Being a band for 20 years or more is not an easy task by any stretch of the imagination. Even when you set aside all the challenges that come alongside being a band in this day and age, how does one keep their music enthralling for their established fanbase throughout such a prolonged period of time? Do you just stick to your guns and keep doing what you do best, or do you push yourself out of your comfort zone and release an album that reinvents the wheel? Surely that was a question post rock quintet Caspian had when it came to approaching their sixth album. After so many years of pushing the boundaries of their creative outlet, where do they take things next? Rather fittingly for a self titled album, Caspian have opted to take a ‘if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it’ approach to their latest work and have released an album that might not break boundaries in ways they have before, but excells at everything it executes.
Most the tracks on Caspian are fairly lengthy, as is to be expected from a post rock act. Opening track ‘Hiraeth’ and closing track ‘Waltz For the End’ are the only two tracks on the album that are shorter than five minutes, bookending four tracks which range from six to nine minutes. It’s not an enviable task to be able to keep a track like that engaging to a listener for such a long period of time, especially without vocals for them to latch onto. One thing that the band are consistently good at is creating a great sense of atmosphere and build up with songs that gracefully take the listener on a audible journey through swooping passages that captivate them from beginning to end. Single ‘Remain’, easily the longest track on the album, is a great example of this. At just over nine minutes, the song is filled to the brim with beautiful guitar work accompanied by pounding and crashing rhythm and percussion work that at times feels haunting whilst retaining a melancholic beauty to it. It’s a track that comes full circle, ending somewhat similarly to how it began whilst also having a different feel to it to encapsulate the feeling of going on a journey and returning home somewhat changed.
Historically, the simple black cover is a ballsy move, reserved for globe-straddling masters of their genre. Metallica, Jay-Z, AC/DC, Spinal Tap and (checks notes) Weezer. Take away even a title, and you’re really only left with Metallica, whose self-titled Black Album is perhaps the definition of changing your sound and conquering the world.
Until now?
Steak, the desert-sound London stoner outfit, is back, four years after their last album, Acute Mania, and they’ve gone self-titled and black. Now, with the greatest respect in the world, I don’t think the band that played bottom of the main stage at this year’s Desertfest are about to ‘do a Metallica’, so such a ballsy choice must come down to one of two things: a sudden attack of hubris, or a wry sense of humour from a band whose over-a-decade career has been one of slow, but sustained recognition from within their scene.
In the four years since we last had some Steak on wax, the band have filled out their ranks, with Crystal Head’s Tom Cameron joining to round out both the guitars and vocals, and right from the opener, ‘Cometh’, you can hear that this isn’t so much a tonal leap forward as a maturation. Where Acute Mania added progressive layers to their desert sound, on Steak that sound has stretched its legs a little further than those Californian skies. A low-and-slow riff soon gives way to shamanistic vocal lines that add complexity and melody to the slow stomp, designed to wrest a cosmic nod out of the listener, and doing a pretty decent job of it, to boot.
What’s that? Oathbreaker performing one of the greatest albums ever recorded? Or Ronker, smashing the ever-loving crap out of the Yokhai stage only weeks after dropping a stonker of an album? Maybe it’s Psychonaut, delivering the second-best set of the weekend (we all know who was number one). We get it, Belgium, you’re good at bands. And yet, it’s not over yet, because here comes Hippotraktor, casually dropping a true album-of-the-year contender. It’s called Annihilist, and it’s a beast.
Let’s rewind a little. So far, this five-piece post-metal outfit has released two albums: 2021’s Meridian and 2024’s Stasis, both of which were very firmly in the ‘for fans of’ subset of albums; not quite reaching the dizzying heights of The Ocean, or many other of their Pelagic stablemates, but still a very lovely time. They trod a familiar post/prog metal path as, say, Psychonaut. That was understandable since they shared not just a country, not just a record label, but also a vocalist, Stefan de Graef; only this time he’s not playing guitar.
Having conquered many an album-of-the-year list last year with Psychonaut‘s World Maker, however, Stefan has obviously decided he’d quite like to repeat the trick, because, right from opener ‘I breathe, I am’, Hippotraktor signal that they, too, are taking a step into godly realms. The opening riff, bruising yet percussive, melodic and hypnotic in a way that makes you feel like you’re about to go over the lip on a rollercoaster, gives way to Stefan’s lush melodies, which wrap around an echoing, rhythmic drum pattern before the whole thing coalesces back into a chorus that can only be described as ‘fuck off great big’. It’s colossal, the kind of statement that can’t help but set a band up for failure, right?
