Like its namesake, Nile is never still. The Underworld Awaits Us All — the forthcoming 10th album from the South Carolina death metal institution, out August 23 via Napalm Records — is another new phase for the band. Like the preceding nine entries in the Nile discography, it’s a unique offering that sets itself apart from its siblings. Indeed, no album from the group led by Karl Sanders, Nile’s lone constant and driving force, sounds the same, and that trend of artistic renovation continues on this 11-track outing. With the proven regularity of the sun rising, the band has once again taken what it learned from previous releases and poured that hard-won experience into a sturdy foundation to help it renovate and rebuild. And yet, despite its freshness, The Underworld Awaits Us All is undeniably a Nile album, burnished with the band’s unmistakable characteristics that make it instantly recognizable. The Egyptology and ancient histories are there. The riffs are there. The blazing tempos and bone-crunching slowdowns are there. In a scene where most bands are content to continually limbo the baseline, that’s a feat of death metal ingenuity that has only gotten more impressive since Nile released its debut demo in 1994.

And so, here we are 30 years later, able to delight in sure-to-be live staples like the incredibly titled “Chapter For Not Being Hung Upside Down On A Stake In The Underworld And Made To Eat Feces By The Four Apes.” But Nile isn’t releasing perfunctory tracks to tour behind. No, from the title down to the tones, this song is death metal for people who love death metal. And after receiving a transfusion of new blood after picking up bassist Dan Vadim Von and guitarist/vocalist Zach Jeter, “Four Apes” proves Nile can still rev way past the redline. Drummer George Kollias’ sound-barrier-breaking performance alone will keep drummer YouTube busy for a few years. In a way, that inhuman speed paired with laser-guided precision echoes the band’s past penchant for tech workouts. Again, part of Nile’s DNA is the sum of its catalog. So, “Four Apes” is fun like 2015’s What Should Not Be Unearthed and has the dynamic, gleaming, serrated steel sound design of 2019’s Vile Nilotic Rites. That said, the other part of Nile’s DNA, the part obsessed with reinvention, is on full display.

That commitment to regeneration only gets clearer the deeper one wades into The Underworld Awaits Us All. The absolutely smoking “Doctrine Of Last Things” kicks off an ass-kicking stretch of quintessential slo-mo Nile riffs stacked in a novel way. Guitarists Sanders, Jeter, and Brian Kingsland get nasty with it, reminding listeners why so many would-be technical doomers have cited the band as bedrock. It’s that good stuff, the greasy, stank-face-inciting gnarliness that Sanders and company can bring to the table. But like a river’s rapids, those riffs are never stagnant. After all, Nile is never still. It flows forward.

Karl Sanders and I met over Zoom to discuss The Underworld Awaits Us All and his lyric-writing process. Most importantly, though, I made Sanders, an astute, worldly, and well-read person, rank all the animals mentioned in Nile’s discography based on how dangerous they would be if encountered in ancient Egypt. Seriously. This is a thing I asked him to do. And they somehow let me keep writing here.

So the new album, The Underworld Awaits Us All. While listening to it over the weekend, I noticed this really interesting split: Two-thirds of the album is pell-mell burners, and the final third is crushing slower stuff. It’s like a blitzkrieg to start and then a siege to finish. What was the impetus for having the record cleave that way?

I think death metal records are supposed to bludgeon first, entertain second. If you put the thoughtful, more involved, slower things up at the front of the record, people go, “Oh, this isn’t brutal. It’s not mean enough. What happened to them? They’ve turned into posers.”

When did that strategy come into play? Is that something Nile has utilized on every album?

I really noticed it on Ithyphallic. The first track on Ithyphallic, “What May Be Safely Written,” is a big, long, epic beast of a song, but it’s not necessarily an immediate song. It’s not like you put it on and it goes bang. “Wow, we’re off to a great start.” It was a weird, Cthulhu, chthonic start. I noticed the reactions to that song really colored how people saw that record. The production was also not what it could have been, but that’s a different story. I think some people got lost because we didn’t put the hard-hitting, to-the-point songs up front. Now I’m like, lesson learned. Let’s hit people over the head first, then take them somewhere else.

I think every Nile album since then has been a good way to introduce new listeners to the band because they have that flow, that intricate sequencing, that helps the album unfurl over time. They’re like grand epics, Lawrence Of Arabia, or something — you travel places within them.

The record’s sequencing matters for how listeners enjoy it. It’s important, and it should be cared about.

Regarding the way it was split, was there any thought about how Underworld would play out on vinyl?

Dude, you’re asking million-dollar questions. Yes, dude. There were two weeks of back-and-forth arguing between everybody involved in making this record. If it’s a double vinyl album, how would that be split? How would that be sequenced? That went round and round for a while until we found the solution.

I think sequencing records is a lost art now in the digital era. In the ’70s, you’d have these Isley Brothers records: side A is a party record, and if you’re not making out with someone by side B, you fucked up.

Dude, I love that you know the Isley Brothers.

When I was a teenager, you’d gather at your friend’s house, put on the vinyl, get high, and stare at the album cover for a while. The way tracks were ordered on side A and then side B really fucking mattered because side B was always where it went somewhere else.

The reason I wanted to get on the horn with you today is to dive into Nile’s lyrics. I think they’re one of the band’s strongest elements.

In a 2023 interview with Metal Crypt, you said, “Of course, every single song that gets written has quite a bit of time spent finding the ideas then taking those ideas to new places. It’s not enough to research it. I think it’s important to also have something to say. If you look back at many Nile records, it’s evident that we’re not just spouting history. We have our own viewpoints and ideas that we’re communicating through the medium of historical fiction.” Couple questions about this:

First, what’s a specific example on The Underworld Awaits Us All of communicating an idea through historical fiction?

“Stelae Of Vultures.” It’s kind of like personal anger management. What happened when Eannatum slaughtered the Ummites mercilessly and reveled in the carnage? Why on Earth was he so over the top with the way he slaughtered these people and fed them to the vultures? Why did he bask in the carnage and brutality of it? Well, nobody ever makes the connection that, early on in the battle, he got shot in the eye with a motherfucking arrow. So when I read that, I envisioned it like, OK, if Samuel L. Jackson got shot in the eye with an arrow, how would that play out? If you had Samuel L. Jackson playing King Eannatum in the movie, he would go, “Motherfucker, you shot me in the motherfucking eye.” It would be some over-the-top brutality. I think it’s as simple as getting shot in the eye with an arrow has got to hurt. It has got to be day-ruiner. I bet the concept of mercy and humanity just goes right out the fucking window.

It’s a good parable for the human condition. It’s not just an eye for an eye. It’s like an eye and then an escalation for more and more to appease an insatiable but self-destructive blood lust.

