence unfolds a pure masterclass of rare violence, atmosphere and intensity, carrying the listener across a gruesome wormhole and into another dimension of history's past where violence, carnage, bloodshed, magic and ritualism incarnate the sum of mankind's biggest and most ancestral fears....
CD $13.85
12/08/2023
LP $23.95
12/08/2023
***Formed by members of Encoffinate, Radioactive Vomit, Grave Infestation, Mass Grave, Temple of Abandonment, Nightfucker, Deathwinds etc., war-mongering bestial black/death metal cult Ceremonial Bloodbath re-emerge from the fetid underground of Vancouver, BC with their sophomore full-length abomination, Genesis of Malignant Entropy, an all-devouring, abyss-like monstrosity conceived from pure terror and insanity. Seemingly dwelling on a plane of atrocity entirely its own, Genesis of Malignant Entropy sees the Canadian horde once again draw its primeval life-force from the iconic legend of bands like Blasphemy, Bestial Warlust and Proclamation, but reworking it across a broader, more enigmatic canvas laced with a consciousness-obliterating amount of disassociatives and hallucinogens. Nothing less than an authentic horror of creation, this is a work in which the feral and animalistic traits of its main influences appear to be exaggerated to the point of acephalic bestiality, while a hideously deformed and surrealistic aura is achieved via pure sensorial torment and a complete deconstruction of reality. A fuming cauldron of skull-stomping neanderthalian drums, tortured howls, and on onslaught of demented, mangled guitars shrouded in destruction emerges from this unholy conception, rendering the listener nothing less than meat to be violently torn in an otherworldly primitive ritual disembodiment. The utter atrocity conceived and the strange and unorthodox ways through which such carnage was conceived will leave the listener butchered and sensorially violated in an authentic delirium of destruction.
LP $25.35
12/01/2023
***The debut album from dark esoteric grindcore act Egregore (not to be confused with the Canadian black metal band) takes us into ominous realms rarely explored before by, and in the genre: those of metaphysical occultism and supernatural darkness; a descent into the immaterial self and into alternate realities to transform a tradition inspired by bands like Carcass, Discharge, Convulse, Demigod, Terrorizer and Napalm Death into a destructive psychic mind-weapon. Egregore's grim and mystical amalgam of '90s death metal, crust, and grind aims to use the timeless lesson cemented chiefly by Carcass's Heartwork and Necroticism albums to disintegrate the corporeal self, transfigure the soul and open the listener's third eye unto a superior reality dominated by obscure forces, invisible powers, and higher truths. A passageway album using sonic destruction as a key to dimensions above and beyond the self, Synchronistic Delusions continues the band's explorative synthesis into the unknown, bridging '90s death metal and grind, black metal, crust punk and esoteric projections derived from jungian philosophy, occultism, supernatural theology and paranormal cabalism to destroy reality and liberate the mind from its carnal prison.
LP $23.50
11/10/2023
***East Coast raw death metal/punk savages Kontusion finally release their pulverizing debut self-tiled demo on vinyl, CD and cassette (reissue) via Sentient Ruin, in the wake of its original 2022 self-release on tape and digital formats. Upon release the four-track, seventeen-minute slab of necrotized terror saw the duo of drummer Chris Moore (Repulsion, Coke Bust) and of vocalist, guitarist and bassist Mark Bronzino (ANS, Mammoth Grinder) revel into a gore-splattered, chaos-torn disfiguration of lo-fi, blown out primitive death metal and punk-infused carnage reminiscent of (and influenced by) 80's and 90's bands like Terrorizer, Napalm Death, Discharge, and Convulse. The four skull-crushing tracks see Kontusion regress to a state of demented, feral abandon, incorporating influences from raw punk and hardcore to deconstruct death metal and reduce it to a mangled and scattered pulp reeking of terror and shrouded in destruction. Single-sided LP pressing housed in silkscreened jackets.
CD $12.75
11/10/2023
LP $25.35
11/10/2023
***American one-man nuclear black industrial weapon Uranium returns, transmuted into its most astonishing and terrifying form yet. A statement of unseen magnitude and scope, the second full length album Pure Nuclear Death sees the enigmatic East Coast visionary harness a realm of terror and death-torn sonic immensity rarely, if ever, seen before in this plane of reality. Clear from the title alone, Pure Nuclear Death embodies the triumph, definition and consecration of a vision and concept which in the span of a just a couple of years and releases so far has already become classic and by all standards and measures, simply unrivaled. Awe-inducing, imposing and inexorably devastating, Pure Nuclear Death comprises thirty six minutes, split up into five tracks, of omnipotent, death-heaving black industrial immensity designed to devour the listener and deliver to them a world-ending payload of absolute death. The legacy of bludgeoning, visionary post-industrial acts like Godflesh and early (Cop, Filth-era) SWANS transposed into total oblivion and coerced into a monstrous, lightless abyss of tectonic and crushing blackened electronics. An antihuman concept on nuclear energy and its most godly and terrifying traits incarnated in a sound which is its perfectly executed and envisioned embodiment. An indissoluble fusion reaction between a concept extrapolated from science, ethical literature and philosophy to convey realities of daunting scientific an technological darkness, and a god-like sound assembled from a critical mass of cataclysmic power electronics, apocalyptic industrial and black metal chained together into an otherworldly sonic weapon of absolute atomic death.
