Let’s kick off with a useless quiz fact: they’re named after a Venom song, not after the same-named Bruce Willis franchise.

We’re dealing with an old-school inspired outfit Die Hard. On most of their band promo pictures they look like bunch of black metal fetishists, but actually Die Hard play a raw and balls to the wall blend of death and thrash. They’re inspired by bands such as the above mentioned Venom, Sodom, Bathory and Celtic Frost, but classic – both in terms of their death and thrash metal elements – as the band may sound, they’ve only been around since 2005. Moreover, with their jagged and unsanded classic sound and hate and Satan-inspired lyrics, they really couldn’t have come from any other country than Sweden. Indeed, this is a clear-cut case of Swedeath!

A whole bunch of news has been coming to us over the past few weeks, and in there is something interesting for everybody: we have new videos, album teasers and new release dates coming up!

Solvet Saeclum is marked by a most remarkable album cover; every time I play this record, the hellish space art manages to keep me captive for at least a few minutes. The laughing skeleton and the serpentine Communist, lifting his red flag high, have a charming effect on both eyes and mind, while the large planets and numerous rockets make for a bombastic, hellish landscape.

Stylistically, Solvet Saeclum is a very interesting, as their brand of Technical Death Metal is quite unique. Many Tech Death-outfits, like Gorod and Ascariasis, have a tone, cold as ice, while Ophidian I literally burn through forty minutes of fire and brimstone, spread about over nine infernal songs.

Since the rise of Deathcore in the ‘00s, I’ve been following the various strains of it with mild interest, seeing it develop towards melodic, djenty or brutal tendencies. Firmly in this latter camp, US quintet Labyrinthe have unleashed The Depths of Hell this year, their début for Tribunal.

Taking notes from acts such as Suicide Silence and Carnifex, the band go one stage further and incorporate some of modern Brutal Death Metal’s characteristics, taking Ingested’s Surpassing the Boundaries of Human Suffering as a navigation point. As you can imagine, this record is just a little bit heavy.

Apparently named after a fictional castle from a series of fantasy books by English author Mervyn L. Peake, the Gormenghast under our scrutiny is a no-nonsense Death Metal outfit from the Russian city of Ekaterinburg. The now five-headed, but four-headed at the time of recording – band has been active since 2008 and has released its debut record through Stygian Crypt Records earlier this year.

Resist or Serve is an album offering dark, hellish Death Metal, much in the vein of the old school. That means blast beats, crunchy and chunky guitars and completely incomprehensible vocals.

This is a DMB exclusive and we’re very happy about that. And proud. And honored! And it makes our cock tickle.

Ever since I discovered Red Descending’s Fragile Nation music video I’ve been keeping a close eye on the band and in touch with front man and bassist Bernard Shaw. An interview I had with him back in early 2010 can be found here.

Skip to the summer of last year, when the band released their Kingdoms album, their second full-length since they started the band in 2003. I did an extensive review of the album and praised its alternating nature between darkness and light, a struggle that is omnipresent throughout the record’s compositions. Great record and one you should definitely check out if you haven’t already!

Shambless. That sounds terrible, like Tinky Winky’s gay friend, or a Pokémon character perhaps. But actually it’s just ‘shambles’ with an additional ‘S’.

‘Cause that’s what the band started out as, as Shambles, back in 1997. The Bulgarians do a piece of Symphonic Death Metal with a medieval / fantasy atmosphere. In their own words, they were influenced by ”early Amorphis, Haggard and even Summoning” and gained a ”cult status” in their home country. With Menra Eneidalen, first released in 2011 and now rereleased globally through Stygian Crypt, their third studio album, they deepen their lyrical and musical concepts of Elfish mythology.

A little lesson in Northern Mythology: Fenrir was a son of god of fire Loki and Hrimthur (a giant tribe) Angrboda. Incest was a common good in those days, because the dude looked nothing like a human or giant, but like a humongous wolf instead. He was bad-tempered and ill-willed and so the gods thought up a plan to tie him up. After wolfman broke a couple of conventional chains they tried it with a dwarf chain. The chain was called Gleipnir and was made of six ingredients of varying questionable existence: the breath of a fish, the beard of a woman, saliva of a bird, roots of a mountain, the sound of a cat’s paws and tendons of a bear. Týr, the god of war, lost his right hand during the event as Fenrir bit it off.

There are more details to this story, but you’ll have to dig through Wikipedia for those yourself. They key message here is that Fenrir got pissed. And apparently he still is, because he’s still in chains. Must be looking for revenge. Long story short: cool title for a Death Metal song, an EP and a band: Wrath of Fenrir, all released last month.

After a bunch of shorter / smaller releases and a debut full-length called Breed Deadness Blood in 2008, Necrovation apparently finally developed an album worthy of their own name.

The band, from Kristianstad, Sweden, is active since 2003 and produces some very traditional sweaty armpits, beer and smoke Death Metal, a.k.a. Old-School! In a time in which Metal is heavily commercializing it’s a good thing some bands remain close to the roots of Extreme Metal. Necrovation (the album) offers a selection of nine songs of ear punishment in the traditional Death Metal way. Proper Swedeath!

A good deal of time ago – we were writing October 2010 – I featured a band called Atrum Aequora in a little potpourri post. Atrum Aequora is a female fronted Melodeath outfit from Melbourne, Australia, and it hit the spot because of its contrast between female cleans and grinding, technical Metal.

Since that time the band has gone through a few line-up changes – guitarist-vocalist Adam Donnellan left the band for example – and worked on a new demo, simply titled 2012 Demo, on which Grinding the Remains, the song we included in our earlier post, is a recurring guest. Happy to give it a quick spin!