My second question is, what I find engaging about this approach is that these songs aren’t straight dispatches from the past but are more in the vein of, say, a Homeric poem or how myths and legends found their way into Herodotus’ histories. Additionally, in some songs, there’s this sense of the Lovecraftian supernatural. How does the lyric-writing process take shape? Is it just finding some interesting historical tidbit and spinning a good yarn from there?

My process is simple. [miming a routine] OK. It’s time to write a song. I’ll go to the bookshelf. I’ll pick a book at random. This one is one of my copies of The Book Of The Dead. I’ll close my eyes. [flips pages] I’ll open my eyes and see what’s there.

Now, most of the time, this is a stupid way to write songs because you’ll open the book to a random page, and there’s nothing there that will make a metal song. But one out of every dozen times you do this, you open to something and go, How is that not a metal song?

Here’s what happened for “Chapter For Not Being Hung Upside Down On A Stake In The Underworld And Made To Eat Feces By The Four Apes.” I opened The Book Of The Dead to Chapter 181. It was the chapter for not being hung upside down and made to eat feces. So I saw that, and I went, How is this not a fucking metal song? And then I take whatever the book gives me, which sometimes is preposterously thin, and turn it into a full metal song. That usually means I have to go pick up some other books. But instead of the universe’s randomness guiding me, now I’m hunting for stuff to bring this idea to fruition.

I was going to ask you this later, but is that why you trend towards books like From Fetish To God In Ancient Egypt by E. A. Wallis Budge?

You know about that book? Wow. I love that book.

As a source, is it easier to work with something that already leans towards the fabulistic?

Yes, absolutely. Once you’ve already got one foot in that mud puddle, it’s easier to splash around in that mud puddle. That’s why I really liked the Old Kingdom, the pre-dynastic era, because it’s not as well defined. There’s less that’s actually known about that period. So, correspondingly, there’s more artistic license to go all death metal with it. We’re not presenting a balanced perspective of ancient history. We’re writing death metal songs. It’s two different things. It’s not a historical preservation society where we carefully preserve the pottery of 4,000 years ago. We’re writing death metal songs. We’re digging up the obscure and the misunderstood and making it more misunderstood.

I like that a lot.

So, the other reason I’m bugging you today is I went through the entire Nile discography searching for specific instances of animals being mentioned and tallying the results. For example, “Worship The Animal,” while being about worshipping the animal, doesn’t mention any specific animals, so that song is out. I also didn’t count any classes, such as reptiles, or instances where an animal was invoked to describe characteristics — “dog-faced man” — or were obvious allusions to gods — “the hawk-headed lord.” I’ve included some exceptions because they’ll make for good conversation. Otherwise, I’ve ordered these animals according to the frequency with which they appear in your lyrics.

I’d like to discuss the themes behind these animals and then have you rank each animal based on how dangerous you think they might be if you encountered them in ancient Egypt.

[laughs] OK.

Dogs

Number of times mentioned in discography: 8
Sample lyric: “I mix the dung of a dog/ Foul canine excrement/ With barley flour/ Smear it on your shoulders/ Cast it from you/ And feed it unto you,” from “Hittite Dung Incantation” off of 2009’s Those Whom the Gods Detest

Dogs are number one. It’s also the first animal you mentioned on the 1994 demo: “The dogs of war will gnaw my bones.” Were you expecting dogs to be your most frequently mentioned animal?

No, this is quite enlightening. I’ve never done a count. I’m really paying attention to wherever you go with this.

Why do you think dogs have made such a good lyrical touchstone for Nile?

Well, I like dogs, and it’s a really good phonetic word. Dogs! It has some bite to it, and I’m not making a pun.

Dogs are our friends, but dogs will also eat you as soon as you’re dead. They will bite you. The people next door to me, they’re pit bull abusers. I don’t call them pit bull owners, they’re pit bull abusers. They really neglected those dogs their whole life. So every time I take out my trash or go to the mailbox, this poor pit bull wants to get over that fence so bad to fucking get at me. I feel bad for him, but I also feel like, Wait a minute, as soon as motherfucker gets over that fence, I am fighting for my fucking life.

It’s a good analogy for the duality of man, too. That’s probably why we see so much of ourselves in dogs, to begin with.

I have a dog. Gentle creature. Love that dog. She often comes into my studio to help me mix albums.

Has she gotten any album credits yet?

No, not yet. But if you solo up the vocal tracks or anything like an acoustic guitar or acoustic instrument, and you listen really, really, really closely, you might hear her barking in the background.

Continuing with the dog theme, I think the most quoted song in the Nile catalog is “Hittite Dung Incantation” from 2009’s Those Whom the Gods Detest. How did the lyrics for that song come together?

Well, it was like the first method I showed you: I opened a book about ancient Hittite magic in religion, and that was a page in it. So when you see something like that, you don’t go, I can’t write a song about this. You say, OK, universe, thank you. Here we go.

It’s outlandish. But you know what? Outlandish is better for extreme metal than boring. It might be a little bit weird and esoteric, but it’s death metal. Come on.

Where are you ranking dogs on the danger scale?

Dogs aren’t at the absolute bottom of the scale because dogs can fucking hurt you. But dogs are also our best friend, so they’re in the bottom half of the scale.

I will say that playing a bunch of FromSoftware video games has taught me that a pack of dogs is the most dangerous thing you can encounter.

Crocodiles

Number of times mentioned in discography: 5
Sample lyric: “Swarmed by the eight crocodiles/ I know them by their names and lives/ I save my father from them,” from “The Fiends Who Come To Steal The Magick Of The Deceased” off of 2012’s At The Gate Of Sethu

Crocodiles are perhaps the animals most associated with the Nile. Was there ever a thought to shy away from them as a lyrical theme since that would be what people might expect?

No. That would be a heresy. We would be offending the crocodile god Sobek if we were to exclude him from his rightful fucking place at the top of the scale.

I wanted to ask this question specifically in the crocodile section. In that 2023 interview with Metal Crypt, you said, “I think lyrics deserve as much attention and hard work as any other part of the songs. Maybe even more so because we write the words first, and the music is done in such a way as to bring those words to life.” Maybe it’s the power of suggestion, but there have been a few times in the Nile catalog where the music sounds like a big, lumbering crocodile walking out of the water. So, if you’re bringing the words to life via the music, do the traits of animals ever play into that?

Absolutely. The super low, rumbly voice that I do in Nile? Why is that in there? Because that sounds like a fucking crocodile fucking growling at you.

Awesome.

Yeah, that’s in there, and I love it for that fucking reason. It’s either a mummy growling, a crocodile growling, or a hippopotamus growling.

I love it. So we’re putting crocodiles at the top of the danger scale.