LP $23.50
11/10/2023
***American industrial metal conspirators Ash Prison (formed by Matt Auxier of electro-industrial act 6th Circle on guitars and electronics, by bassist J. Thompson of East Coast darkwave cult Child Ov Night, and by California-based Italian vocalist M. Alagna of Abstracter, Somnolent and ex-Atrament) arise with their pulverizing debut album Future Torn, a collaborative, cross-genre usurpation of heavy industrial electronics, dark hardcore punk and black/heavy metal united under the black banner of total anarchy, chaos, and absolute retaliation. Influenced by acts like Ministry, Skinny Puppy, G.I.S.M., Mayhem, Motörhead, Discharge and Godflesh, on the pummeling debut long player Ash Prison infer of a future, and soon to be, dystopian failed state fallen into complete anarchy and chaos, being paid back with violence and scorn for its own perpetration of injustice and corrupt societal squalor. Within this dark conceptual framework, a crushing barrage of cold sequences, torrential, obsessive drum machines, bulldozing bass lines and abrasive, distorted electronics serve as the backbone to a vitriolic onslaught of grinding guitars and hateful vocals reminiscent of and inspired by the iconic despisal of pioneering underground vocalists like Sakevi Yokoyama and Attila Csihar. A highly original, deadly, and thought-provoking syncretism of dark social commentary and sonic antagonism, Future Torn unites various eras, decades, and interpretations of musical insurrectionism to create its own divergent idea of "anarcho-punk", post-industrial dystopia, and heavy metal destruction to soundtrack and instigate the rise of turmoil, riots, violence, and widespread destruction.
LP $23.50
10/27/2023
***American bestial death metal berserker Invultation returns with its second full-length abomination Feral Legion, a thirty seven-minute siege of inescapable black/death ruin whose ominous nature and intents are already clear and evident from the album title alone. Indeed, Feral Legion takes us forward, or back, to a time once evoked by Einstein in his (supposed) famous words "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones". A time in which humanity's prolonged obsession for power through dominance has reduced the world to a lightless and inhuman prehistoric dark age where primeval animalistic instincts of survival and a complete lack of sanity are the only "logic" reigning. The music marvelously encapsulates this concept unfolding ten dehumanizing, life-scourging slabs of pure shellshock and complete sonic armageddon derived from the immortal legacy of black/death war cults like Blasphemy, Bestial Warlust and Angelcorpse. And while that is the premise and starting point, the means by which Invultation accomplishes its conquest is quite unprecedented for the standards of bestial extreme metal. The "chaos-for-chaos-sake" approach the genre has widely been known for is ignored in favor a hyper-realistic, (technical) death metal-derived approach with a crystalline production that exposes and exalts every moving part in the record, revealing an entity working within an evolved and sophisticated technical and compositional framework in which absolute destruction is achieved solely via the raw tonnage of the riffs and by the superb quality of the performative skill...
LP $22.25
09/15/2023
CD $12.25
09/29/2023
***Bestial, pulverizing, black/death metal barbarity from the outermost realms of insanity. Sacramento, California-based desecrators Abhorrency bring us their humanity-ending debut full-length abomination, Climax of Disgusting Impurities, thirty two minutes of complete savagery and bestial sonic abandon worshipping the deranged cult of bands like Death Worship, Conqueror, Bestial Warlust and Proclamation. Unrelenting and antihuman in every aspect imaginable, the nine-song audial weapon of mass extermination establishes a perpetual state of torment and terror within the listener through an unyielding death-bearing black, death, and grind-infused onslaught designed to demolish every human presence by any means necessary. A new cult of total death has risen, and Abhorrency are its new chaos-wielding prophets and emissaries!
LP $20.50
09/01/2023
***Where does reality end and where does it begin? And who, or what, decides this? Multinational experimental black metal enigma 夢遊病者 (SLEEPWAKER) re-propose this question to us via their masterful fourth album Skopofoboexoskelett, an enigmatic and playfully formulaic quandary of deconstructed visionary counter-music reminding us a simple concept: that reality is dictated by perception, and as such, by manipulating perception (via the arts), any reality is not only possible but also valid. And as is always the tradition with 夢遊病者, music is the alchemical key via which questions are raised and answers are found in the labyrinth of history, culture, lore and world traditions. In the case of Skopofoboexoskelett, an exploration of the notions of self-reflection, intuition, phobia, luck, and failure in the context of the evil eye, its historical, cultural, physical and metaphysical meanings, as well as its psychological effects, carefully unraveled and revealed. Within this paradigm "Skopofoboexoskelett" takes 夢遊病者's vision, agenda, and intents, further than ever before, with musical boundaries shattered, definitions pulverized, genres, styles and aesthetics ridiculed into a masterful sensorial manipulation which draws the listener into the deceptive and subversive absurdity that is their own perception being stimulated in unprecedented ways. Drawing their own line and dictating the guidelines of music's end as we know it, 夢遊病者 use their unique sonic idealizations made of lysergic black metal excoriations, kraut, psych, noise rock, world music, improvised deconstructionism and schizoid free jazz to transcend conscience and reason, devastate the senses (particularly the auditory one) and open the mind...
LP $23.95
09/01/2023
CD $13.85
09/29/2023
***After the pure magic and fire of the Into the Nightmare precursor demo tape, we're thrilled to bring you its full-scale successor and evolution: the unrivaled debut album by Chilean heavy metal cult SHADOWS. Packing in 30 minutes of legendary songwriting and visionary revivalism Out for Blood take us back to a time, somewhere in the early '80s, when acts like Mercyful Fate, Satan, Death SS, Judas Priest, and Alice Cooper were laying the unforgettable foundations of what would soon become a generational, industry-changing phenomenon: the defining of heavy metal as we know it. A raging and undying fire of searing leads, thundering drums, spooky operatic vocals, ripping guitars, unforgettable hooks and outrageous transgression. With no hesitation or limits to its deathless imagination, Shadows has conceived a classic metal crucible of unparalleled wizardry and dominance, using familiar concepts borrowed from dark b-movies, old comic strips, occultism and esotericism to take the listener down a dark, left-hand path of cinematic storytelling, thrilling fantasy, dark impulses and transgressive paranoia. The ten tracks of Out for Blood display a breadth of tricks and expertise rarely seen at such an accomplished level in contemporary NWOTHM and classic metal acts, and this should come as no surprise knowing that Shadows mastermind and main songwriter John Shades (a pseudonym of Cristian Silva of Apostasy fame), has been shaping the pillars of true and untamed underground South American heavy metal for at least three decades. Using a mist of dark, keyboard-laden atmospheres, vorticose melodies and a dominating,...
