Are we still spinning tapes here? Of course we are! And we're starting the haul of my latest bunch with one of the many reasons I haven't even decided what my TOP 25 albums of the year are, because this is yet another burning hot candidate...
AGRICULTURE - The Spiritual Sound (2025)
I recently listened to most of the new Deafhaven album. And in shocking contrast to my previous experiences I actually liked it. So that kind of ruined what I wanted to say about the work at hand here, which was that Agriculture actually redeem what Deafheaven promise... Well, at least they're still doing it better.
"The Spiritual Sound" is made of Black Metal and Shoegaze, of hopeful celestial melodies and wild Rock star shredding. It comes pure, raw, radical and in your face, but it can also be quiet and fragile. It's beautifully brutal and brutally beautiful, half-way between Alcest and Boris. If you understand the term beyond a specific subculture and music genre, Agriculture are most definitely Punk.
This is a serious work, but it's so much fun to listen to! The wild energy it radiates has such a cleasing yet life-affirming quality - just an album unlike any other. And surely one of the prime Metal releases of 2025.
The tape looks good, I especially dig the back cover. Putting the track titles only onto the cassette shell itself is a minor annoyance though.
AGRICULTURE - Agriculture (2023)
While I was ordering "The Spiritual Sound" it was a no-brainer to also get the Californians' 2023 debut album. Relatively speaking the
Ecstatic Black Metal on the self-titled "Agriculture" may not take as many detours in style and intensity yet, but the difference is actually not that huge. All the trademarks including super sparsely instrumented ballads and the brute yet perfect production are already in place.
Other than its successor, which only has
Emma Ruth Rundle on its final track, the debut even features several guest musicians on violin, saxophone (hey, it's
Patrick Shiroishi!) and lap steel guitar. So both albums have their unique details. And while yes,
Agriculture are even better today, this shit already fucking rules!
TERZIJ DE HORDE - Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone (2025)
We're not leaving (Post) Black Metal territory yet, but we're moving from
The Flenser to
Tartarus Records, and from the US west coast to the west of Europe with the Dutch steamroller
Terzij De Horde.
"Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone" contains more and shorter tracks than their last 2022 album
"On One Of These, I Am Your Enemy" and adds to a ten minutes longer total playing time. A little over fourty minutes still aren't
Swans dimensions, but for the angry ferocious high-speed assault this group delivers it's really more than enough.
With a vocal performance closer to Hardcore than to Black Metal, this album feels seriously pissed off - and the melodic layers in the killer guitar riffs are not designed to tame, yet rather to amplify that relentless, never pausing anger.
An album with long and winding song titles like "A Hammer To The Great Matter Of Birth And Death", "The All-Consuming Work Of The Soul's Foreclosure" or "Justice Is Not Enough To leave The House Of Modernity" of course deserves a seperate booklet for its lyrics. This comes with the tape in one of those
Tartarus-typical black deluxe boxes with golden hotfoil print. Nice.
I don't know if it's just my copy of this edition of 100, but it features the classic switcheroo with sides A and B being interchanged. No biggie, shit happens. The music of course still absolutely rips!
UBOA & WHITEHORSE - The Dissolution Of Eternity (2025)
If Black Metal is too light and upbeat for you, Tartarus Records also has something more malicious for you with this Australian split tape of artists who really give down under a double meaning.
Side A features two tracks of nasty life-hostile Sludge from Whitehorse. Slow, deep and soul-crushing their Doom strikes with inhumane vocals, crawling killer riffs and great supportive electronic effects, as well as a giant drum sound. These two songs are surely among the best of this genre released this year. I assume it has something to do with line-up changes at the time, that these recordings from 2017 had to lie dormant for years. Good this sick shit is out there now!
Still not brutal enough? Enter Harsh Noise artist Uboa with five recent tracks on side B! She starts off with flavours of hardly and then even less musical mayhem, filled with tons of tension and destructive expression. The interesting turn however happens first with the piano interlude "Dreamwalker, Fuck I Miss You" and then the shoegazy "Pareidolia Shadow", both drowned in Ambient sounds and Noise, before "The Apocalypse Of True Love" summons the whole spectrum of both beautiful and uncomfortable textures in Uboa's repertoire and even evolves into a Post Rock hymn for a while - before descending into hell and finding peace there. Cathartic.
NOIR NOIR - Black Curtain / Divine Swelling (2016/2022/2025)
We're continuing with another solo artist, Noir Noir from Spain, who also incorporates Electronic Noise into his sound, but all in all leans more into Industrial, als well as Dark Wave, while being rooted in Death and Black Metal. This cassette released by Sentient Ruins Laboratories combines two EPs from 2016 and 2022, thus giving us a good overview of the range of low-fi raw and rather polished majestic noises. Be ready for some extreme shifts! This is a weird one. But it's dark, double dark, one could even say. And definitely not your ideal soundtrack for going to bed.
While the outburst of drum computer Old School Black Metal in the middle of these apocalyptic soundscapes still confuses me a bit, as a whole - or the sum of two wholes if you will - "Black Curtain / Divine Swelling" is as evil as it gets and a pretty powerful and overwhelming experience.
RITUAL ASCENSION - Profanation of the Adamic Covenant (2025)
This next ejection of Dissonant Death Metal and Doom has already been reviewed by me
back in February, when it came out. But as so often with
Sentient Ruin releases it took a while until the tape was available within Europe and found its way onto my shopping bag.
Since my opinion about this album hasn't changed, I could only repeat myself here.
Ritual Ascension's filthy journey into the swamp is still as foul, mouldy and ghoulish as ten months ago. Some listeners may have decomposed already, so my advise comes too late for them, but I suggest at least one thorough shower after listening.
TEMPÊTE SOLAIRE - La Précession Des Équinoxes (2025)
Last but most definitely not least a tape I bought at this year's last show for me, which was
Thisquietarmy x Otay:onii. This is the second release of
Eric Quach's bass, drums and saxophone trio
Tempête Solaire.
Even bolder than on
"Heliospheric Dialogues" Quach,
Eric Craven and
Elyze Venne-Deshaies are exploring their explosive take on Free Jazz, which includes traditional Jazz trio aethetics as well as broader Fusion and Post Rock sounds, electronic effects, Drone textures, doom-ish heaviness, Punk, Prog, Ambient and Noise. It's a wild mixture that comes together much more natural than one would assume and even in its most abstract and experimental passages like during the seventh track "Manicouagan" always stays enganging. A brilliant album!
Fuck yeah, what a killer split release! On side A Whitehorse pummel you down with their misanthropic Sludge powered by awesome riffs and seemingly recorded in a giant dystopian dome of torture. And that was only the warm-up for the trip through psychological hell and back - with surprising moments of remembering the existence of sunlight - by Noise artist Uboa.