Along with hippos. Hippos are maybe even more dangerous than crocodiles, but they look gentle and playful.

OK. I’m glad you brought this up. When are we getting a Nile hippo song?

That’s a great question, especially because they’re also referred to as the behemoth, right? We’ve been buddies with the band Behemoth for many years, so I’ve got to do it at some point.

Hippos are vicious animals and, in Egyptian mythology, are creatures of chaos. The fiends of Set are crocodiles and hippos. Hippos were day-ruiners for anybody in a boat on the Nile who was unlucky enough to cross their path.

I don’t wanna pitch ideas here, but is there a song about a battle between hippos and crocodiles? Is that something?

I think so. I think there’s something in there. I haven’t figured out how to do it yet, but that’s on the bucket list.

Snakes

Number of times mentioned in discography: 4
Sample lyric: “Save me from these snakes which art in Rosetjau/ Which live on the flesh of men and gulp down their blood,” from “Permitting The Noble Dead To Descend To The Underworld” off of 2009’s Those Whom The Gods Detest

“Save me from these snakes which art in Rosetjau/ Which live on the flesh of men and gulp down their blood.” Great line. I think this a great example of skewing towards the fabulistic. We’ve touched on this a bit, but is your lyric writing focused on mythology, or are you presenting something more entertaining for the listener?

There’s both of those elements in there. Snakes are a huge part of ancient Egyptian mythology, so you can’t cut them out of the picture. But sometimes, when I use the word “snakes,” I’m not necessarily talking about snakes. I mean, I am because it is ancient Egyptian mythology, but I’m not always talking about snakes in the literal sense. “Save me from these snakes which art in Rosetjau.” I’m taking a shot at people who act like snakes. It’s a metaphor.

Interestingly enough, I came across a news article about a week ago in which they had dug up a papyrus listing all these ancient Egyptian venomous snakes and their antidotes. This papyrus listed about 27 different varieties of poisonous snakes. Most of them have become extinct. It was like, Wow, that’s pretty cool. There’s a song in there somewhere.

Snakes are probably among the more dangerous animals you’d encounter in the Nile. Are you going to rank them near the top?

I think so because there are several varieties of venomous Egyptian snakes, not just the Egyptian cobra but also the horn pit vipers and a whole bunch of other snakes. Snakes were also valuable because they ate rats.

Jackals

Number of times mentioned in discography: 4
Sample lyric: “Causes You To Howl Like A Jackal In Anguish,” from “Lashed to the Slave Stick” off of 2005’s Annihilation Of The Wicked

Not to be confused with the band Jackyl.

Oh my god, dude, they’re from very near where we live. We’ve known them for 35-40 years. They’re a fun bunch of guys. Always clowning. Always on their most party-tastic behavior. Got to love them.

Is there any chance we can get a chainsaw guest solo on a Nile album?

[laughs] It’s all chainsaws already. If you listen to the guitar parts, those are chainsaws.

Fair enough. I didn’t have a whole lot on jackals, so I wanted to ask you this question: In an interview with Voices From The Darkside, you discussed a book and said, “there are comparative studies where they actually found the Hittite records of the exact same war and of course it is very different than the Egypt account.” Has any of this Rashomon-type subjectivity of truth made it into Nile’s lyrics?

Absolutely. And propaganda. The stuff carved on a monument’s wall is probably a one-sided accounting of what actually happened. You look at Ramesses’ account of how he viewed the battle and then how the Hittites viewed it. It’s propaganda at work — lots of propaganda.

Winners write the history.

Dude, one of the things that blew my mind when I started touring internationally was watching the news as you travel. You leave JFK, connect in London, and then fly on to Munich or wherever, and as you’re walking through the airport, you see the news on the TV screens. You can see three completely different views of exactly the same event. Much like if you watch something on CNN, then you watch the same thing on Fox News, it’s like two completely different ways of looking at it. Kind of like when there’s a car wreck, and the person on this side of the street sees it this way, a person on the other side sees something completely different.

Yeah, the fallibility of memory. Whatever you remember is your brain reconstructing reality.

Well, that’s a mindfuck. What do we actually know?

Did you think we were going to go here today?

[laughs] No, but I’m really happy that we went somewhere. This has been a joy so far.

Where are you ranking jackals on the danger scale?

Higher than dogs, but still not at the level of crocodiles or hippopotamuses.

Maggots

Number of times mentioned in discography: 3
Sample lyric: “Maggot infested, disowned bodies of men and animals,” from “We Are Cursed” off of 2019’s Vile Nilotic Rites

Again, this isn’t a maggot question per se. In an Echoes And Dust interview, you said, “I’m always on the lookout for new texts to use for lyrical inspiration, although new isn’t exactly the right word to use here. We did tap into some Assyrian and Mesopotamian themes and stories on our previous records.” You’ve got quite a few songs in the catalog now that aren’t specifically about ancient Egypt, such as the aforementioned “What Can Be Safely Written” on 2007’s Ithyphallic. Is there any trepidation that fans won’t “get it” if you stray from Egyptian mythology or history?

Yes and no. Sometimes, I write about stuff that’s not Egyptian, and half the time people don’t know it’s not. Like my solo records, people often say they’re Egyptian, blah, blah, blah. They’re not, but if you want to hear it that way, go right ahead. You can’t tell people what to think when they look at the Mona Lisa. If you go to the Louvre and look at the Mona Lisa, you can walk away with your own impression of it, and it’ll be just fine. I think music is like that, too. I think we’re just doing what Samuel Clemens said: Write about what you know. Maybe people get it, maybe they don’t, but it’s death metal. So, in some ways, the lyrics are important, but you can see them as irrelevant sometimes. Like they’re relevant to us. We wrote the song. And it’s relevant for anyone who wants to care about it. But what does it add up to? I don’t know. I don’t have to know. It doesn’t matter. It does matter.

One of the great things about art is that one person’s singular vision can open up a whole new world of possibilities for another. Nile’s focus on ancient themes, such as Egyptian mythology, opens up listeners to insights about the human condition and history, especially if they live in the US, which is culturally a very young country.

You mentioned the human condition. It reminded me of when I was in Egypt in 2016 and was there working with Nader Sadek. He had taken us down to Saqqara and the pyramids at Abusir, and on the way back into Cairo, we had to go through these little shitty suburbs where poor people live, and a lot of that shit was mind-blowing. But there was one moment on the trip where you could see the pyramids behind us. In front of us, you could see the skyscrapers of downtown Cairo. But all around us was poverty, filth, raw sewage in the street, garbage piled up, kids and dogs playing in the garbage, just utterly mind-boggling poverty. And I could see all these three things at once, and it made me think, Humanity is fucking cursed to be fucking stupid forever.

I think you’ve said in an interview that class is inescapable in all areas of life.