CD $13.75
08/25/2023
LP $25.50
06/30/2023
***Pure sonic annihilation reaches its pinnacle and inevitable sublimation on Disimperium's debut full-length album Grand Insurgence Upon Despotic Altars. As the debut 2021 7" Malefic Obliteration had already hinted at, human ears will fall prey yet again to an entity whose quest for total sensorial destruction has now reached implausible and horrific extremes, far beyond the confines of sanity which had already been obliterated on the inaugural release. In its nine tracks and thirty two minutes of pure concentrated terror, Grand Insurgence Upon Despotic Altars discharges an inescapable payload of death that impacts the listener with the force and speed of an apocalyptic shockwave escaping the fireball of a nuclear warhead. An onslaught of carpet bombing drums, bass, guitars and contorted vocals dissolving the lines between sanity and pure chaos establishes a permanent and incessant state of absolute armageddon, while a maelstrom of malefic atmospheres and apocalyptic darkness enshrouds the assault transforming the work into a weaponized, hallucinogenic, otherworldly burden of total terror. Where bands like Diocletian, Impetuous Ritual, Tetragrammacide, Knelt Rote and Damaar had already tested and established the limits of human resistance against abstract ideas of omnipotent negativity and horizonless sonic bedlam, Disimperium explore these outer limits even further, venturing out and establishing a new era into which there is no more measure to the very definition of musical insanity sought and achieved for the sole sake of aggression.
CD $12.00
08/25/2023
LP $22.25
09/15/2023
***NOW AVAILABLE ON CD!!! UK mechanized black metal futurists Decoherence reappear from the darkest unknown with Order, an imposing third full-length voidscape consecrating an unrivaled auditory vision into absolute darkness and emptiness. Humanity's microscopic existence and total insignificance within the paradigm or our vast reality and unknown creation, soundtracked using the medium of cold, synthetic, mechanical experimental black metal to infer a future reality, aeons away, in which unknowable technological advances will bridge unfathomable sidereal distances and quell humanity's longing for knowledge by placing us right in front of the mouth of oblivion, from which any return or escape will be impossible. Decaying at the event horizon, the awareness that our maniacal quest for knowledge was solely driven by an oppressive feeling of meaninglessness and fear in the shadow of the immensity and cruelty of the empty vast cosmos, will become more crushing than the infinite gravity itself. It is the premise itself, made of absolute insignificance and inevitable annihilation which makes the music of Decoherence so completely antihuman. A scenario of absolute hell lost between science, imagination, philosophy and total fear, merging different states, flaws and aspects of the human nature and mind, meticulously crafted from the surrealism of Blut Aus Nord and Ulcerate-derived avant-garde dissonant black and death metal, the grim, sidereal vastness of Darkspace, the industrial post-human bleakness of Godflesh and Brighter Death Now, and the ambiguous, experimental futurism of transformative 80's and 90's bands like Alchemist, Ved Buens Ende, Voivod and Killing Joke.
LP $21.95
07/28/2023
CD $12.25
09/01/2023
***We're proud to announce renewal of our near-ten year relationship with raw black power ambient ritualists Sutekh Hexen in announcing the band's colossal new 2xLP P:R:I:S:M, a full collaboration with Canadian nightmare-weaving enigma Funerary Call (aka field recording and experimental soundscaping artist Harlow MacFarlane), to be released this summer in collaboration with our good dearest frequent co-conspirators from Europe Cyclic Law. With P:R:I:S:M, magisterial sonic-alchemists Sutekh Hexen and Funerary Call join forces to deliver a fully collaborative album of eight highly experimental tracks. Throughout this octonary journey, concepts and unseen source energies are refined into spectrums of deeper consciousness. The resulting narrative guides the listener through a vastness of (dis)charging energies, rebirth through dissolution, and harrowing harmonic passages in tremendous spaces. Inner-workings suspend transformations in time. Pushing their respective boundaries, Sutekh Hexen and Funerary Call initiate the listener with the crystalline, static miasma of the album’s opener 'Meridian غ', only to enshroud them in the manifesting psychosis of 'Infernal Folly'. The churning mysticism of 'Perilous Shade' offers temporal sanctuary, and 'Toward the Eastern Gate' calls forth tectonic-prophecies as the album's centerpiece, tipping the scale into 'Fractal: Void'—a blistering disarmament in a storm of guitars, scathing electronics, and the disembodied calls we all anticipate and fear. 'Æscend Obsidia' tests the preceding tension and overwhelms in shimmering radiance before declaring release in 'Pangæa Ultima² (Dread)'. Closing with 'Shores of Purgatory', thresholds are breached anew with hectic guitar feedback, spectral synthesis and meditative melodic embellishments. Where the mirror blinds, the P:R:I:S:M offers vision—refractions...
2XLP $28.95
07/14/2023
***Italian death-doom titans Assumption return with "Hadean Tides", their colossal new full-length album and first new work of new material in four long long years. "Hadean Tides" sees the Italian quartet take their dismal experimental slow moving death metal formula into a realm of absolutely soul-disintegrating majesty, unfolding nearly an hour of abysmal downtuned crawling carnage immersed in contemplative dirges and mesmerizing ambience. Few underground extreme metal bands these days are capable of evoking such grandiose visions of aphotic dimensions and of shifted states of consciousness as Assumption can conjure through the hallucinatory immensity of their transformative death-doom. Yet, "Hadean Tides" sees the Italian band seemingly dwell on a plain of creative clairvoyance unto its own, once again shattering boundaries and exalting an endless stream of influences and boundless sonic exploration to reaffirm themselves as absolute prophets of this visionary death metal transcendence where cavernous gargantuan riffs and supernatural ambient soundscaping interweave each other and are trapped within an inextricable time dilation to form a monstrous aural hallucination adrift unto the abyss. The massive album displays an unseen plethora of chromatics and manifestations of self, adding keys, strings, choral chants and flutes to the absolute crush-depth to mutate effortlessly between the dismal bleakness of bands like Evoken or Esoteric, the comatose encrusted cavernous rot of death-doom legends like Winter or Disembowelment, and the enigmatic ambience abstractions of ethereal experimental bands like Dead Can Dance and Trial of the Bow. The band's masterful melding of styles and transformative approach to the...
