I've been following Year Of The Goat since their debut and while there maybe a few Swedish based occult rock bands that have surpassed them in terms of profile and fame, I genuinely think they are one of the best examples of the genres to come from Sweden.
Trivia Goddess has been a long time coming, a six year gap since 2019's Novis Orbis Terrarum Ordinis, sees them put their trilogy of records (of which that was the second) on hold to write a standalone record that deals with harrowing moments from women's history, most of which coming from religious persecution and the male-centric writings of the Abrahamic faiths. This is a band who have always denied these belief systems instead welcoming the teaching of LeVay and the powerful hold of witchcraft and the Hekate the Trivia Goddess herself.
This ode to feminine power is enhanced by backing vocalists Elin Gårdfalk and Maria appearing on every track, adding their voices to these songs for a much broader approach, where these feminine spirits from the past can be conjured into the minds eye. This wider vocal sound is set against their 60's/70's inspired occult heavy rock, though Trivia Goddess does wander a little into a darker doom sound at times, the guitars of Thomas Lucem Ferre Sabbathi Eriksson, Jonas Erik Waldhuber Mattsson and David Håkan Andreas Olofsson have a little more bite in their triple pronged attack, making for some brilliant harmonic passages but also a bit they are also down-tuned a little for heavier riffs overall.
Marko Kardum (or is that Rickard Larsson’s) bass and Daniel Melo Ortega drumming leans on both their retro style and this newer shift towards a sinister soundscape, which began to arrive on the previous album.
Mikael Mihailo Popovic lends a lot of skill to this new record, not only giving more vocals along with Eriksson but also playing the keys/organs/synths that swell the sound to cinematic levels and providing the acoustic guitar that belongs in the time of witchcraft and religious zealots, the horrors and images of Medieval court brought to life with these acoustic moments.
From the swelling. 60’s punch of The Power Of Eve, through the heavy 70’s stomp of the title track, to the slithering, progressive power of Mét Agwe, the organ drenched Alucarda, and the doom of King Of Damnation. Trivia Goddess is the most powerful record yet from Year Of The Goat, I hope there’s not too much of a wait for the next one! 9/10
Nord Electric - Loneliness For Sale (Outer Battery Records) [Rich Piva]
I am a big fan of the band Ride and their blend of Brit Pop and Shoegaze they perfected in the early 1990s. Drive Blind is one of my favorite songs of that decade and the first three full lengths and early EPs are essential listening.
From the swelling. 60’s punch of The Power Of Eve, through the heavy 70’s stomp of the title track, to the slithering, progressive power of Mét Agwe, the organ drenched Alucarda, and the doom of King Of Damnation. Trivia Goddess is the most powerful record yet from Year Of The Goat, I hope there’s not too much of a wait for the next one! 9/10
Nord Electric - Loneliness For Sale (Outer Battery Records) [Rich Piva]
I am a big fan of the band Ride and their blend of Brit Pop and Shoegaze they perfected in the early 1990s. Drive Blind is one of my favorite songs of that decade and the first three full lengths and early EPs are essential listening.
One half of the dual vocalist/guitarists duo from Ride has a new project, as Nord Electric brings Mark Gardener back and bringing us some more beautiful rock that he perfected with his original band.
Loneliness For Sale is a four song EP that shows Gardener still knows how to craft the perfect alt pop song and leverage his influences and his experience in Ride to give us some more of what he does best. The title track is straight up Jesus And Mary Chain with way less fuzz but just as much melody and beauty.
The songs on the EP are expertly recorded and sound so big while also being so straightforward. Track two, Traces, leans towards straight up 90s indie pop with great harmonized vocals and is catchy as hell, which from Gardener should be expected, and he delivers. This song has serious Sloan vibes to it too, which is always a good thing.
When Are You Gonna Wake Up slows down the pace and ratchets up some of the shoegaze side of Gardener, but never getting too sleepy or fuzzy, with a big chorus and great vocals. Dagen H is an instrumental that has some Eno to it; more Krautrock than sleepy shoegaze or pop. It is very cool but a weird way to end the four song EP, at least from a flow standpoint.
I am excited to hear with Nord Electric does next. Outer Battery Records work with Gardener and all the Swervedriver stuff they are putting out is wonderful and I hope it continues. For now, Loneliness For Sale is worth your time if dreamy brit pop from a legend of the genre is your thing. 7/10
Heruvim – Mercator (Redefining Darkness Records) [Spike]
If Mercator were a map, it wouldn’t chart borders or seas, it would sketch out scars, the kind carved deep into history and into people. Heruvim, split between members in Ukraine and abroad, don’t make their context a gimmick, but you can hear it etched into every tremolo line, every furious rhythm. This record is a statement, half an hour of atmosphere and aggression bound together so tightly that you feel the weight of it pressing down.
