imperium dekadenz

CANTO: Ne Obliviscaris, Imperium Dekadenz, Fit For a King, and More

CoreyLeave a comment


Ahhhhh, so it’s going to be one of THOSE weeks. Coolcoolcool.

“Ein Bier… bitte.”
– cmb

CANTO: Imperium Dekadenz, Drudkh, Withered, and More

CoreyLeave a comment


Today was weird. Full moons on voting day seems like a thing that shouldn’t be a thing.

  • Leading off, we have Drudkh, who are streaming All Belong to the Night a few days before its release. Give that a listen here. That album is officially out on November 11, this coming Friday, through Season of Mist.
  • A second item out of Season of Mist features Withered. The blackened death metal outfit has announced a headlining tour in December, covering a good chunk of the Southeast U.S. They’ll be supporting Verloren, which dropped back in 2020.
  • And then we have -(16)-, and their new track titled “Lane Splitter”. Into Dust drops on November 18 through Relapse Records, and their U.S. headlining tour kicks off at the end of this week. Good stuff all around.
  • Closing out, we have new material from one of my favorites, Imperium Dekadenz. Check out the video for “Memories… A Raging River” below, the first single taken from Into Sorrow Evermore. That new album will be out on January 20 through Napalm Records.

“Ein Bier… bitte.”
– cmb

The Nine Circles Playlist Vol. 94 (8.31.2019)

VincentLeave a comment

playlist - mixtape

We’re back again folks.  I don’t have much to say except that I’m grateful again for my colleagues and friends who pick up my weekly column when life gets in the way (go check out Corey’s Evcharist from this past week and witness his return to the throne).  This week has had some pretty amazing highs and some pretty serious lows but I’m grateful for the music that’s allowed me to hit the pause button on life along the way.  You’ll find some of our favorite stuff here that we’ve been jamming the last week, as usual, irrelevant of genre and release date constraints.  Just an honest look at what we here listen to in our down time.  Take a look and a listen below, and thanks for checking it out.

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– Vincent

CURSED IMAGERY: The Week in Album Art (August 30, 2019)

DanLeave a comment
cursed imagery

End of August already? Good lord. I hardly know where the time’s going anymore. Nevertheless, it’s late at night on Thursday because I put this off a bit, and — of course, and probably due to my tardiness — there’s a tremendous load of album art to dig into this week. We’ve got seven featured here in this post, and it could easily have been twice that amount, but for the lateness of the hour. So, let’s not waste any further time!

Continue reading →

Best of 2016: Dan’s List

Dan1 Comment

Nine Circles Best of 2016 Standard

So yeah, this year sure sucked in a lot of ways, didn’t it?

On a personal level…where to begin? My family said goodbye to our beloved dog, Bailey. I had a rough breakup at the end of April. I got into a deeper rut in my professional life than I’d ever experienced before, which culminated in me quitting my job and leaving New York. I also, briefly, quit Nine Circles. (You didn’t think I’d stay away for good though, did you?)

And that’s just my stuff! Beyond that…well, for starters, pretty much everyone died. Prince, Alan Rickman, Phife Dawg, Craig Sager…I mean, you kind of had to know 2016 was going to be shitty on that front after we lost David goddamn Bowie when the year was scarcely a week old. And that’s all to say nothing of the other shit: escalation of racial tensions across the country, continued apathy toward a changing climate, Christmas Eve / Day and New Year’s Eve / Day both falling on Saturdays and Sundays…it was a lot, man. Oh, and we also elected the personification of an Internet comment section to the presidency. That was neat.

In spite of all that, 2016 wound up being a goddamn banner year for metal. When I first started thinking about this list, I was envisioning maybe a Top 15 – but that quickly grew to a Top 25, and then to its current incarnation: a Top 50, with 20 “ranked” albums and 30 honorable mentions, not to mention EPs. It was just impossible to whittle it down any further; that’s how good metal was this year. Hell, I had a number of albums that featured in my mid-year list that didn’t even make it into the honorable mentions section of this one!

Make no mistake, this year would have felt exponentially shittier without all of those records. In times like these, cueing up a metal record that’s driving you bonkers, throwing your head back and howling at the moon kind of becomes essential to maintaining your sanity. And you know what? Sanity was maintained. (Well, mine at least…I dunno about America’s. All the more reason for America to start listening to more damn metal.)

This year may have thrown every possible pile of feces it could at us, but you know what? We made it through anyway. We’re still here and it’s not. And that’s nothing to turn our noses at. Here are the records that helped make that happen for me:  Continue reading →