2XLP $28.95
06/30/2023
***Lucifixion perpetrates black metal terror ever in obeisance to the trinity of his ever looming trident. Disgorged from the yawning maw of abject death, we sharpen our blades and burn in devotion and passion. The work is replete in maelstroms of raw hell, fangs bared at god. Possessed by the spirit of vaunted luminaries such as Katharsis, Armagedda, and Craft. Manic maelstroms of chaotic riffs frenetically assail, as the listener is forced into omnipresent lunacy by way of riffs scourging flesh from bone. This is black metal done the old way, with an attention to both composition and atmosphere, tempered with feral obeisance. Here layeth the hand that stirs to deeds of blood, the thorns that bleed the godhead. Rise and reveal!
LP $21.95
06/30/2023
***East Coast one-man psychedelic bestial death metal force Vile Ritual finally emerges from the bowels of hades with its skull-crushing debut full-length album, Caverns of Occultic Hatred. On the forty-minute, eight-track death-torn abomination, Vile Ritual merges the primeval violence of bands like Archgoat and Von with the technical and compositional unpredictability of progressive and atmospheric-leaning death metal bands like The Chasm, Timeghoul, Incantation, Infester and Demilich to conjure a mind-devouring hallucination of mutated, dark and occult death metal carnage. In a way not dissimilar to what we've seen done by bands like Antediluvian, Howls of Ebb, or Chaos Echoes, Vile Ritual's aim with Caverns of Occultic Hatred is that of prying the listener's mind open with violence, expanding it to the dissolution of consciousness and using alchemical, ritualistic and esoteric orchestrations to create a trance-like state that renders the listener trapped and disoriented into a hideous sonic delusion, to be bludgeoned mercilessly with the carnage of the barbaric blackened death metal that shapes the other half of its darkened, gruesome soul. A record shrouded in shapeshifting ambivalence, Caverns of Occultic Hatred is a horrific and disembodied descent into the madness and chaos of primeval impulses, insanity, and of the dissolution of reality via total sensorial and auditory annihilation.
LP $21.95
06/30/2023
CD $12.00
08/25/2023
***Mysterious Scottish dark doomed death metal behemoths Order of Decay emerge with their crushing debut album Mortification Rites, a blackened necrotic specter of omnipotent, atmospheric, slow-moving death. Humongous in its scope and vision, and inexorably annihilating, Mortification Rites sees the anonymous collective construct massive and enveloping visions of moribund decay, conjuring premonitions of total doom across a forty-six minute, eight-track death-devoured sonic abyss. The album's immense and lightless aura is brought forth by an onslaught of crushing and dissonant guitars enshrouding a monolithic, telluric rhythm section. Keyboard-laden soundscapes and necrotic vocal proclamations feed its imposing aura further, shaping a sonic beast of truly otherworldly traits. The work falls beautifully within the framework of the recognizable and iconic contemporary UK death-doom and dark death metal scene, following excellently in the footsteps of bands like Indesinence, Esoteric, Pantheïst, Grave Miasma and Cruciamentum, with its dismal atmospherics and oppressive onslaughts of dark, dissonant crushing, yet melodic guitar work. But Mortification Rites also brings a whole new breadth of darkness and destruction to the platter, often branching out into the same realms of infernal sonic maelstrom we've seen from Finnish dark death metal acts like Desolate Shrine, Maveth and particularly Krypts, to bring forth its own vision of absolute, abyssal death metal bedlam.
LP $21.95
06/30/2023
CD $12.00
08/25/2023
***The Sky Burial, the ancient Himalayan ritual burial dating back to centuries of the Tibetan Buddhism tradition of taking the bodies of the deceased amongst the highest peaks to be dismembered and consumed at sacred burial grounds by vultures and other scavenging animals, and then dissolved by the high altitude elements, or as the tradition states, to be returned to the sky. What may seem a brutal or savage practice to western eyes in reality is a revered and elitarian burial in ancient Himalayan culture, and this concept borrowed by Portuguese black metal nekromancers Concilium for their immense third offering "Sky Bvrial" has laid the foundations for an absolute beast of an album and for one of the most otherworldly and death-scarred extreme metal releases of the year. Truly immense in its scope and vision, just like the death ritual it recounts and evokes, "Sky Bvrial" channels the omnipotence and darkness of death through a majestic lens of transcendence, ritualism and contemplative reverence toward the power of nature and of the immortality of ancient lore. The nauseating stench of death emanates from every knit and fabric of this beastly record, as the black flame of highly atmospehric sepulchral black metal bands like Demoncy, Teitanblood, and Beherit is re-ignited to conjure visions of a churning, monstrous vortex of rotting dismembered flesh levitating towards heaven, and taken skyward to be returned to the afterlife by massive carnivorous scavenging birds. A truly unparalleled and moving listening experience conjured through seven primeval slabs of...
CD $13.75
06/23/2023
LP $21.95
06/23/2023
***Vacuous' monstrous debut mini-album Katabasis sees a vinyl reissue via Sentient Ruin after its limited first pressing sold out shortly after its original 2021 release. With this release the London, UK-based death horde refined its dismal and pulverizing dark death metal sound, using influences from bands like Incantation, Immolation, and Autopsy to forge an unseen weapon of sonic terror. Katabasis immediately established Vacuous as a rising unholy force in UK underground extreme metal, securing the band a cult following in their home country and eventually a debut full-length release deal via Dark Descent Records and Me Saco Un Ojo.
LP $21.95
06/02/2023
***Seoul-based South Korean sludge metal miserists Gawthrop join Sentient Ruin for Deterioration, a glorious torment and misery-fucked 12" vinyl compilation of the band's first two incredible demo tapes (2019's Demo and 2022's Jumbo). A wretched amplifier worshipping monstrosity of complete antihuman heaviness, the glorious release channels the hate-drenched and bottom-caving megaton DOOM of legends like Corrupted, Meth Drinker, Nootgrush, Grief and Thorr's Hammer into six colossal slabs of pure earth-shaking, downtuned slow-crawling sonic torment that will stomp, crush and flatten the listener to death.
