fiends.io

In May of 2010, long before I was a music writer of any kind, my father and I read the tragic and gut-wrenching news that was the loss of hard rock and heavy metal’s most beloved vocalist [...]

This live album is a documentation of Brit mope-doom-rock titans Paradise Lost's livestream from last year, recorded not in an actual mill, which I for some reason can't stop imagining, but instead at The Mill [...]

Death metal can seem a crowded marketplace at times, but bands as distinctive as COGNIZANCE generally tend to rise to the top. Ultimately, the genre has become an intermittent battle between the instinctively creative and the lazily generic, and [...]

Miserable times demand a miserable response, and A PALE HORSE NAMED DEATH have firmly established themselves as the correct men for the job. With both LIFE OF AGONY and TYPE O NEGATIVE in his creative past, APHND mastermind Sal [...]

Perennially overlooked and criminally underrated, PARADOX are a thrash metal band of rare distinction, with one of the most consistent catalogues around. Thrash diehards will almost certainly be familiar with 1990's seminal "Heresy": a towering, exploratory concept work [...]

Quality, high energy NWOTHM effort from Brazil. "Battlecry" kicks off the ten song collection, an apt calling card for what's to follow: a mix of Iron Maiden and Teutonic influences, good stuff, all. Thumping bass line of "Soulchasers [...]

As summer begins to slowly fade into shorter days and colder nights here in America, I’m constantly in a state of awe whenever seasons change.1 Winds crispen with biting coolness, the skies turn a foreboding grey, everybody begins [...]

It seems that I was not the only one to like Driving Slow Motion‘s 2019 debut, Arda. That self-released piece of instrumental Tolkien worship appears to have scored the Fort Worth, Texas quintet a deserved label deal [...]

Expectations. We all have them, or have had them placed upon us, by parents, fans, and editors. Bands fall prey to expectations constantly, with fans most often demanding a band’s newest release be the same as their last [...]

Sort of odd, writing about a band who didn't enjoy life as "rock stars", let alone partake in any extra-curricular activities. This is the first English translation of the Finns' biography (originally penned, back in 2015, in [...]