It is inescapable. There’s a scene in The Holy Grail by Monty Python where the king goes through the countryside, and he’s going by these people who are farming mud and dirt. They’re not even farming any usable crop. They’re just farming dirt. The peasants start arguing amongst themselves, and the wife, who’s on her knees in the mud, says to the other one, “Why are you always bringing class into it? There you go again, bringing class into it.” And he goes, “Well, if only people would see it’s all about class.” Well, there’s so much truth in that, right? We don’t want to see it, but it’s relevant. It really is. In this country a few years back, people were rebelling against the one percent. That one percent has been waging war back on us, and people don’t even fucking see it, but it’s there. It’s motherfucking there.

So, where would you rank maggots on the danger scale?

Well, you can do something about maggots, right? If you see maggots eating dead stuff, you can do something about it. You don’t have to endure them if you choose not to. It’s not like when a crocodile gets a hold of you, drags you underwater, and starts spinning around — you’re not getting away. So maggots are somewhere on the gentler, lower side of the scale.

Apes

Number of times mentioned in discography: 3
Sample lyric: The entirety of “Chapter For Not Being Hung Upside Down On A Stake In The Underworld And Made To Eat Feces By The Four Apes” off of 2024’s The Underworld Awaits Us All

Tell me everything about “Chapter For Not Being Hung Upside Down On A Stake In The Underworld And Made To Eat Feces By The Four Apes.”

Well, baboons figure prominently in ancient Egyptian mythology. The hamadryas baboon is an incredibly dangerous animal. I mean, dude, monkeys can and will rip your face off. They are more dangerous than people give them credit for. They’re also in the underworld of the Egyptians.

I got into my dad’s Edgar Rice Burroughs books when I was younger. My dad had the entire works, a whole library fucking full of that shit. So, of course, I read Tarzan when I was a kid. It left an impression on me.

You’ve mentioned the “four apes” before on “To Walk Forth From Flames Unscathed” from 2015’s What Should Not Be Unearthed. Are there any songs in the Nile catalog with a narrative throughline over many albums? Previously, on the last episode of Four Apes…

[laughs] Is this going to be a series like the Planet Of The Apes? Yeah, that’s a fun idea. I wish somebody had suggested that a long time ago, then I could have consciously done it.

Where are you ranking apes on the danger scale?

Like a B.

Vultures

Number of times mentioned in discography: 3
Sample lyric: “Torn to shreds by obese vultures,” from “Wind Of Horus” off of 2002’s In Their Darkened Shrines

You have this absolute banger of a line on “Wind Of Horus” from 2002’s In Their Darkened Shrines: “Torn to shreds by obese vultures.”

I love that line. Obese vultures.

I love that line because it packs in so much information. It’s very Hemingway-esque.

You’ve mentioned that Morbid Angel inspired you to put in the effort when it came to doing research for lyrics, and I can sense that in your work. But how much elbow grease do you put into making the lyrics, for lack of a better word, sing?

Well, a lot of times, if you find something brilliant in what we did, then we might’ve stolen it from somebody else. I remember that line was from the book River God by Wilbur Smith. I don’t know that we’re smart enough to think of that ourselves, but we’re smart enough to recognize it when we see it. “Wait a minute, that means something.”

With six words, you have a novel’s worth of information.

I like song lyrics that, if you read them and think about them, they can take your brain a whole bunch of places. I think lyrics should be thought-provoking.

Is there a connection between your songwriting process and how fans interpret those songs? You read books, find something cool, and build on that. Then, people listen to these songs, find something cool, and build upon that further.

That’s the beautiful part, almost as though it’s just suggesting things to people’s brains, and they can do the rest, whether you want them to or not. That’s an incredible feeling. Kind of like when you bring a riff to your bandmates, and you think that this riff means X. “Hey, I got this riff.” But they hear it and take the song in some other direction you never imagined because you planted a seed in someone else’s brain, and that seed blossomed into something else.

There’s a scene in Alien: Resurrection where there are multiple different versions of the creature that’s Sigourney Weaver’s character. They’re all in this lab room, and it’s grown into these different mutated forms. And one of them is going “kill me, kill me” because it doesn’t want to be this terrible, awful thing. That’s kind of what bringing your riffs to your bandmates is like.

[laughs] Incidentally, saying “kill me, kill me, kill me” is how I wake up every morning now that I’m older.

What’s your favorite line in the Nile discography?

Favorite line right now? It’s “monkeys fuck your skull.” I just laugh myself silly when I hear that.

Yeah, that’s a great one. That’s why “Chapter For Not Being Hung Upside Down On A Stake In The Underworld And Made To Eat Feces By The Four Apes” was the first choice for the lyric video, right?

It had to be, dude. There was no other first choice. It had to be that one.

The genesis of that whole thing is when we were playing somewhere in South America. I can’t remember which club it was at, but Brad and I were standing on stage, and the pit was incredibly animated that night. These kids were going nuts. And it looked like when you go to the zoo, and you go to the monkey cage, and all the monkeys, for whatever reason, get all riled up, and they’re running around doing all their monkey business. That’s what the pit looked like that night. So we were standing on stage playing, and we’re talking, and we’re laughing about it, and we’re going, “This is like monkeys going crazy. I hope they don’t start throwing monkey feces at us.” It grew into this bit between Brad and me. When I found Chapter 181 in The Book Of The Dead, I remembered that. So this song had to be a mosh pit song, a mosh pit song that people would run around like monkeys and throw monkey feces at everybody.

I hope you’re not setting yourself up for some Rocky Horror Picture Show crowd participation going forward.

Dude, we realized that we cannot sell fake monkey feces at the merch table. That is not a good idea. That would end badly every night on tour.

Where are you ranking vultures on the scale?

They don’t get to occupy the top slot because they don’t hunt people that are alive. They eat dead, rotting flesh that somebody else killed, so they don’t get to be the most dangerous, most despicable. People would occupy the top of the most despicable creatures scale.

Let’s go to the speed round. I want you to give me the scale tier where the rest of these animals that have been mentioned in Nile lyrics would be placed.

Hawks.

I don’t know. C.

Horses.

Only dangerous if they run over you, kick you, or bite you. But they are friends.

Locusts.

They’re up there on the scale. They’re bad news.

Lions.

Another top-tier predator. Very dangerous.

Worms.

They’re like maggots because if you see worms on you, you can take them off of you.

Yeah, I’m not scared of an animal that is hoodwinked by rain. Lynxes.

Well, they’re in the cat family. They’re dangerous cats. Are they the most dangerous cats? I don’t know. My audio interface is the Aurora(n) Lynx. Great piece of gear. I love it. So if you say the word “lynx,” I don’t think of anything dangerous. I think that interface has been my friend ever since I bought it.