LP $21.25
05/26/2023
***German/Italian cave-dwelling sepulchral blackened death-doom primitives Nekus (formed by current and past members of Putridarium, Into Coffin, Hadit, Omnivore, and Bestial Warfare, among others) emerge with their hideous debut 2LP Sepulchral Divination, over fifty minutes of aphotic, downtuned subsonic horror emanating from the wretched bowels of the abyss. Comparable in sheer ugliness and inhumanity to other slowed down sepulchral death and doom metal abominations like Grave Upheaval, Moss, Anatomia, and Encoffination, Nekus are conjurors of a lightless subterranean realm somewhere between the pits of hell and the center of the earth where existence may assume horrific forms and where life as we know it is impossible. Indeed this monstrous, fifty-plus minute crawling nightmare of horrid, telluric mummified death doom is not something of the plane of being or of surface-dwelling, air-breathing and light-needing existence. Rather, a decomposing, lightless, sinkhole of putrefied sonic emanations opening an abyss unto the dimensions below the earth's crust, where eons of putrefaction, fossilization, gravitational crush depth and infernal magmatic upheaval perpetually beholds the inaccessible omnipotence of death and inexorably calls all surface life to it.
LP2XLP $27.95
05/12/2023
CD $12.25
06/23/2023
***Lima, Peru-based deranged raw black metal cult Vulvanic join Sentient Ruin under the black banner of total violence and depravity to bring you a much-needed reissue of their two long sold out self-released demo tapes, 2019's ブラックエンジェルの色合い ("Scent of Black Angel), and 秘密の夜の殺人者 ("Ripper's Secret Night of Murder") remastered from the raw mixes by Will Killingswroth at Dead Air Studios, and graphically re-envisioned by the Violent Visual Shock art studio into a horrific forty-minute LP compilation of violent, sadistic sonic abandon. Formed by current and former members of Evil Spectrum, Tenebrion, Sordid, Obscure Evil, and Purgatorio, and infamous in their home country for erratic and unpredictable live shows entailing violence, butchered animals, sadism and self-harm, the rogue blood horde known as Vulvanic are creators of a demented and diseased form of schizoid raw black metal infested with punk, noise, and derailing psychedelia, the depravity and repulsiveness of which has few comparisons even in the darkest and most tabu dungeons of the underground. Utterly deranged and horrifically disfigured, Vulvanic's music is even difficult to parce in its incomprehensible deformity, rising from a death-scarred dungeon and delivering hallucinatory and stomach churning visions of violence, squalor, sadism and depravity at a level unthinkable for any barely held together mind. Their crippled and spastic audio-visual syncretism unites various deviancies from around the globe, particularly in the evident hardcore and raw punk aspect predominant in their music and reminiscent of transgressive cults from Japan like G.I.S.M., Zouo, G.A.T.E.S. and Zeni Geva, and inevitably also...
LP $21.95
04/28/2023
***A concept of ultimate finality doused in cosmological inevitability. A sound of world-building/destroying immensity shrouded in otherworldly dissonance and suffocating atmospherics. Visions of eons ahead, evoking the ultimate fate of matter and as such of existence. All this is the Abyssgazer, the immense debut album by Italian atmospheric post-death/doom metal oracle APHOTIC. The four piece from northern Italy which features current and past members of bands like FUOCO FATUO, BLASHPHEMER and EKPYROSIS, has set out to create the ultimate extreme metal clairvoyance into the death of our universe, through an audio, visual and conceptual experience of unparalleled evocative power.
CD $13.75
04/14/2023
LP $21.95
06/23/2023
***The blood-freezing second full-length album from Swedish black/death industrial beast V:XII (pronounced and read "Five Twelve") adds a new urgency and dimension to the infamous underworld of Scandinavian evil martial dark ambient/industrial made famous by the legendary legacy of Cold Meat Industry and affiliated acts like Brighter Death Now, Mz.412, etc., and later, by its contemporary bastions like Nordvarg and Trepaneringsritualen. The crushing new opus titled Lu-Cipher-Sabbatean is a grueling listening experience that for thirty six minutes imposes complete submission upon the listener, drawing them into a wretched realm of majestic, deconstructed electronics and into an infernal dimension of utter darkness and dread. Perverse, violent and hallucinatory in its every aspect, Lu-Cipher-Sabbatean conjures a lightless abyss of paranoia and ritualized insanity, as it unfolds an ominous concept on the conspiratorial mind devolved into to its worst and most deteriorated form, the religious one. A sense of grim solemnity transpires from the album's ritualistic and almost liturgic pace, evoking a seething feeling of absolute evil as widescreen moments of abysmal dark ambience are violently lacerated by violent, spasmodic proclamations and by an onslaught of cold, bludgeoning martial rhythms and disembodied incantations.
LP $21.95
04/14/2023
CD $13.75
06/23/2023
***Brazilian US-based doomed death metal duo Negative Vortex rise from the depths of torment with their long awaited debut album "Tomb Absolute", a fifty four-minute, nine-song double LP of absolute, towering atmospheric death metal oblivion. Years in the making, meticulously produced, and assembled from sheer pain and perfectionism, "Tomb Absolute" is a colossal slab of grim and hopeless death metal evoking bleak and pessimistic visions of a doomed future to come, and stirring with bitter reflections about mental illnesses, society's role in human failure, dysfunctions of the mind and spiritual hopelessness. Musically the album takes its life force and inspiration from the glory and timelessness of 80's and 90's death and doom metal (Cathedral, Nihilist, Autopsy, Celtic Frost), wielding a death-bearing payload of intense, monolithic, gut wrenching death metal riffs alternated by ultra-depressing slow-paced doom sections to conjure an ultimate monolith erected to complete death, pain and suffering. The album's imposing and pessimistic aura is further enhanced by a dense and a multi-layered production, lengthly and trance-like compositions that drag the listener into a labyrinthine realm of utter darkness and despair, and synth-laden ambient dirges and spoken word passages that exalt the album's lightless depths and monstrous atmospheres. Completing and further adorning the massive hellscape are also illustrious guest appearances from veterans of the scene like Nick Holmes (Paradise lost / Bloodbath), Kam Lee (Massacre), Moyses Koslene (Krisiun), Leon del Muerte (Impaled / Terrorizer L.A.), Vik (Whipstriker), and Caleb Bingham (Athanasia), providing additional guitars leads and vocal contributions.
