traditional metal festival, Frost and Fire. Coinciding with the announcement of next June’s Irish installment of the fest Frost and Fireland, we sat down with festival founder, Night Demon frontman and Cirith Ungol bassist Jarvis Leatherby to talk about the festival’s history, as well as what he has in the works for next year.
An in-depth interview conducted by Karmazid with Atlantean Kodex’s Manuel Trummer.
Formed at the onset of popularity of the retro thrash movement in 2005, Nekromantheon have largely outlasted and outperformed all of the bands that were their peers through the rise and fall of thrash revivalism. Targeting from the start the deeper underground and always avoiding the party-heavy themes and aesthetic that plagued their contemporaries, Nekromantheon built a cult following for their intense velocity, witching thrash mentality, and incredibly high quality over the years. Nearly a full decade after 2012’s Rise, Vulcan Spectre, Nekromantheon have returned for their third album. Visions of Trismegistos largely carries on exactly where the band left off nine years prior.
Sword-and-sorcery fiction is heavily related with epic heavy metal. Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock are two of the first names a heavy metal fan might have in mind mainly because of characters like Conan the Barbarian and Elric of Melniboné.
When DMR Books started, they had this crazy idea of releasing an anthology of fantasy fiction including stories written by heavy metal musicians. Soon enough, more books followed and now we have the chance to talk with Dave Ritzlin of DMR Books about this story.
Just two years ago Stygian Crown released their impressive demo and now they’ve released their debut album and they’re already being enlisted for international festivals! This relative success isn’t for nothing. Although it’s still early to tell, it’s pretty clear that Stygian Crown’s self-titled debut is something special and likely to be one of the best traditional heavy metal records of 2020 with its specific brand of crushing epic doom reminiscent of Solitude Aeturnus and Capilla Ardiente. We caught up with Rhett A. Davis for an interview that you can read below!
The witch is back with a vengeance! Spanish heavy metal sorcerers Witchtower return with their third full-length, Witches’ Domain. As we discuss during this interview, on this album we will find the darkest and heaviest version of Witchtower so far, adding some new influences without ruining their personal essence at all.
Scald were a short-lived epic doom metal band from Russia with just one album to their name – Will of the Gods is Great Power. This singular album is among the best the genre has to offer and is a must listen. After decades of inactivity, the legendary Russian band are back with longtime fan and scene veteran Felipe of Procession and Capilla Ardiente as the frontman.
Ambush stand out among their peers as one of Sweden’s new premiere traditional heavy metal bands. Due to personal struggles and line-up shuffles, it’s been five long years since we’ve properly heard from these Swedes. They’re now finally set to release another album! Infidel is set for a March 13th release via High Roller Records. It follows the same rough outline as the first two Judas Priest and Accept inspired albums, but Infidel features a bit more experimentation in terms of both music and themes. We interviewed Oskar Jacobsson, Ambush’s vocalist, about the journey to the new album and the themes behind it.
Everything is a bad quality farce, but Ácido clears the path screaming, “Always Heavy Metal!” Ride Into Glory has the pleasure of interviewing two of the pioneer Metal bands from Latin America; Uruguay’s Ácido and Honduras’s Khaos. The bands may not be well known to those outside of the local scene or to those but the most die-hard Heavy Metal Hunters, but we hope this interview gives them more international attention.
Australia’s Road Warrior blazes bright and mean. Formed by members of enduring extreme metal bands, Road Warrior represents a new foray into a different kind of sonic destruction from what the band has done before in their other projects, channeling the muscular spirit of bands like Griffin and Jag Panzer with a healthy dose of Australian spirit. Power (review here), released near the end of 2018, is already becoming a recent favorite and left me hungry for more; fortunately, frontman and main songwriter Denny “Denimal” Blake has taken the time to answer some questions about the band for me.