THE DEVIL'S MONTH: February 2025
Rounding up some of the finest releases of the previous month - including Andy's picks too!
No need for any big introductions. You know what you’re here for already. February is the shortest month, but there’s been no shortage of awesome music. Just like any other month. Go see the huge pile of records our favourite record-flogging boys and girls at Mondo Negro have for you, for ample proof of that.
During this whole month, both José and Andy have been like that dog in the meme, saying “this is fine” while the world around us burns. But in their case, they just mean that the music they’re blasting is fine, and it really is. That’s why they’re sharing it with you. And you know, for a second there, those awesome tunes almost give us a little hope, even the most hopeless kind of music. In fact, especially the most hopeless kind of music. But we digress. Or do we?
Mantar
Post Apocalyptic Depression
(Metal Blade Records)
The only reason why there are six picks instead of the usual five this month is that I totally forgot Mantar’s new album was a February release. I realised it in the nick of time, when all the other stuff down there was already written, and it felt as unbearable to take one of them out as it did to leave ‘Post Apocalyptic Depression’ out. So fuck it - which, neatly enough, seems to also be pretty much the overall mood of this record. Though Mantar’s discography is essentially faultless, a pleasantly growing collection of raw, catchy, sludgy, devil-may-care bangers without exception, it has always felt at each turn like the duo was always looking for something new, or different. There seemed to always be an effort, even if unintentional and/or subconscious, to twist their relatively simple, punked-up approach to songwriting into something that would set each new release apart from the others. With success, mind you. It wasn’t a fruitless pursuit. But ‘Post Apocalyptic Depression’, on the other hand, looks and sounds more relaxed, more natural, as if the guys know they’ll just sound like Mantar and no one else anyway, so they just let it rip with fewer concerns than before. It’s probably something that comes with maturity, or age, or any of those clichés. But yeah, this bunch of songs feels loose and organic, like they were just having fun in th rehearsal room, without relinquishing any of their usual anthemic and raging properties. Or their emotional and lyrical weight, mind you - that album title does have a real meaning. Anyway, I have no idea if this little psychoanalysis I just did was really how the lovely pair of Hanno and Erinç felt or not, but after many, many listens of the thing (the main reason I forgot about it in the first place is that I’ve had it for a couple of months already, and it’s become so ingrained in my mind during this time that it feels like it’s already from 2023 or something - which also says a lot about both its immediacy and staying power), I can safely say that, if I’m going to whip out a Mantar record for a quick shot of musical adrenaline, and despite my profound love for most of their back catalogue, it’ll probably be this one that comes out of the shelf quicker these days. Make of that what you will.
Merciless
Behind The Realms Of The Dark
(Darkness Shall Rise Productions)
Merciless’ 1990 debut ‘The Awakening’ is as legendary as it gets - as pioneering and influential as Morbid or Nihilist’s equally iconic material from that era, for instance, as to what it meant for the Swedish extreme metal scene in general. It also happened to also be the very first release on a certain label called Deathlike Silence Productions. That’s right: cat. number ANTI-MOSH 001. Look it up if you need to, kids. Ferocious, ultra-violent death/thrash in execution, very much black metal in spirit, a path similar to the one some of those earlier German thrash luminaries like Sodom or Kreator trod. However, it didn’t come out of nowhere - Merciless had been sharpening knives already with their two demos, ‘Behind The Black Door’ and ‘Realm Of The Dark’, from 1987 and 1988 respectively, many tracks of which were then recorded again for ‘The Awakening’. Though rougher and more rudimentary in both sound and performance, this material remains perfectly “listenable” even by today’s standards, and it was already absolutely clear that the band was on to something special and unique for the time. This compilation of those two demos put out by Darkness Shall Rise last month provides a great trip down memory lane and hopefully an essential history lesson for younger ears and brains trying to enrich their metal ancestry knowledge.
Moundabout
Goat Skull Table
(Rocket Recordings)
Already on their third album, the duo of Paddy Shine (Gnod) and Phil Langero (Los Langeros, Damp Howl, Bisect) keeps taking us on the bleakest of journeys through the Irish midlands. It does tell you something when a band decides to open a new album with a frightful recitation punctuated only by oddly chilling electronic bleeps and wails - and totally nail it. It’s like the remains of a glitchy tape recording of an exorcism or something equally silly-sounding when you describe it, but deathly serious and intimidating when you actually sit down to listen to it. You’ll feel it in your bones. You’ll hear the word “ritualistic” atrributed to a lot of music, but very few times will it be as warranted as this. Their Bandcamp describes this title-track as a “shamanic rite on which Langero’s charismatically charged mantras collude with an audial landscape somewhere on the map between the abstract spell-casting of Nurse With Wound and the druidic gnosticism of Julian Cope,” which is honestly hard to argue with. This track is indeed the highlight and the easiest example we can use to illustrate the effect of the album, but the rest of it is equally uneasy and almost dangerously evocative, establishing deep, uncomfortable trances that draw you in with alarming ease. Approach with caution!