CD $13.75
03/03/2023
2XLP $28.95
04/14/2023
***Thirty six minutes of mutant death metal armageddon to disintegrate the fabric of reality. At last, Spanish hallucinatory death metal abomination Pestilength issue their critically acclaimed 2022 sophomore album "Basom Gryphos" on vinyl. Across it's synapse-obliterating eight songs "Basom Gryphos" unfolds an infernal fractal of muted death metal forged from the same aberrant antimatter that birthed defining works by Morbid Angel (early tucker-era particularly) and Immolation, revealing a shapeshifting, suffocating sonic hallucination conceived at the outer limits of death metal as we know it. The disfiguring dissonant black metal touches and disorienting atmospheres transposed from the band's origins persist in their framework, further exalting the band's deliriant penchant for total extreme metal surrealism, while the cryptic allomorphic symbolism and inverted anti-language that permeates the lyrics and song titles complete an alien extreme metal crucible of truly mind-altering enormity.
LP $18.50
03/03/2023
***After the glorious Wormboiler cassette tape compilation obliterated human ears in 2021, American one-man black industrial weapon Uranium finally emerges from the depths of oblivion with its debut full-length album An Exacting Punishment, a five-track, forty-minute radioactive nightmare of complete sonic ruin channelling the darkness of black metal with the scathing immensity of defining post-industrial acts like Brighter Death Now, Godflesh, Wolf Eyes, Swans, MZ. 412, Controlled Bleeding, and Genocide Organ. As the band's name aptly hints at, Uranium was conceived as an aural vessel to explore the outer limits and the most irreversible states of complete human disintegration, and the incineration of its most defining and triumphant achievements; namely society, progress, technology, and civilization, with nuclear power being the conduit and ultimate engine of the greatest and most horrific forms of total annihilation mankind could ever face. Auditory terror both permeates and defines Uranium's music, with bludgeoning and majestic post-industrial soundscapes pulsing inside a lightless void lit only by drifting embers and falling ash, while immense infernal atmospherics wrap their deathly spires around the listener, crushing them into a distorted auditory abyss. Power electronics, industrial noise and black metal have rarely before been seen chained together and weaponized into such a mortal design. An authentic weapon of mass annihilation engineered to face human life with absolute death. A death-scarred reality that emerges from the utter bleakness and ruination of Uranium's apocalyptic design, as the listener is cast at the center of a caustic nuclear nightmare where flesh boils and...
LP $21.25
01/20/2023
***Triumphant vinyl compilation of obfuscating bestial death metal savagery. As the title unmistakably hints at, Infinite Visions of Violence & 2018 Demo unites ALTAR OF GORE's skull-crushing 2018 debut demo and the equally putrescent 2022 follow up Infinite Visions of Violence demo into a single vinyl release remastered for the purpose by WILL KILLINGSWORTH at Dead Air Studios. With this release these animalistic tracks find their first ever presentation on the wax format and sublimate into their final form to testify the gruesome majesty and horrific violence of one of America's most barbaric underground death metal acts. Conceived and executed entirely by ACOLYTE OF THE FOUL ONES, Altar of Gore is the latest weapon of death metal carnage to have emerged from the festering and sprawling New Jersey extreme metal underground along with bands like Blasphematory, Death Fortress, Siege Column and Massive Retaliation, among others, all of which have also seen Acolyte serve in their ranks in one form or another at some point.
LP $21.25
01/20/2023
***Dutch experimental raw death metal absurdity Cryptae return with their second full-length deformity, Capsule, their most aberrant, delirious and labyrinthine (master)piece of anti-music yet. Conceived through a deconstructed and radicalized approach of "less is more", this new chapter of conceptualized insanity sees the deranged duo of drummer/vocalist Rene Aquarius and guitarist/bassist Kees Peerdeman starve and disassemble death metal from within, as they explore a cryptic concept revolving around marine life and its abysses teeming with absurd and marvelous life forms. The staple high contrast minimalist/maximalist experimental approach of Cryptae in deteriorating the familiar fabric of death metal and finding new and insane ways to dismount and reassemble the genre through delirious aural experiments, this time reaches truly extraordinary and implausible new dimensions of the absurd. Entire strings of death metal's DNA are removed and replaced with components from other genres in a deranged and playful act of stylistic disfiguration, yielding deformities unending and essentially crippling the genre into an incomprehensible, skeletal mutation. A violently malformed and enigmatic abstraction arises from this delusion, through the forced abortion and abolition of all musical canons and decency, triggering a marvelous rebirth through conceptual annihilation and spasmodic nonconformity which is set to challenge and destabilize our perception of extreme metal at the deepest levels. A glitched and distorted sonic fractal of demented improvisation drives Cryptae's crippled and deconstructed raw death metal experiment, as primitive raw (post)-punk, repetitive and bludgeoning industrial, schizoid no-wave, and jazz-derived free-form backward moving meters and compositional oddities all do their...
CD $14.00
12/09/2022
LP $23.50
11/10/2023
***Mysterious Norwegian death metal cult Impugner reissue their debut mini-album Advent of the Wretched worldwide (with new art and master) on CD via Sentient Ruin and on cassette tape via Caligari Records, after a limited self release tape had surfaced in Norway via the band back in 2021. "Advent of the Wretched" brings us back to the early and formative years of death metal when bands like Autopsy, Death, Pungent Stench, Nihilist, and Darkthrone in their Soulside Journey era were issuing their first works and laying the groundwork for what would become the perfect symbiosis between the gruesome morbidity and the executional excellence which has made death metal so loved and revered thereafter throughout the decades. In the same manner, and with a strong emphasis on traditionalism and timelessness, on this already iconic debut offering Impugner unfold a masterful slab of arcane-sounding death metal oozing with schizoid atmospheres, a putrid production quality and a demented prog-derived songwriting highly reminiscent of Morbus Chron, Obliteration, or of the founding masters mentioned above. The choice of using art for the work licensed from the Edvard Munch estate in Norway is just another sign of this band's insanely tasteful vision and of its deliberate approach in crafting the death metal art which favors a sense of timelessness, unpredictability and a strict adherence to its primordial strengths and vision of it being, and remaining, a timeless art of the absurd.
