Back catalogue: Metal

Review: "A record that sounds like dystopia", painting "a bleak portrait of an America that is on the brink of implosion" wrote one critic after first hearing AmeriKKKant, the 14th studio album by the mighty Ministry. If this is your first encounter with the record, it should take exactly two tracks to understand what said scribe - penning prose for The Spill Magazine - was getting at. There's anger, trouble, rage, frustration, disillusionment and a rallying war cry to stand up and stop the decline of Western civilisation at the hands of populists and fundamentalists running through every bar of every track. More so, this is also about standing tall and representing what constitutes an LP. Far more than a vessel for singles, AmeriKKKant is long form expression in the truest sense. Not necessarily a journey into industrial metal and sample-oriented experimental rock, but a manifesto for what they can represent.

Review: "Hopium" is internet-speak for naive "hope" in the face of oncoming calamity, where "hope" is imagined as a kind of injectable drug upon which media consumers inevitably get hooked. With this in mind, LA-based political synth-come-punk-metal ish act Ministry (the lifetime project of founder Al Jourgensen) deliver their latest album, HOPIUMFORTHEMASSES, which provides a window into the pysche of the contemporary hope-stricken worrier / warrior of today. From the opening war-cry of 'Goddamn White Trash' to the closing clamour of 'Ricky's Hand', it's clear the ultimate message is that there are two kinds of hope - the passive "hopium" kind, and the active kind that knows what it's doing.

Review: Thrash metal revivalists, Municipal Waste, make their ferocious return on 'Electrified Brain', their first full-length in five years, and follow up to 2017's blistering, 'Slime & Punishment'. The seventh album from the Richmond, Virgina outfit delivers on all of the violent, crass, whiplash-inducing mayhem we've come to expect, yet approached with seasoned experience and a renewed energy following their half-decade respite. Commenting on the material, enigmatic frontman Tony Foresta offered these choice words - "We're not writing any love ballads to sell records." Make of that what you will.

Review: 'Unfurling' their 15th album - a stonking discographic achievement - My Dying Bride's A Mortal Binding is brought to our attention. The Yorkshire-based quintet deliver this incendiary sonic meditation on loss, distress, and abyssal horror with glee, eliding gothic and apocalyptic themes while playing on bleak aspects of the band members' personal lives, sublimated through wicked doom metal. 'Thornwyck Hymn', 'Her Dominion' and 'The Apocalyptist' betray a belief that one can master the end of times - whatever form they may take - and use them to one's own advantage: such is the implied message.