🌶️ To The Teeth: Anciients found their own direction

Plus: Grendel's Sÿster, Concrete Winds, VHS, Nails, Leprous, Sur Austru & much more!

Aug 30, 2024

Welcome to the To The Teeth newsletter! Your weekly update of new heavy music. You can listen to (most) everything in the playlist on Spotify. If you like what you read, go to Patreon (receive a patch!) & Bandcamp (buy a patch!). Peppers are hot 🌶️!

New Albums

🌶️ Anciients

Extreme prog, Canada (Season of Mist)

FFO: Opeth, Baroness, Mastodon

I’ve said it before this year: these are great times for lovers of Oldpeth. We’ve had good albums from Aquilus, Piah Mater and even a neo-oldpeth-Opeth song from actual Opeth. And now there’s new Anciients. This album is where Anciients find their own direction. They have the Opethian dynamics, the choppiness of Mastodon, the folky leads of Baroness and a little bit of Katatonian sadboy. And that said, they really sound like just Anciients. It’s creative and expansive, and refreshingly original.

🌶️ Grendel’s Sÿster

Heavy/folk, Germany (Cruz Del Sur Music)

FFO: Slough Feg, Wytch Hazel, Skyclad

Brb, getting a cloak and moving to a castle. I’ll also pick up smoking pipe, and I’ll be happy to not do anything else for the rest of my life. Don’t call me. Oh and the whole thing is also (also also) in German!

🌶️ Concrete Winds

Death/grind, Finland (Sepulchral Voice)

FFO: Angelcorpse, Necrovore, Vorum

“To all death metal lunatics and black metal psychopaths left out there in this toothless and tamed scene, let us proclaim the word! CONCRETE WINDS are back to push spikes, needles, and barbed wire into your flesh and ears.” - this is the most cringe but also the most correct press blurb I’ve seen this month.

📼 VHS

Death/thrash/grind, Canada (Crucial Blast/Grand Vomit Productions)

FFO: Exhumed, Macabre, Ghoul

Morricone-style western music with death metal vocals. There’s really only one band that would even just try such a monstrous idea, let alone record ánd release it. It’s gloriously insane.

There’s more: Leprous (prog, Norway), Nails (powerviolence, USA), Sur Austru (atmospheric folk/black, Romania), Amiensus (prog black, USA), Avmakt (black, Norway), Ellende (post-black, Austria), Gutvoid (death, Canada), Wintersun (symphonic melodeath, Finland), Teeth (tech death, USA), Nahtrunar (black, Austria) and Pneuma Hagion (black/death, USA). I missed last week: Dawn Treader (atmoblack, UK) and Simone Simons (sympho/prog, The Netherlands). The rest is in the playlist!