CD $14.00
11/04/2022
***Death metal meets its future self. When almost everything has been said and done, contamination becomes the only escape, as new ways to interpret and reinvent the wheel must be found to keep setting the mind free and the genre moving forward, including creating clever and transformative crossover syncretisms with other styles and genres than can open the eye of terror along with new gateways to a higher dimension of chaos. And this is how Brazil's mysterious experimental death metal deconstructors ANTIMONUMENT have approached their cryptic and bludgeoning craft: infusing it with all kinds of foreign (but adjacent) audial excoriations, including industrial noise, hardcore punk, cryptic no-wave and scathing power electronics, to render their experimental dark extreme metal a futuristic and multidimensional sonic warhead. Imagine a mix of Blasphemy, Carcass, Incantation, Khanate, Swans, Crucifix, Void, Godflesh and Controlled Bleeding, and you will be closer, yet still not completely within, the mutated experimental realm of devastation conceived by the Brazilian cult. And it doesn't end there. As an art studio/collective creating audio-visual experiences encompassing sound, visuals and video, Antimonument is more than just as a band, rather an explorative sensorial weapon of self determination. In this sense the Brazilian collective can be seen as an extreme metal counter-shade to the flourishing Brazilian experimental underground vanguard that in recent years has nurtured defiant bands like Test, Papangu, Deaf Kids etc. who've turned grindcore and hardcore inside out. It was only a matter of time before grim and abysmal black/death metal would receive...
LP $21.25
11/04/2022
***Industrial black metal/noise/grind nightmare Vessel of Iniquity is back with its third official full-length album, a rogue abomination set to blow yet another smoldering wound into the fabric of consciousness via unconceivable deconstructions of reality and through a deviant approach to music creation aimed at harnessing absolute terror and mimicking the final stages of sanity. Introducing eight-string guitars for the first time ever, on The Path Unseen sole mastermind A. White has made a stylistic and sonic shift aimed at rendering his beast an even more lethal and oppressive force than ever before. The switch to eight strings has given the project abyss-like traits, as a death-bearing payload of low end frequencies and bottom end crush-depth of near-inescapable traits is added into the mix rendering the project essentially irreversibly damaging. The unrelenting outreach and research for the most weaponized and exaggerated forms of aural annihilation conceivable are now ever so evident in the project as Vessel of Iniquity morphs once again, release after release, seeking new ways to dissolve reality and suck the life out of its surroundings with black hole-like constructs of inescapable and all-devouring terror, which also showcase with unmistakeable evidence the fiercely experimental and constantly evolving nature of the project. Aside from the outlandish experiments in inconceivable fretwork annihilation, the catastrophic work is completed by its staple assault of carpet bombing drum machines, tectonic noise constructs and monstrous industrial abstractions that all play their unforgiving role in assembling this obliterating sonic nightmare of the underground which is...
CD $14.00
10/07/2022
LP $22.95
10/07/2022
***Hate Propaganda's far too overlooked 2019 debut MLP World War 666 sees a much needed reissue on vinyl, remastered and enhanced by brand new artwork commissioned for the purpose by Xerox master P. Van Trigt. When it was first released on cassette tape back in 2019 by War Arts Productions, this war-torn debut offering of primeval warnoise by the mysterious Portuguese war criminals stood out immediately as a crown jewel debut for the genre and as one one of the year's most definitive and underrated manifestations of extreme metal's most hateful and berserk fringe. Packing in nineteen minutes of absolute hatred, the annihilating MLP manifests as a nightmare hallucination of complete violence and negativity, evoking eons of perennial apocalyptic global planetary war and terror on the wings of its nefarious design of achieving maximum annihilation in the shortest amount of time possible. To harness this bleak pantheon of ruin, the Portuguese conquerors have assembled a weaponized and uncontrolled sonic chain reaction where grindcore, black metal, death metal and hardcore punk are all accelerated and instigated into an inescapable payload of death aimed straight at the vital sinews of humanity. A sonic maelstrom churned into shape by an onslaught of obscure violent riffs, psychotic leads and ominous laughter which, parallel to a pulverizing drum performance, emanates from oblivion with an antediluvian, negative aura.
10" $21.35
09/23/2022
***Chile-born and now Germany-based scourging black metal plague Vel'Har joins Sentient Ruin for a much awaited and long anticipated vinyl release of its 2020 light-consuming debut MLP Letanía I. On the wretched offering cryptic mastermind H.S.V.H. unfolds two monstrous black metal blades adorned by three interludes to invoke an unholy sonic siege upon the ridicule of life and the purity of christendom. Baptized under the pentagram and spewn from the unholy jaws of oblivion, these five tracks sprawl and hiss like a horrifying morass of snakes, consuming reality and devouring everything in the wake of a monstrous tide of venom. The rawness and violence of these riffs is evident, but so is the ritualistic and esoteric majesty emanating from its death-scarred aura; an infernal force summoned as a liturgy or rite of passage toward a higher meaning and other form of existence. And that form is Satan's triumph, the zenith toward which every moving part of this wretched crucible converges. His glory as beacon and conduit of pestilent krafts conceived with the malefic design of insulting life and transporting the listener deep inside twisted and inverted dimensions of infinite dissolution and complete insanity.
10" $21.35
09/23/2022
***After three highly praised 7-inch EPs, RIGOROUS INSTITUTION rises from the shadowy dripping streets of Portland, OR to deliver us their first full length album. Full of scathing vocals with smart, bleak lyrics (that border on poetry at times), axe grinding riffs, driving, dirty bass lines, hypnotic percussion, atmospheric synthesizer and a sense of droning paranoia scattered throughout its entirety. Yes, this is what one could call crust, but it feels too easy to use that word. These weirdos veer into seldom ventured territories that go from ripping to horrific soundscapes that make one's skin crawl as much as their fists pump. Picture John Carpenter joining forces with Amebix in 1982 and it will give you an idea of what this epic 12” will bring. This might just be the perfect soundtrack for the current state of the world.