The opener, Mysterium Tremendum, doesn’t waste a second. It’s a plunge straight into the abyss, guitars jagged but strangely luminous, the kind of track that grabs you by the chest before you’ve had time to breathe. From there the record never really lets go, Nulla Res stalks forward with slower menace, only to be torn open by the urgency of Gnosis and Arammu, which hammer with a focus that reminded me a little of early Death, but refracted through something far more cinematic and dreamlike.
Listening on headphones I found myself drawn into the layers tucked between the riffs, ghostly notes flickering just under the chaos, like whispers breaking through static. Switch to speakers, and it’s the opposite: low-end shaking the room with the whole thing feeling like a physical assault. That contrast is part of Mercator’s power, it lives both in the detail and in the sheer blunt force.
The interlude VIII almost feels like a trick of memory, a brief flicker before the title track arrives. Mercator builds with a terrible patience, pushing tension to breaking point before unleashing its full weight. And then the closer, Lacrimae Rerum, is pure devastation, cascading riffs and surging vocals that left me with the image of standing in the aftermath of fire, not knowing what could possibly grow in the ash.
What struck me most, though, wasn’t just the aggression. It was the way Heruvim can turn their chaos into something strangely beautiful. There are riffs here that transported me back to gigs in the 90s, amps trembling and sweat on concrete floors, but there are also passages that felt like standing outside during a bombardment, listening to a battered walkman and clinging to sound as a lifeline. That’s not an easy balance to strike, but Mercator manages it.
Bleak, unflinching, but never without purpose, this is a debut that plays like a battle cry carved into steel, Heruvim have turned survival into sound. 9/10
Unpunished - Echoes Of History (Self Release) [Sasa]
The 5-piece Canadian metalcore band formed in 2018 and have released an EP this year, titled Echoes Of History. Pierre-Luc Defoy and Dean Pavici on guitars, Alex Brochu-Meloche as the bass player, Justin Lefebvre on drums (and producer) and Jean-Christophe Magnan as the vocalist. The EP consists of 5 tracks that totals up to just over 24 minutes, having themes of betrayal, humanity, rage, and despair.
The EP ranges from anger towards society for crumbling and losing their humanity, to someone who has felt betrayal by those they love and trusted. The track Plague Of Our Race really stuck out to me the lyrics are a call out to events that are currently happening, you can hear the disappoint and anger from the fast-paced instrumentals to the vengeful and fiery vocals and words from Jean-Christophe. The drums are racing with the guitars to create this powerful rage; it definitely has that deathcore viciousness to it and probably has to be my favourite track on the EP.
Burn The Traitors has to be the heaviest track within this EP as it has no clean vocals at all. The song starts off with some heavy drumbeats and fast paced guitar riffs, it has that melodic metalcore element to it during the breakdowns, it is definitely an intensive track. It centres around betrayal and pain that has been inflected by a person you once believed trustworthy. The guitar solos in both As Water Fills My Lungs and Shattered In Disarray are honestly so well done and put in perfectly to blend in with the rest of songs. These two tracks share themes of betrayal, hurt and anger which is a running theme within this EP further portraying their message with just 5 songs. It takes out on a whirlwind of emotional wreckage.
Echoes Of History is definitely furiously speedy and brutal, yet it is still melodic asking it hard to pinpoint what set genre this band is. The band states that the artwork was inspired “by the ouroboros, an Egyptian symbol of enteral cycle of time but with an almost empty hourglass in the middle signifying that humanity keeps repeating the same mistake.” I love the artwork as it catches your eye so easily without having a lot going on, especially the meaning behind it and how it is a description of what the EP about rather than it be something completely different.
Although the band may seem constantly serious and melancholic, they did have fun when producing and making this EP, they even had fun when naming the demos with funny names to joke with Jean-Christophe, for example they called one of the demos “JC’s hip replacement surgery” due to him being the oldest. The EP is definitely Unpunished’s best work as of yet, the ep does consist of their original songs being remastered making the EP not entirely unique through out, but it is amazingly put with instrumentals having influence from metalcore, death/core and melodic death.
You can definitely see that the band members each have their own sort of style and personality, it makes them even more distinctive and enables them to make something different to what we already know and heard. I can not wait to see what Unpunished will do next as they are still in their early works but have genuinely done so well with this new release. 7/10
I am excited to hear with Nord Electric does next. Outer Battery Records work with Gardener and all the Swervedriver stuff they are putting out is wonderful and I hope it continues. For now, Loneliness For Sale is worth your time if dreamy brit pop from a legend of the genre is your thing. 7/10
Heruvim – Mercator (Redefining Darkness Records) [Spike]
If Mercator were a map, it wouldn’t chart borders or seas, it would sketch out scars, the kind carved deep into history and into people. Heruvim, split between members in Ukraine and abroad, don’t make their context a gimmick, but you can hear it etched into every tremolo line, every furious rhythm. This record is a statement, half an hour of atmosphere and aggression bound together so tightly that you feel the weight of it pressing down.