Lynxes: not dangerous, but great sound engineers. Scorpions.

Ooh, very dangerous. Very dangerous.

Cats.

In Egyptian mythology, their danger is balanced by their goodness. They’re guardians of the underworld. In real life ancient Egypt, they ate rats, so they were a force for good.

This last question is a layup, but why have animals been such an enduring part of Nile’s lyrical themes?

Because they’re an enduring part of Egyptian history. In Egyptian mythology, they understood everything through animals. They made all their gods to be human bodies with animal heads. That’s how they saw it. I’m just following suit. Somebody already laid out the format, and I’m just following the fucking format. That’s all. Wasn’t my idea.

[laughs]

–Ian Chainey

FOUL EMANATIONS FROM THE VOID

10. Eye Eater – “Alienate”

Location: New Zealand
Subgenre: technical death metal

The dissonant, ever-evolving maelstroms Eye Eater pulls from the void, twisting, turning, and raging along one vector before spinning to another. The New Zealand band is refreshingly mid-tempo, and they welcome empty space. “Alienate” treats us to both brief and extended passages of curious, cautious instrumental exploration, as if the band is honing in on some deep cosmic frequency, scanning for new strange signals to latch onto. These are not quite edge-of-the-seat moments, but they demand rapt attention, with a lead guitar sounding like a NASA sonification of a James Webb image, and sparse drum work that jolts. It’s both unsettling and beautiful, and the throaty, guttural rasp that commands the more all-out sections — when a double kick is used in a short staccato burst effect — is that of some kind of deep space doomsayer. There’s nothing to be found about Eye Eater online, so there’s little context to provide. Alongside the alien Rosetta stone-style script and other deep space imagery, the disquieting unknowns the band conjures through twisted sounds make it a real mystery that’s hard to turn away from. [From Alienate, out now via the band.] –Wyatt Marshall

9. Conglaciation – “Asunder”

Location: New York, NY
Subgenre: death metal

Everything snaps into place during a solo on “Asunder.” The opening track on Conglaciation’s self-titled full-length debut is when “what is this,” that uncharted territory sensation accompanying any fresh listen, quickly transitions to “oh, they get it.”

The New York trio’s leads-heavy approach has gotten comparisons to Spawn Of Possession and Anata by way of Artificial Brain thanks to a flurry of notes flowing from guitarist Cotter Champlin’s dexterous digits. (Champlin has played live with Artificial Brain, and while it may be an oversimplification, one could say some of that band’s space dust covers Conglaciation.) The deluge of sonic data, this rushing river of notes that would’ve crashed MetalTabs back in the day, can be overwhelming. It may take your brain a few seconds to register precisely what has buzzed your tower. And while that’s not dissimilar from other chops-monsters in the tech death game, Conglaciation’s self-titled debut is much more human than cyborgs constructed in a clean room. Like Anachronism, one of our favorite boundary-pushers from last year, Conglaciation understands that for any of this stuff to work, you’ve got to feel it.

The solo on “Asunder” makes you feel it. Two-thirds of the way through the song, after Conglaciation has let loose a barrage of riffs and singer Andrew Gonzalez, a growler with a strong feel for rhythm who gets the most out of an early Psycroptician gut-derived rumble, plots out the range of his roar, the tech death churn gives way to chiming arpeggios. And then, like an agile bird with shimmering plumage diving for prey, a fusion solo swoops in. Sure, it’s one of those solos guitar teachers rush to YouTube to make reaction videos about, but it’s also tinged with a melancholy not common in this style of music. More than the musicianship, that’s what hits, this uptick of realer emotions like a rush of blood to the head. As the shred increases in difficulty, backed by a nifty little chug that borders on anthemic, it scratches the sickness centers of one’s death-metal-sprained brain. But, jeez, that solo gives Conglaciation a dynamic quality, making you want to poke around beneath the brutality to see what other gears are making this thing tick.

“Asunder” isn’t an isolated case. Take Conglaction’s “Conglaciation” from the album Conglaciation. Champlin, who also handles bass duties, and drummer James Knoerl have that Gordian Knot quality, an impossibly entangled mass of rhythms that would test a quantum computer’s abilities to untie it. They also have that Gordian Knot quality, as in Sean Malone’s post-Cynic fusion band, which, chaffing against the confines of multiple styles, always had something neat up its sleeve. (RIP, the Seans.) On Conglaction, neat stuff abounds. There are Champlin’s solos, the pretty reveries that fill these tracks with the same quiet wonder as an unpolluted night sky, and the death metal leads that death-defyingly maneuver through a highly concentrated asteroid field. In the interest of turning down the dials of hyperbole, Conglaction and Gordian Knot are not a one-to-one — Gordian Knot was a singular thing we had the privilege to live through, and Conglaction is still pretty green, showcasing a promise one hopes it grows into. But there’s a sense that a similar operating procedure is at the heart of Conglaction and makes its gears whirr: Whenever something starts to feel too stuffy, drop in some neat stuff. That’s not a bad maxim to blargh by. See, they get it. Let’s hope we get more. [From the Conglaciation, out now via Liminal Dread Productions.] –Ian Chainey

8. Defacement – “Burden”

Location: Utrecht Province, Netherlands
Subgenre: death metal / black metal

It’s dualities all the way down on Duality, Defacement’s third full-length. The Netherlands-located quartet sneaks them in everywhere like gargoyles on old cathedrals. There’s the black-and-white cover bisecting the band’s logo into different shades. There are the burbling, synthy, musique concrete-esque interstitials breaking up the storming, brutal outbursts. And there are these moments of overwhelming emotion rising from the ashes whenever the band seems as though it’s at its rock-bottom bleakest.

“The storytelling in Duality is influenced by the experience of multiple conflicting feelings at the same time,” the band writes in an email sent through Unorthodox Emanations’ publicist. Cryptic! That open-ended, you-figure-it-out approach befits Defacement’s enigmatic nature. “We wouldn’t call it a metal band or black or death metal,” Khalil Azagoth said in an interview with Aristocrazia Webzine. “We see it as something anybody can relate to, anyone can potentially connect to the storytelling behind the music.”

Defacement started telling its story on 2019’s Deviant, an album that clocks in at a brisk 28 minutes and winnows down the wind-tunnel black/death/doom gales of Altarage into something more concentrated and single-minded in its desire for destruction. 2021’s self-titled sophomore album, with an album cover that was like if David Cronenberg directed a sequel to Face/Off, is more violent, upping the band’s extreme tendencies along with its runtimes. In the Aristocrazia Webzine interview, Azagoth said the album “came in a period where social aggression came to an ugly point.” And Defacement is ugly, disgusted, and incensed, except for the four “Limbo” breathers where clouds of tones shimmer like they’re being illuminated by the sun. “Limbo” is entered again in the middle of “Wounded,” the album’s closer featuring guest vocals from Brendan Sloan. When the band comes back in, it’s noticeably changed. It’s still growing like a terrifying hurricane fed by hellacious pressure systems. But Defacement tempers its cacophonous odium with something like self-reflection.

