Beneath the land of warriors and magicians where Marco resides and compiles best of traditional heavy metal releases of the past, are the moldy catacombs where darker parts of Ride Into Glory dwell and the occult tunes echo. Here in our coven, we wanted to make a list of best releases of the year of the plague (Best of 2020).
Magnus Venator comes out officially on 4th of September, 2020 by Floga Records. Now you can hear it, an exercise in modern Hellenic black metal, in its entirety here as a Ride Into Glory exclusive and read an interview with the band’s guitarist Astrous.
With Anamneses, Alexandros’s intention is to create a bridge between the past and the future of Macabre Omen. Although this is a daunting task to do with just one song, Anamneses from the Past (Sirens Calling) does just that.
Necromantia are one of the more curious and immediately striking bands in black metal. The Hellenic BM scene was, outside of a couple outliers in the Scandinavian countries (eg Dissection, Immortal etc), the most traditional heavy metal of the bunch – after all, it is why RiG has a big ‘ol primer on the scene. Of the big bands, Necromantia is perhaps the most musically “traditional metal” of the bunch, while also being musically one of the more radical bands of their brood.
Flamekeeper is the natural result of the journey from Italy to Sweden for Marco S., the main person behind occult black/death metal band Demonomancy and also The Devil’s Mark Studio. Carrying Mediterranean influences like Necromantia with him, he arrived at the epic metal masterpiece, Hammerheart by Bathory. The debut effort of Flamekeeper is an approach to that Hammerheart sound that is rooted more in black metal in spirit, yet with plenty of clean heavy metal sounding sections.
They have been there at the dawn of Hellenic black metal in the early 90s. They are here now. Varathron seem to have no intention to let this flame die.
Reverse engineering is the deconstruction of an object to reveal the components, patterns, or essence of it. It is the process of analyzing an aircraft piece when there is no documentation available to make out the chemical and physical structure of it, or tracing back to the source code of a software when it was lost using the bits of the machine code sent to the processor, or breaking down Hellenic black metal to extract the pure epic heavy metal essence of it.
The Greeks who would become the prominent members of what we call the Hellenic black metal scene experimented with different sounds before reaching their final shape. Some of them started their journey playing raw, aggressive grindcore and spent years chasing a contract for their debut. Others tried out the early death metal sound before taking part in one of the cornerstone splits of the country. Through experimentation and desire to find their unique approach to “evil metal”, Greeks cultivated their own sound, which resulted in what could be considered the most important wave of Hellenic black metal releases around 1992.