The opener, Mysterium Tremendum, doesn’t waste a second. It’s a plunge straight into the abyss, guitars jagged but strangely luminous, the kind of track that grabs you by the chest before you’ve had time to breathe. From there the record never really lets go, Nulla Res stalks forward with slower menace, only to be torn open by the urgency of Gnosis and Arammu, which hammer with a focus that reminded me a little of early Death, but refracted through something far more cinematic and dreamlike.
Listening on headphones I found myself drawn into the layers tucked between the riffs, ghostly notes flickering just under the chaos, like whispers breaking through static. Switch to speakers, and it’s the opposite: low-end shaking the room with the whole thing feeling like a physical assault. That contrast is part of Mercator’s power, it lives both in the detail and in the sheer blunt force.
The interlude VIII almost feels like a trick of memory, a brief flicker before the title track arrives. Mercator builds with a terrible patience, pushing tension to breaking point before unleashing its full weight. And then the closer, Lacrimae Rerum, is pure devastation, cascading riffs and surging vocals that left me with the image of standing in the aftermath of fire, not knowing what could possibly grow in the ash.
What struck me most, though, wasn’t just the aggression. It was the way Heruvim can turn their chaos into something strangely beautiful. There are riffs here that transported me back to gigs in the 90s, amps trembling and sweat on concrete floors, but there are also passages that felt like standing outside during a bombardment, listening to a battered walkman and clinging to sound as a lifeline. That’s not an easy balance to strike, but Mercator manages it.
Bleak, unflinching, but never without purpose, this is a debut that plays like a battle cry carved into steel, Heruvim have turned survival into sound. 9/10
Unpunished - Echoes Of History (Self Release) [Sasa]
The 5-piece Canadian metalcore band formed in 2018 and have released an EP this year, titled Echoes Of History. Pierre-Luc Defoy and Dean Pavici on guitars, Alex Brochu-Meloche as the bass player, Justin Lefebvre on drums (and producer) and Jean-Christophe Magnan as the vocalist. The EP consists of 5 tracks that totals up to just over 24 minutes, having themes of betrayal, humanity, rage, and despair.
The EP ranges from anger towards society for crumbling and losing their humanity, to someone who has felt betrayal by those they love and trusted. The track Plague Of Our Race really stuck out to me the lyrics are a call out to events that are currently happening, you can hear the disappoint and anger from the fast-paced instrumentals to the vengeful and fiery vocals and words from Jean-Christophe. The drums are racing with the guitars to create this powerful rage; it definitely has that deathcore viciousness to it and probably has to be my favourite track on the EP.
Burn The Traitors has to be the heaviest track within this EP as it has no clean vocals at all. The song starts off with some heavy drumbeats and fast paced guitar riffs, it has that melodic metalcore element to it during the breakdowns, it is definitely an intensive track. It centres around betrayal and pain that has been inflected by a person you once believed trustworthy. The guitar solos in both As Water Fills My Lungs and Shattered In Disarray are honestly so well done and put in perfectly to blend in with the rest of songs. These two tracks share themes of betrayal, hurt and anger which is a running theme within this EP further portraying their message with just 5 songs. It takes out on a whirlwind of emotional wreckage.
Echoes Of History is definitely furiously speedy and brutal, yet it is still melodic asking it hard to pinpoint what set genre this band is. The band states that the artwork was inspired “by the ouroboros, an Egyptian symbol of enteral cycle of time but with an almost empty hourglass in the middle signifying that humanity keeps repeating the same mistake.” I love the artwork as it catches your eye so easily without having a lot going on, especially the meaning behind it and how it is a description of what the EP about rather than it be something completely different.
Although the band may seem constantly serious and melancholic, they did have fun when producing and making this EP, they even had fun when naming the demos with funny names to joke with Jean-Christophe, for example they called one of the demos “JC’s hip replacement surgery” due to him being the oldest. The EP is definitely Unpunished’s best work as of yet, the ep does consist of their original songs being remastered making the EP not entirely unique through out, but it is amazingly put with instrumentals having influence from metalcore, death/core and melodic death.
You can definitely see that the band members each have their own sort of style and personality, it makes them even more distinctive and enables them to make something different to what we already know and heard. I can not wait to see what Unpunished will do next as they are still in their early works but have genuinely done so well with this new release. 7/10
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