CD $14.00
09/23/2022
***"Back after just a few years with a third album of arcane evil speed-metallic riffcraft, there is no questioning the apex of inspiration is still riding high beyond classic Chilean thrash metal band Apostasy‘s return back in 2013. Driven by their own fiercely traditional conviction from the start the banners of this classic Valparaíso-borne forever underground entity still fly by a strong willed and highest standard. If we can consider their previous full-length, ‘The Sign of Darkness’, the band making good on their promised return with blazing and uncompromising evil thrash then we can view ‘Death Return‘ as further solidification of their legacy featuring prime works beyond 2018. The mid-to-late eighties are still in sight as these new pieces generally veer towards brutal South American thrash of that era but, this time around they’ve made some room for nostalgia including a few remade classics from ‘Sunset of the End’ as well as the strongest tracks from EP and demo releases during the interim. The greater effect is a summary of this dark-souled thrash entity’s past and present self framed as one experience, a sustained continuum of steadfast ideals."—Grizzly Butts
LP $22.95
09/23/2022
***One of the earliest and first experimental/ambient projects to join the ranks of Sentient Ruin and turn it into the multi-headed abomination we strive to be(come), Italian black ambient/death industrial demon CLAVICVLA is back with its most perverse and deranged work yet, once again in proud partnership with illustrious French ambient/industrial colleagues Cyclic Law. From the artwork to the titles and themes, the intent of new full-length offering Degeneracy of the 5th Density is clear: worshiping and glorifying perversions, deviancy and immorality in their every form and shape. With these nefarious intents sole mastermind ITTIEL has orchestrated the rise of this third aural plague of his around a creeping miasma of monstrous sepulchral ambience reeking from the ruptured bowels of oblivion, unfolding a forty-five minute sonic nightmare of absolutely omnipotent repulsiveness. Corroding reality like a biblical plague, Ittiel has invoked these eight tracks of nefarious black ambient bedlam from a putrid death-scarred fog begotten of hell, conceptualizing its inverted spawn with blood freezing synthesis and a regurgitation of deconstructed soundscapes and wretched utterings hissing blasphemies from beyond the mortal plane. Dark ambient, black industrial, ritual drone, noise and subsonic horrors of all kinds are distilled by the demiurge into a sonic morass of total suffering and terror, and ritualized into a soundtrack to every broken soul's most hidden, vile and foul impulses.
LP $19.50
08/12/2022
***Portland, OR-based bestial esoteric black/death metal sorcerers Diabolic Oath are back with another annihilating chapter in their unrelenting conquest of the outer limits of total sonic bedlam. This time the experimental extreme metal trio return with the Aischrolatreia MLP, a prelude to their forthcoming sophomore full-length album which offers another glimpse into the band's unique and hallucinatory formula of barbaric occult war metal and unconventional fretless instrumentation and composition. The twenty-four minute, five-song esoteric weapon of mass annihilation delivers a churning and abysmal onslaught of warped, tectonic hallucinations, with the band designing seemingly impossible and highly cerebral trajectories with their respective instruments while the load of death emanating from these plague-ridden conjurations crushes the listener down with merciless abandon into complete aural carnage. With Aischrolatreia Diabolic Oath have proven once again of being one of the most transformative and unconventional forces in extreme metal, with their undisputed talents as virtuosic musicians being lent with staggering vision and imagination to one of the most animalistic and inhuman manifestations of extreme metal being forged today.
CD $14.00
08/12/2022
LP $22.95
09/23/2022
***After a long silence New Zealand bestial death metal horde EXALTATION finally unveil their first proper full-length offering, Under Blind Reasoning, after a demo tape had surfaced back in 2017 amongst generalized obscurity. Indeed what we find on this debut offering is something distant from the lo-fi quality of the promising but under-produced demo, and sees the band tap instead into a realm of vehemence and aural destruction of unseen magnitude and terror. Feral, enveloping, monumental and sprawling in its unrelenting wrath, Under Blind Reasoning sees the obscure New Zealand death-bringers whip the sum of their influences (Immolation, Morbid Angel, Incantation, Deicide, Blasphemy) into a coercive realm of shelshocking torment and rise from the depths of obscurity like a cataclysmic weapon of mass-destruction. The album's dense and multidimensional recording quality has yielded a death metal beast of truly unsettling proportions. Every instrument and the utter violence with which it is wielded appears on full display, as the listener is helplessly left annihilated, blow after to blow, to witness the band's tight, savage and merciless performance and technical proficiency literally maul down the fabric of reality piece by piece.
CD $14.00
08/12/2022
LP $21.35
08/12/2022
***Greek black/death metal legion Anticreation emerge from the abysses of hell with their colossal debut album From the Dust of Embers, a thirty-four minute aural declaration of war toward the insignificance of all terrain things. Monstrous walls of low end dissonance churn and fume like sprawling hellfires, while dark ambient and ritualistic debris metastasizes around the telluric instrumental sections creating a grandiose and enveloping hellscape shrouded in darkness and death. No newcomers to their scene, the cryptic duo of Necro and Noctus who form the core of Anticreation have been sailing the black seas of Greece's most uncompromising underground for literal decades, with Necro in particular having spent the last twenty years forging hellbent steel in such miscreant greek black metal entities as Burial hordes, Enshadowed, and Merciless Crucifixion, among others. Anticreation is a vessel unto fusing Necro's and Noctus' long running expertise in black metal and the duo's interest and fascination in the bleakest and most otherworldly forms of dark death metal, namely that one conceived in various waves by bastions of the genre like Immolation, Portal, Pseudogod and Teitanblood, resulting in their debut offering From the Dust of Embers, an imposing dark death metal beast levitating with an immense aura of complete ruin and inevitability.
CD $14.00
07/22/2022
LP $22.95
09/23/2022