Duality finds Defacement teasing out the possibilities of “Wounded,” expanding the band’s palette to include sections one could even call pretty. These shifts, tension and release and push and pull, give Defacement a more explicit compositional richness. It can still be absurdly heavy — guitarists Azagoth and Tadzio excel at a style we’ll dub ‘frenzied death metal in the infernos of hell’ while bassist Forsaken Ahmed and drummer Mark Bestia cook up contrasting rhythms that swell the delirium like a bee sting. But the “Big Feelings,” such as the heart-punching-the-gut solos, are a nice touch, suggesting that even during the unending misery of existence, there can be beauty in the experience. “Duality is as well a documentation of incidents in a retrospective development or vision,” the band writes. And maybe that’s the final duality: a band that won’t tell you how to interpret its music but makes you feel so much. [From Duality, out now on Unorthodox Emanations and Total Dissonance Worship.] –Ian Chainey

7. kyomdarak – “2406252”

Location: Gifu, Japan
Subgenre: experimental black metal

The experimental Japanese solo black metal project kyomdarak travels fascinating worlds — alternate, microscopic, aquatic, and otherwise alien to human perception or experience. “2406252,” from kyomdarak’s latest album, A New Ecosystem, is a mesmerizing exploration of a kind of rhythmic hypnosis that could be plucked from some animal or cellular communication mechanism. It’s drum-forward at first, with double kicks and fills driving forward a composition otherwise accented with raw riffs and warbling, strange atmospherics. It proceeds in a jerk-start but controlled manner, like the insectoid spasms of ants or another colony-based insect species working in strange yet seemingly robotic concert or the unpredictable movements of a fish. A fuller, heavier buzzing builds later, signaling the arrival of some new, large body or presence that distorts the environment that kyomdarak has been constructing.

On other releases, kyomdarak can be more atmosphere-forward, less percussion-centric. Kyomdarak seems to save the rhythmic focus for releases that feature images of streams as album art. Little is known about kyomdarak, but this is: the musician behind the project is also an avid mountain stream angler, posting first-person videos of himself fishing in the mountains on his YouTube channel accompanied by his own soundscapes. On A New Ecosystem, tracks bearing names “Contaminated areas,” “Culture tank room,” and then a series of numbered tracks — presumably samples in a lab (three bear the starting digits “24062”) — suggest a particular kind of directed study of sound. It’s fascinating, disorienting, jarring, yet completely absorbing. Head on over to kyomdarak’s YouTube channel to see the maestro himself fishing in the pristine waters of the Gifu mountains, gently calling and coaxing trout onto his line before releasing them back into the cold, crystal waters. [From A New Ecosystem, out now via the band.] –Wyatt Marshall

6. Mayhemic – “Toba”

Location: Peñaflor, Chile
Subgenre: thrash

Kaboom. If Mayhemic were a comic, that would be the first panel. The Chilean quartet dials up a blitzkrieg attack that is more like a volcanic blast. Out from the collapsing earth comes an expulsion of red-hot riffs and flowing tempos. Thanks to that seismic assault, Toba, the band’s debut full-length after nearly six years of shorter releases, holds its own with the 21st-century spate of blackened Norwegian speedsters, the current gold standard for NG+ thrash batshittery — Condor, Nekromantheon, and the like. But Mayhemic also flexes that metallic Chilean craziness that’s a dominant part of its DNA. That daredevilry, that je ne sais oh shit, adds that little bit of danger that makes good thrash so appealing.

OK. OK. Let’s take a detour. I know what you want to know: What’s up with the album title?

Toba: not a toe-shaped tuba — kindly ignore the stolen dad-joke valor throughout, thanks — but the site of an ancient supervolcanic eruption that went Armageddon mode 74,000 years ago. (The 440-squre-mile Lake Toba, located in today’s Sumatra, is the result of one of the all-timer explosive events on Earth.) There are also theories that Toba contributed to a possible perma-winter stretching over a decade, kicking off a cooling episode that killed off an abundance of early humans and led to a “genetic bottleneck.” Genetic bottleneck: a good way to describe the staid version of weekend warrior thrash that fills out local bills to this day. Anyway, several subsequent studies have challenged that theory to the point where no one really still believes it, but that hasn’t stopped the debunked decimation from lodging itself in the public imagination. After all, a massive explosion causing frostbitten suffering is acceptably metal.

“Toba,” the song, maximizes the mayhemic metal of its namesake. “A prosperous land of new dwellers,” Mayhemic vocalist/guitarist Noctumbra screeches. “Living a promising heyday/ Near the cradle of the humans/ A premature Armageddon rises/ Largest vomit known from the bowels/ Of the earth that men witnessed.” Look, a premature doomsday sometimes happens to all near-mass extinctions. The song is an absolute burner, though, clocking in at a robust six-and-a-half minutes that gives Mayhemic room for some sonic storytelling, telling a tale with epic poem scope. The riffs rip, but they also feel like they’re serving a greater narrative.

Besides its breakneck proclivities, Mayhemic’s adeptness at spinning a good yarn is its other strength. Much of Toba focuses on the primitive. Mayhemic wields a skull-crushing club on “Kollarbone Crushed Neanderthal,” a song about Homo sapiens challenging its fellow primate. “Triumph Portrait” does a five-minute thrash roundup of the Black Death. My favorite of the bunch is the instrumental “Eschatological Symphony,” which is exactly that, a thrash symphony (thrashphony?) that might’ve been a respected part of the classical canon if bygone composers had the privilege of hearing Pleasure To Kill. This stuff just works: barbaric music about ancient barbarity, hellish howls about past hells, violent metal explosions about world-ending volcanic events. When Toba gets going, it sounds like a roller coaster car getting speed wobbles, ready to jump off its track at any point, which is the real thrill of thrash. But don’t sleep on the songwriting, which is like when an action movie has a great script. EXT. VOLCANO – MAGMA-FLINGING MOUNTAIN – REVELATIONS-ASS END TIMES: Kaboom. [From Toba, out now via Sepulchral Voice Records.] –Ian Chainey

