Prior to the release of their second EP ‘Hymn of The Vulture’, I Am The Law shared stages with Superjoint Ritual and Crowbar. They also cite Pantera and Lamb of God among their main influences, so, taking these facts on board, you could probably take an educated guess at what these Nashville based Southern metal overlords sound like before even hitting the play button.
…And you’d be absolutely right.
Portuguese hardcore band Don’t Disturb My Circles released their debut EP in 2009. The EP didn’t receive a lot of overseas press, but nevertheless the band continued to work hard promoting their work on their home turf. By 2015, they’d had shared stages with thrash legends Sepultura and Obituary, Cancer Bats and Dillinger Escape Plan, a band with whom their 2018 EP shares a few parallels.
‘Advorsus’, the 2016 debut from UK sludge fiends Kurokuma, was easily one of the heaviest things to be released that year. Since then, the band have played various live shows, one of which was released digitally for posterity; they’ve contributed to a split release with sludge pioneers Conan and even found time to record a Kraftwerk cover. Nobody expected that. With one thing and another, even though it has only been two years, a proper studio follow up from Kurokuma seemed to be a long time coming.
In 2016, Allfather unleashed ‘Bless The Earth With Fire’, a hulking brute of an album that valued riffs over chorus hooks, resulting in a record that presented the very best in sludge metal recorded on a DIY budget. Extensive gigging followed, including bills shared with the mighty Morag Tong. Over the next eighteen months, the Kentish band drove big riffs into peoples’ skulls from small stages whilst simultaneously teasing about working on new studio material.
The landscape of hard rock music in 1988 looked very different, in comparison, to that of a decade earlier. When Saxon began their recording career in the late 70s, rock and metal were solely the reserves of the readers of Sounds magazine, the devotees of the Radio One Friday Rock Show and festival goers. By the late 80s, it was no longer considered such a niche genre: bands like Europe and Poison had scored chart success on both sides of the Atlantic; Def Leppard‘s ‘Hysteria’ was one of the biggest selling albums of the era and Guns N’ Roses were on their way to becoming a worldwide, stadium filling phenomenon. Whitesnake‘s ‘1987’ was selling by the bucketload to a broad demographic and even Metallica – a band that only a couple of years earlier seemed entirely marginal – were on the cusp of UK singles chart success, and yet Saxon, in terms of commercial success, appeared to be floundering.