Mining Metal
Mining Metal: Best Underground Metal of October 2023
Highlighting standout underground metal releases each month. Mining Metal: Afterbirth, Auriferous Flame, Dream Unending/Worm, Ὁπλίτης, Laster, The Lion’s Daughter, OWDWYR, and Vertebra Atlantis Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey
Mining Metal: Top 10 Underground Metal Albums of 2022
I sit here writing this intro essay crouched at a too-small desk, my fiance’s mother’s childhood desk, huddled beneath a blanket in my fiance’s childhood room placing the finishing touches on our list just before Christmas Eve. My body is currently scratched and busted up; I have a bad hematoma on my left arm from elbow to armpit, with deep scratches on that forearm while my left hip and right elbow feel jacked to hell. That is because last night, after bursting out of my apartment door to tell a neighbor to quiet down after they paced screaming at the top of their lungs for over two hours, I found myself locked out of my apartment with my 12-year old dog locked inside. So, I attempted what any grown man left on their own in such a situation would: I attempted to scale my apartment buildin...
Mining Metal: Critical Extravasation, Cryptae, Dream Unending, Elder, Fell Ruin, Feminizer, Spider God, and Tchornobog, and Abyssal
Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence contributing writers Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts. Peter Griffin once asked, “Where are those good old-fashioned values on which we used to rely?” While he was talking about entertainment at large when he posed that question, stroking his inappropriately-shaped chin, it’s debatable if he’d ask heavy metal, the genre that holds onto its good old-fashioned values with a Mankind-Mandible-Claw-like grip, that same query. This is to say that metal is laden with refinement more than drastic innovation. Now, this is actually good in that metal has arguably ...
Mining Metal: Abduction, Daeva, Faceless Burial, Forlesen, God Alone, MAL, The Otolith, and SUMAC/Keiji Haino
Every month, I could write to you all about how the selection process for this column is hard. When you first sit down to do something like this, there’s a hunger to write about all the bands that really get your engines going, to finally get to make people outside of your circle hear the things you’ve rehearsed in your head to pitch all this music you love to others. But as the months (and now years) creep on, you start finding that, well, those bands keep putting out music and a lot of it has stayed pretty good, but now new bands have joined the pack, and oh that’s a new label, and I’ve never even heard of this scene before, and wow these classic bands came back and put out a really special release, and… So sometimes the choices are less based on pure quality as other paradigms. One of t...
Mining Metal: An Abstract Illusion, Barn, Floating, Lunar Spells, Mamaleek, Miscreance, Toadeater, and Toughness
As the first summer this decade that felt like a true summer winds down, metalheads rejoice as the seasons turn in our favor. We trade in our black cutoff death metal shirts for black long-sleeved death metal shirts, battle jackets give way to actual jackets (denim and patch-filled, of course), cut-off cargos transform into jeans while combat boots…actually, who knows what metalheads wear to shows these days, though Dave Mustaine is hopefully still kicking about in his Nike Air Tech Challenge IIs. The point is, temperatures will start dropping throughout most of the world soon, and inside those cold weather months is peak metal mise-en-scene. The black metal that champions either Scandanavian pastures or American fauna usually comes with a wintery tone, though that’s not to say that fall d...
Mining Metal: The Best Underground Albums We Missed in 2021
Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence writers Joseph Schafer and Langdon Hickman. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts. Inevitably, we come across albums that we’d like to cover but don’t. More than eight good underground metal albums come out during most months, even when the scope of “underground” is narrowed to labels without dedicated distribution. But not every month. January is typically a fallow season for metal records, as people recuperate from the holiday season and begin planning their upcoming year. Because we dedicated December to our annual best-of list, we decided to spend this column covering a few bits and bobs we mis...
Mining Metal: Top 10 Underground Metal Albums of 2021
Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence writers Joseph Schafer and Langdon Hickman. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts. For the December edition, Joseph and Langdon pick their Top 10 Underground Metal Albums of 2021. We thought this year was going to be the mother lode — and it was. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, we predicted that many bands working on albums would hold onto them for a year, expecting the global crisis to end in time for a celebratory 2021 album drop and profitable summer/fall tour. Obviously, some of those predictions fell though, though we did get big summer festivals like Psycho Las Vegas returning, and ...
Mining Metal: Abstracter, Conjureth, Fire-Toolz, Kowloon Walled City, Light of the Morning Star, The Silver, Sunless, Worm
Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence writers Joseph Schafer and Langdon Hickman. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts. “Listen to them, children of the night, what music they make.” Even casual film buffs probably recognize that line, and not just because Tribulation titled an album after it. It was spoken by Bela Lugosi in the titular role of Dracula in the 1931 film. If you’ve never seen the movie, now’s the time, since it’s Halloween, and thanks to streaming it’s more readily available than probably any other film of its generation. But if you get a chance, watch the Spanish-language version, too. Moodier and more luxurious in its...
Mining Metal: Beyond Grace, Blames God, Centenary, Defacement, Formless Body, Replicant, Succumb, Wraith
Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence writers Joseph Schafer and Langdon Hickman. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts. Metal is eternal. While its popularity ebbs and flows in the macro, its genres in the micro persist. A subgenre might experience a resurgence in popularity long after its progenitors have become elder statesmen — thrash exploded again long after its mid-’80s heyday in the early ’00s, for example. Even minuscule representations of a genre might persist after its innovators metamorphose. For example, Carcass have a new album out this month, one that sounds nothing like the grindcore permutation of the group from their ...
Mining Metal: Alchemy of Flesh, Diskord, Filth Is Eternal, Hooded Menace, Oxygen Destroyer, Qrixkuor, Sculptured, Wormwitch
Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence writers Joseph Schafer and Langdon Hickman. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts. I’d hoped to be done with obituaries for a while after last month’s one-two punch of Metal Church’s Mike Howe and Slipknot’s Joey Jordison. No such luck. As I’m writing this, the metal world received news that Eric Wagner, vocalist of The Skull and former singer for Trouble had passed away from complications related to COVID-19. He was 62 years old. Advertisement Related Video Wagner had a singular voice and lyrical approach. He used his warbling upper register without apology, channeling the rough-around-the edges t...
Mining Metal: Dungeon Serpent, Hellish Form, Lantlos, Mesa, Midwife, Mordred, Night Crowned, Sallow Moth
As I write this introduction, I’ve just found out about the passing of Mike Howe, vocalist of the criminally underrated band Metal Church. He was 55 years old — too young. The last time I memorialized a musician in this column, it was Entombed vocalist L.G. Petrov. Howe’s story differs from Petrov’s in two critical ways. First, because Petrov’s passing was unfortunate but expected, whereas Howe’s was surprising. Second, while Petrov and Entombed had gone their separate ways, the band had achieved notoriety commensurate with their artistic output. In contrast, Howe had been an active member of Metal Church at the time of his death. Despite 40 years of existence, the band isn’t as well known as they deserve to be. Metal Church was one of the Seattle-area ’80s heavy metal bands that, alongsid...
Mining Metal: Take Over and Destroy, Avtotheism, Boss Keloid, Code, Pharaoh, Siderean, Witch Cross, Witch Vomit
Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence writers Joseph Schafer and Langdon Hickman. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many anticipated that a year or more without touring would prompt musicians to create a surplus of material to be released afterward. Now that America’s becoming increasingly vaccinated, that prediction looks to be panning out. Not only are there a slew of spectacular releases on the horizon (and I don’t just mean Carcass, though their new song “Kelly’s Meat Emporium” is a must-listen), but many of them come from bands that never broke up but also haven’t been particularly active, eith...
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