5. Raat – “Void’s Embrace”

Location: New Delhi, India
Subgenre: atmospheric black metal

“Void’s Embrace” is a stunner, as achingly beautiful as it is ferocious. It moves seamlessly from tender instrumentals into lightspeed cosmic blasting, dragging you by the heartstrings all along. Drumming is crazy tight and full of thunder and fire; guitars and other stringed instruments shred and carry monumental and yearning melodies; buried vocals emanate from the void; and it all comes together into a resplendent wall of “woah.” It’s a sonic whirlwind, and it’s about as high polish and crispy as this stuff gets — you could get lost in it on these merits alone. But in bringing it all together, Raat taps into a remarkable, captivating magic. It’s all the work of one “S.R.” from New Delhi, India, who has been pumping out EPs and full-lengths as Raat for half a decade at this point (and has other highly active projects, the raw-ish black metal Ascend Towards The Moon and the post-metal Lesath — the label Flowing Downward has a thing for prolific virtuosos). So, there’s a considerable body of work to explore. “Void’s Embrace,” and the new album Enchantment, though, are taking it to another level, bursting through the atmosphere into the beyond. [From Enchantment, out now via Flowing Downward.] –Wyatt Marshall

4. Oxygen Destroyer – “Shadow Of Evil”

Location: Seattle, WA
Subgenre: death metal / thrash

Lord Kaiju, the guitarist and vocalist of Oxygen Destroyer, choreographed Guardian Of The Universe like a showstopping fight sequence. “It’s a tribute to the Heisei Gamera Trilogy, my favorite films of all time,” he writes in an email about the genesis of the Seattle quartet’s third full-length, later adding, “The plan was to push ourselves to our absolute limit and create a record that’s just as grand, epic, and brutal as the movies they’re inspired by.”

But the death and thrash ragers that make up Guardian Of The Universe aren’t just paying tribute to some of the most “highly regarded [films] in Kaiju fandom.” No, Oxygen Destroyer use the films as riff templates, lining those riffs up with the action on the screen. “Every riff on this album is inspired by specific key moments from the Heisei Gamera Trilogy,” Lord Kaiju explains. “It syncs up perfectly. We have a handful of music videos on YouTube. I recommend checking those out to see what I mean.”

Or you can just hear what Lord Kaiju means. Guardian Of The Universe is a visceral album, a true leaves-marks onslaught pairing speed-demon death metal and chunky thrash pummeling that’s like if enlargened-by-radiation versions of Angelcorpse and Demolition Hammer did battle within a city that’s soon to be stomped to dust. Lord Kaiju and Joey Walker’s guitars fire forth with the anarchic precision of an atomic breath attack. Bassist Paul Wright and drummer Chris Craven bang out a bevy of bruising body blow rhythms. Oxygen Destroyer plain rips. And “Shadow of Evil” is a ripper on an album of rippers, somehow turning it up a notch on an album that already feels dimed.

“That song is a tribute to Gyaos, Gamera’s arch nemesis,” Lord Kaiju notes. “The Gyaos species are sinister as hell and consume literally everything they can, including each other, when they have the opportunity. With this in mind, I wanted that track, in particular, to be as chaotic, frantic, and destructive as possible.”

On “Shadow Of Evil,” Oxygen Destroyer hits a frantic high from the jump. Between the sonic boom OOGH and the start of the rough-as-a-cat’s-tongue, rasping vocals of the verse, the band consumes many notebooks full of headbangable riffs, the kind of involuntary neck-snappers that will keep chiropractors in business for eons. For the rest of the track, the terrain quickly shifts beneath the listener’s feet as fleet rhythms explore the outer boundaries of thrash extremity while panic shredding solos chase closely behind them. All of this happens in lightning-fast miniatures. It’s the thrash journey — that classic songwriting standby when the bridges and codas sprint through an instrumental odyssey before returning to the main section — condensed to highly concentrated laser-like zaps. So, how does Oxygen Destroyer structure these surprisingly intricate songs?

“We play hyper-fast to symbolize certain moments in specific Giant Monster films where buildings are crumbling, landscapes are exploding, and titans of terror are clawing at each other,” Lord Kaiju writes. “And when we play slow, it’s syncing up to the scenes where Kaiju are slowly lumbering across the land or recharging themselves within the depths of the sea before the next attack.”

As for the journey, those wordless moments of thrash badassery? “Sometimes I feel like it’s best to let the music speak without words being said,” Lord Kaiju states simply. “I love making the listeners wait for the vocals to kick in from time to time, the same way most Kaiju films keep the viewers waiting a short while until the monster finally appears.”

Of course, crushing these songs in the studio is one thing. It’s worth noting that Oxygen Destroyer also excels on the stage, as evidenced by its recent West Coast run of dates with the similarly-minded Ascended Dead. At a set witnessed by yours truly, the band rose from the depths and tore the venue to bits. It made it look easy. Oxygen Destroyer knuckled down, becoming almost entranced by its own ripping qualities, and performed its promised business of tearing off my face. This practiced, super-athlete quality belied the difficulty of the new material, as Lord Kaiju notes. “I won’t lie. The new songs are tough, far more technical than anything we’ve done before. They’re a real bitch to perform. I love it, though. I like to imagine we’re summoning the presence of the sacred beasts themselves, and their power is almost too much for our human forms to contain.”

Be that as it may, the technical side of the songs isn’t the hard part. “The true hardest part is making sure the songs are a worthy tribute to the monsters that inspire them,” Lord Kaiju explains. “For example, the eighth track, ‘Banishing The Iris Of Sempiternal Tenebrosity,’ is based on the final battle from Gamera 3, which might honestly be my favorite Kaiju fight of all time. That song, in particular…took me half a year to write. I needed to be absolutely sure that it would do justice to one of the most important scenes in the Gamera trilogy. It drove me mad, but once it was finished, it was totally worth it.” I’m sure the choreographers of Kaiju films feel the same way. [From Guardian Of The Universe, out 8/9 via Redefining Darkness Records.] –Ian Chainey

3. Likno – “Birth”

Location: Kozani, Greece
Subgenre: black metal

Likno plays a rawish, wintry black metal, and on “Birth” the Greek duo rip along an off-kilter bent. Unlike some of their Hellenic compatriots who embrace a bigger, more traditional sound, Likno hacks through the ice to record in cobwebbed, decrepit tombs. The bass quarks and the drums thud rather than boom, giving “Birth” an earthly, organic quality. Eerie, uneasy melodies waft above and dissipate. But it all comes together into a rocking cantor — for something from such a distant corner of the black metal underground, it’s remarkably catchy. You’d happily roll with the track as it unfurls in haunted house fashion, but it contains a remarkable flute-driven second act that takes it to another level. The melody on offer brings to mind, a bit, the underrated, great Amorphis track “Nightfall” (from the also underrated Tuonela). On “Birth,” it’s a kaval, a type of flute popular in the Balkans and Anatolia, bringing a mystical magic to life. It’s a memorable imprint at the end of an already captivating song. [From Likno, out now via the band.] –Wyatt Marshall

2. Kraanerg – “The Deluge (Pipes Burst From Joy Alone)”

Location: Houston, TX
Subgenre: prog

In more ways than one, Nat Bergrin is Kraanerg’s Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun. There’s the literal sense: Bergrin composed the three-song album and assembled the crack ensemble, which consists of ultra-talented players in prog, free improvisation, and the avant-garde side of metal. However, fittingly for a multifaceted creation, Bergrin’s relationship to this album runs much deeper than that.

