• Watch: Ten Ton Slug – Hunting Ground

    August 6, 2019 - By 

    Galway sludge metal quartet Ten Ton Slug have long been masterfully crafting some of the finest riff-led, crushing metal on the island and with international slots amassing, their debut album is set for release next year. The first single to be taken from the LP – and their first release since 2017’s Blood and Slime – is the  ‘Hunting Ground’, and if its sonic pulverisation is anything to go by, 2020 looks to further galvanise the band’s status. The single was recorded & produced by Ciaran Culhane, and its occultist, paranoia-inducing video was filmed at Cavan’s stately See House, directed and edited by Pádraig Conaty. Check out more on…

  • Plain Living & High Thinking: An Interview With Belfast’s Latest Promotion

    January 8, 2018 - By 

    If you’ve been keeping track of the Belfast live music scene lately, you might have noticed – despite well-intentioned pockets and open-minded promoters – that it’s somewhat fractured and currently lacking the infrastructure to cultivate a strong grassroots music community beyond those looked after by management and the likes. Two bands who have organically harnessed their substantial following in a very short space of time are the groove-strewn, endlessly soulful jam trio Electric Octopus – having toured the UK, look to extensively traipse across Europe in Spring following the release of their latest album – and stoner-doom outfit Elder Druid, who released…

  • So Much For The Sun – So Much For The Sun

    August 14, 2017 - By 

    Lisburn doom-laden stoner rock/sludge trio So Much For The Sun have just released their debut album. Mastered by doom stalwart Brad Boatright, the album was recorded and mixed by Niall Doran at Start Together Studios – who has recently become the go-to guy for any production of noteworthy heft in NI. The band’s eponymous debut is a lengthy and dynamic affair, its samples and lyrics delving into sociopolitical commentary with a careful blend of clean and guttural vocals that’d see them sit well on any Desertfest billing. With the crushing low-end of post-metal & doom, its heaviness is framed within the midrange-bogarting fuzz of early…

  • Interview & Introduction To: Fractured

    November 20, 2015 - By 

    You may not have noticed yet, but Dublin-based filmmaker John Mulvaney is doing an invaluable service for the Irish underground scene in his short-form documentary series, Fractured. Each short film zones in on members of some of the best under-the-radar heavy and/or experimental artists in the country, piecing together a range of evocative cinematographic fragments of the musicians and their surroundings, soundtracked to candid aural insights from the respective musicians and their music. Mulvaney’s evident passion and respect for the music has continually led to a carefully crafted portrait of each artist, with every instalment accumulating to more than the…

  • The Hefty Fog: Metal Is Gay

    May 17, 2015 - By 

    Heavy Metal has never and will never be a bastion for political correctness, nor should it. It’s all about hyperbole on steroids, and if you don’t get it, you don’t get it. You’ll fail horribly trying to change it. However, through all the goat cults, slopping entrails, corpse-bothering, and general rhubarb, the only thing that still shocks me about it all is the homophobia. Now, Metal fans aren’t especially homophobic, but when it does show up on the odd forum or comments box, it’s pretty ugly, and it’s hard to wrap your head around it. If anyone could for the…

  • Hefty Fog: Director’s Cvlt

    May 5, 2015 - By 

    Just when you think that the stick has finally broken, after its loyal years of splintering across the body of the dead horse, someone comes along with a claw hammer and changes the game entirely. The story of Norwegian Black Metal has been told numerous times over numerous formats, in books, magazines, documentaries, Youtube parodies – it is the one story in the history of heavy metal that seems to resonate with everyone, fans or otherwise. The murder, the arson, the music, but mostly the murder, are all what sets it apart from the usual Led Zeppelin fishmongering of rock…

  • Therapy? – Disquiet

    April 9, 2015 - By 

    When talk first began of a sequel to ‘Troublegum’, the 1994 punk-metal opus that made legends of Co. Antrim trio Therapy?, your writer couldn’t help but feel pangs of uncertainty. From a band that over the course of 25 years plowed a fiercely independent furrow, and did so while thinking about ten steps ahead of the musical sentiment of the time, a move for nostalgia would be surely a massive anti-climax after producing two career-defining albums in ‘Crooked Timber’ and ‘A Brief Crack of Light’. Is it? Well… the jury is still out after a fortnight’s constant listening, which, for…

  • The Hefty Fog: The Aussie Triumvirate

    February 20, 2015 - By 

    The latter half of the 00’s were, as far as underground Metal music was concerned, focused almost entirely on the advent and subsequent decline of ‘Slamming Brutal Death Metal’, or however many variants on that title had been adopted during the time. The grooves of the early to mid 90’s had resurfaced on a Death Metal scene that desperately needed some kind of facelift, lest the hardcore fans be doomed to relive the 80’s over and over again like some kind of Scott Burns-produced Groundhog Day. What we got in the end was a newly popularized strain of Death Metal…