Under the needle

It’s precisely 7pm on a Monday night, and the freshly-birthed drudgery of a new working week has had ample time to take effect – judging, at least, by the endless hordes of weary-looking Londoners jostling their way home through the hectic streets of a presently heaving Camden Town. So it’s with no small amount of amusing irony to note that the sizeable crowd of black-clad metal fans camped up outside The World’s End should be the ones looking so uncharacteristically cheery t

Of all the cruellest and most psychologically shattering of emotional states, nothing cripples the human spirit more brutally and absolutely than the tragic loss of a loved one. The quiet, shell-shocked numbness. The great, gaping void within that aches like some horrific incurable wound. The raw, gnawing grief slowly devouring the very fibre of your being from the inside out. Yet out of these agonising, tear-stricken moments of darkness come some of the most jaw-dropping and

A Pale Horse Named Death wandered into doom metal’s brooding Asphodel Fields back in 2011. The poetically-named outfit was formed in New York by Sal Abruscato, a former drummer with Type O Negative, on the back of the collective outpouring of grief - and consequent dissolution of the band - following the tragic death of frontman Peter Steele. While Pale Horse’s offerings are suffused with all the moody, gothic broodiness the masters of doom were renowned for, Abruscato serves

In the name of art and music, Niclas Frohagen, the one-man wonder that is post-doom band Forest of Shadows, has once more sliced open his veins and let forth red streams of lyrical anguish. Latest album 'Among the Dormant Watchers' is drenched in personal, almost spiritual epiphanies of emotion that shine like sudden illuminations of silvery moonlight in sylvan glades. Ten years in the making and in the finest tradition of Scandinavian doom, this is a melancholic medley of po

On 20th December 2018, Finnish doom luminaries Swallow The Sun will be releasing a brand new EP by the name of ‘Lumina Aurea’ in the eagerly anticipated run-up to the band’s 7th studio album ‘When A Shadow Is Forced Into The Light’. Amassing 13 minutes of crushingly harrowing yet intricately crafted atmospherics, this epic slab comprises a tantalising taste of things to come, while in the same breath standing in its own right as a truly unique and multi-faceted body of work.

Dark Matter Editor Faye Coulman talks us through the soundtrack to her escape from commuting hell... It’s precisely 7.48am and as I stand on board a crammed tube train wending its rickety, cloyingly humid way toward the seething inner circle of commuter hell that is Oxford Circus, I can already feel a troubling intermingling of claustrophobia and simmering agitation bubbling up inside of me. On its exit from the next station, the train lurches violently into motion, throwing

From the twisted torture-scape of seething underground metal that is Blackened Death Records comes yet another deliciously dark, diabolical treat. The thrilling debut EP from London-based rising stars Skeletal Serpent combines the raw, demonic vocals of Blackened’s Pope Richard with the monstrous music of skilled newcomer Andy Kang to confidently inhabit the realm of classic death with true panache. Surging forth from their subterranean lair, Skeletal Serpent spew up brutal,