“Most of the ideas came directly from stitching together ‘diary scores,’ ideas knocked out in one sitting to process something new and interesting I recently listened to or an emotion I was trying to work through,” Bergrin writes in an email. “Particularly over a four-year timespan, it became an intensely personal way of documenting my life. I can point to specific moments on the album and remember what I was feeling on the day of composition.”

What Bergrin has composed is daring in its complexity, a many-sided marvel that never fails to unveil something new. There are, of course, the sonic layers. Bergrin, who plays piano, synths, and additional guitars, is joined by Laktating Yak’s Angel Garcia (drums, vocals), Kostnatění’s D. L. (guitars), El Mantis’ Danny Kamins (saxophone), and Daniel Cho (violin), along with some extra “ambience” by Tchornobog’s Markov Soroka, who also mixed and mastered the album. These players construct not just a wall of sound but paint a vibrant, detailed mural upon that wall. Every section is packed with independent points of interest, aural brushstrokes with their own narrative arcs, that unifies as a greater whole. It might be trite to write, but in that respect, Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun echoes life’s expected and unexpected contours in the grander sense and on a smaller, more personal level.

“It’s certainly a travel diary, with bits of audio from six US states and four other countries,” Bergrin writes regarding Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun’s progression. “I also see it as inextricably linked to my process of coming to terms with my queer identity and gender fluidity in particular. In incorporating so many more influences, and being far more open about the genuine emotional content of my work, it also represents embracing the sides of myself that I had repressed heavily in the years prior. There’s a lot of uncritical bitterness to my past work, and Cherry Pit has genuinely been extremely helpful in allowing me to process past baggage and reconstruct my art into something new, something dynamic and beautiful. I see that same transformation as happening with how I see my own self and presentation, in a way.”

Those dynamic and beautiful moments make up some of Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun’s other layers, such as the affecting emotional undercurrents that sweep listeners along, peeling back the buffers surrounding the self until it uncovers something more vulnerable and earnest. For an album that, beyond some wordless vocals woven into textures, is instrumental, it’s almost as if Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun is constantly conversing with you. It’s engaging, not only because its experimental side excites the synapses, but because it calls out for a response.

“I personally find that instrumental music has a lot more capacity to channel raw emotion than music with singing, at least on average,” Bergrin answers when asked about how they communicate feelings and emotions through the music. “Harsh vocals, especially to me, feel antithetical to conveying anything too emotionally immediate, even for bands I really enjoy, which is why I had to ditch them. There’s just something more pure about melodies delivered on a saxophone or violin compared to something diluted by lyrical content.”

That said, as Bergrin clarifies, the human voice is there if you listen for it. “There are actually quite a few moments on the album, and on ‘The Deluge’ in particular, where the instrumental melodies are heavily based on the vocal melodies of other albums I admire. There are absolutely direct quotations from Magma/Offering, Sun City Girls, several tropicália classics, etc., if you know where to look. The piano lines also have a few sources from fairly well-canonized composers, such as Rachmaninoff and Astor Piazzolla.”

Right, let’s talk about “The Deluge (Pipes Burst from Joy Alone).” Following the 22-minute opening track, “Here The Ground Is A Spandrel,” “The Deluge” bolsters the album’s ideas while paving paths toward new avenues. The opening, with Garcia’s pounding drumming anchoring the swirling storm clouds produced by the rest of the band, is one of the album’s heavier moments, although Bergrin stresses they weren’t aiming for metal. “I don’t think I’ve ever considered Kraanerg to be a metal project in any real sense; it’s more of a conduit for channeling raw compositional ideas into something meatier using heavier rock orchestration. At the very least, it’s PROG with metal influence, not METAL with prog influence.”

The progness really shines through on “The Deluge.” When the tempest of tones starts to part, it echoes the “ecstatic atmosphere” of Magma, one of Bergrin’s influences. And Cho’s gorgeous violin at 3:53 might remind listeners of Rock in Opposition heavyweights such as Univers Zero. “I guess the fundamental lesson to be learned from zeuhl and RIO to me is that the best ideas are built from the ground up,” Bergrin explains when asked how they got into those subgenres and how they feel those subgenres are shaping extreme music now. “The core RIO scene had bands that sought to push compositional limits from a very fundamental level; they weren’t saying, ‘Let’s fuse our prog sound with genre X.’ It was art for art’s sake, in the best way.”

Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun fits into that ‘best way’ tradition. Here’s this composition that reverberates on a human level because it’s so steadfastly singular. It’s one of those beautiful quirks of art: how one person’s journey — in this case, these diaristic scores — can be so moving that it allows others to find meaning in a life that isn’t theirs. That’s empathy, really. And so, Nat Bergrin is Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun, but it’s so invitingly vast, so generous, so open, it can be you, too. [From Heart Of A Cherry Pit Sun, out now via Not Music.] –Ian Chainey

1. Lammoth – “Lunar Tales Of Fire And Magic”

Location: Ashville, NC
Subgenre: black metal

Lammoth rages out of the gates on “Lunar Tales Of Fire And Magic,” a bruising black metal track that plumbs the darkest caverns and scales the highest peaks while pulling from all the best parts of the greater black metal smorgasbord. The opening riffs lay down heavy machine gun fire, wonky castle synths pop in as a creep choir section, and then a riff-and-roll sets the stage for what comes next: a wide-open blast-off buoyed by clouds of light-filled synths. Then, the winding journey really begins.

Lammoth is Tolkien black metal, but unlike a lot of Tolkien black metal that leans into evocative atmospherics for emotional impact, seeking to transport the listener to lands far away, Lammoth instead triples down on the extreme elements of black metal to make the fears and fires of doom real. The acrobatic lead guitar work provides the fantastical narrative element on “Lunar Tales Of Fire And Magic,” never sacrificing ripping for a softer, cinematic aura. This track is definitely a great single to introduce the one-person project out of Asheville from Robert Sanford, but I was torn between featuring it and the incredible EP closer “Brandywine Memories,” where Sanford pulls from an ’80s video game and synth palette, creating warm, upbeat magic cast in the glow of a winding neon river, or a cabinet TV left on throughout the night. [From Tales Of Treachery, out now via Fiadh Productions.] –Wyatt Marshall

HYMNS OF BLASPHEMOUS IRREVERENCE