Their third EP in three years …Then You Cannot Love Me arrives as a companion to last year’s If You Do Not Fear Me…, and while it might continue in title, sonically it’s a very different beast. Where IYDNFM… was aggressive, featuring some of their heaviest work to date with the likes of ‘Sepsis’ and ‘Wrath’, …TYCLM reaches for more melodic pastures with some of their most sonically diverse songwriting yet.
Opener ‘What You Paid For’ hits a churning riff immediately, dropping out in short order for Haley Roughton’s voice to shine. The verses are delicate and yearning; it’s a slower open, rather than the likes of ‘Pray’ that opened their debut EP with furious screams and thunderous riffing. That’s a hallmark of …TYCLM, expanding Gore.’s sound from what was initially established on their first two EPs. Lead single ‘Lead Me To The Slaughter’ has, as we’ve come to expect, an earworm hook in its chorus that’ll stick in your head for days after and is ripe for singalongs from small rooms to the arenas they just supported, I Prevail in.
Following up on 2021’s Skyrim-themed atmospheric black metal Wretched Abyss was always going to be a unique challenge, to say the least. Where do you go from there with something so specific, so tied to a particular place and time (even if that place and time is fictional)? Well, the answer, it seems, was clear: you go somewhere completely different, take new inspiration and create a heavy metal soundtrack that fits.
This time round sees Noctule entering The Lands Between. “Arise Tarnished” is the call, and those who answer will experience the grandeur, the chaos, the beauty, the decay and the horror that the world of Elden Ring has to offer.
From the very first moments of ‘Welcome to Limgrave’, listeners know they are in for a treat: the epic journey of being placed into a world that seems to grow and grow. Even within this short instrumental, it evokes that feeling of embarking on something vast, terrifying and spiritually challenging. There’s wonder here but also trepidation, that unmistakable feeling of stepping out into Limgrave for the first time and realising that whatever waits beyond the horizon is probably going to kill you.
From paedophilic, incestuous legacy-obsessed blood demons and half-man, half-snake deity devourers to rotten, health-cheating, one-armed warrior princesses, each track is dedicated to some of the most memorable remembrance bosses from the game. They all have their own unique flavour, whilst still remaining connected to the wider whole. Importantly though, this never becomes a novelty record. Knowledge of Elden Ring adds another layer, but underneath all the references is an extreme metal album more than capable of standing on its own two feet.
It might not be readily apparent on the surface, but there’s a lot of AC/DC’s DNA in unpeople, not least because there are at least two huge fans in the band. Rising from the ashes of members’ previous projects, unpeople immediately caught attention by their hook-forward approach that melded massive riffs, even bigger choruses and multipart vocal harmonies, straddling the line between huge arena rock and thunderous metal. Their self-titled EP was the opening salvo, and two years later, we are unpeople has emerged as their much-anticipated debut album.
Fans will already be familiar with the opening triple-hitter of ‘clouds’, ‘friends’ and ‘the garden’.In fact, if you’ve seen unpeople live over the past couple of years, you’ll also have heard ‘swallow’ and ‘bottle it’, songs that find their final form here. Let’s not beat around the bush, either; all of these songs slap. The riff that kicks off ‘clouds’ proper is a stomper, with drummer Richie Rayner underscoring it with a simple, driving rhythm. It holds a secret, though; not only is this an arena-filling banger, but they briefly channel their inner Devin Townsend during a furious breakdown with honest-to-god blastbeats and vitriolic screams from guitarist Jake Crawford.
Following it with ‘friends’ is an easy choice to keep the energy up, a bellow-along refrain of “Now that I know I don’t wanna be friends”, harmonising background melodies from guitarist Luke Caley and bassist Em Lodge. ‘the garden’ remains a world-beating banger and hasn’t lost any of its impact even if we don’t get the riff coming back but faster as they do live. First unreleased song proper (though, again, one that’s been played live) ‘swallow’ features some spoken-word vocals initially, a punk affectation that’s soon overpowered as the song blossoms into yet another huge chorus with glorious multi-part harmonies.