Owlbear
Feather & Claw
(Alone Records)
It seens clear by now that this first trimester will go down as a particularly rich period for proper, traditional heavy metal. With releases by Century (which we covered in last month’s column), Christian Mistress (out now!) or Tower (ready to be released later this month - watch this space), to mention but a few, that old genre-horse keeps riding on, stronger than ever, it seems. So here’s another awesome record to add to that pile, the new Owlbear. First of all, yes, an owlbear is a creature from the D&D universe, and yes, it looks exactly like you imagine it does even if you’ve never engaged with that world in any way or even looked at this album’s cover. In a way, Owlbear also sound more or less like you’d expect they would given this background, but even if they fit well into the fist-raising, monsters and dungeons and epic battles side of heavy metal - as their debut album already did, mind you -, they nevertheless apply a heart-warming amount of passion and dedication to what they do so that they don’t really end up sounding like yet another tired addition to the genre like so many of their peers end up. Nope, despite coming from the coolest heavy metal influence pool you’d expect (they had a three-song covers EP last year where they did songs by Warlock, Cirith Ungol and Manilla Road, so there’s no shortage of good taste here), Owlbear are vibrant, catchy and intense, their lyrics are interesting and engaging, and their playing is technically great without any pretentious showing off, everything being employed to the greater purpose of writing kickass tunes you’ll want to slay dragons and skeleton soliders to. Katy Scary is an expressive and exciting vocalist, while guitarist Jeff Taft comes across more and more like an exceptional songwriter and riffmaster. As a whole, ‘Feather And Claw’ is a clear upgrade on the debut and hopefully signals Owlbear’s arrival into the great hall of the leading “proper” heavy metal bands of today.
Pissgrave
Malignant Worthlessness
(Profound Lore Records)
Ugh. That’s usually the first reaction when faced with a new Pissgrave album, right? You know what it’s going to be like by now, these people have been flinging their abject, sickening piles of musical filth at us for over a decade now, so another maggot-infested monstrosity with a title like ‘Malignant Worthlessness’ won’t secretly turn out to be their acoustic folk album or their selection of Nick Drake covers. Though it’s clearly not, and though it is, indeed, another gore-infested pile of death metal brutality, Pissgrave nevertheless also evolve, just like any other pulsating, festering organism. Returning to the wise 31-minute running time of the debut, they have packed a staggering amount of actually memorable, crushing riffs into these mostly short songs, injecting an extra element of musicality - think Incantation or even speeded Autopsy riffs - while maintaining that constant, almost unbearable level of noisy intensity. In a way, they’ve kinda thrown everything that’s great about different kinds of death metal at the wall, and like an unidentifiable, horridly gooey paste, it all stuck. Yuck, but wow.
Tunic
A Harmony Of Loss Has Been Sung
(self-released)
Tunic are no stranger to these pages - they’ve already appeared on a 2023 Devil’s Month with their previous album ‘Wrong Dream’, which even made it to my top albums list of that year, and founder David Schellenberg had already been a guest on the podcast in 2021 when ‘Quitter’, the album before that, came out. Even with this familiarity that comes from being a long time fan of the band’s angular, emotionally aggressive kind of noise rock, this album still came as a bit of a shock. It’s not like their music ever had any identifiable shreds of joy in it before, but ‘A Harmony…’ is particularly bleak. Not only because of the events that led to it (David and his wife suffered a miscarriage in early 2023 and this album is the absolutely cathartic-sounding chronicle of that sad event), but especially because of the sonic results of trying to transmit something so traumatic to music. As the little description on their Bandcamp notes, there isn’t a single chorus to hang on to, and in general there seems to have been zero effort during the songwriting to make the record appealing in any kind of way. “A manual for living with defeat,” as the great Leonard Cohen once sung, would have been a more than adequate description of what’s going on here, and perversely that makes for a great listen in the end. Noise rock - to apply a general term to this music, though it’s far from a typical example thereof, if there is one - seems to have been made for tackling difficult subjects, for expressing the unbearable grey pointlessness of all our lives, and as several other musical monuments to apathy and hopelessness have proved throughout the years, it’s a kind of music that is at its best when its performers are at its worst, so to speak. Singing harmonies of loss.
Bloody Head - Eden In Retrograde (Bandcamp)
This is actually an album of remixes of tracks from the Nottingham lysergic punks Bloody Head album ‘Perpetual Eden’. It takes as its starting point the genuinely psychedelic nature of the band and highlights the beauty hidden in the noises between the notes themselves with the various artists creating other sound worlds that veer from tribal beats, dark ambient, degraded warping and ominous harsh noise to glitchy, phased sections of musique concrète. It’s best listened to in one sitting with an open mind, in the truest sense of the term. Lovely pink translucent cassette tapes with printed labels are available from The Print Project.
Dead Mint - Dead Mint (Minty Fresh Records)
Trippy, desert rock/garage vibes with a very UK twist. Wonderful sounding album suggesting late night/early dawn rituals with an almost Shimmy Disc Records flavour and hints of Bongwater, Kim Gordon, Murder City Devils and even Kyuss in places.
Cool vocals add to the intrigue and this great set ends with its two best tracks the Can-esque freak out of The Weir and the beautiful Bulwell Bogs.
Knives - The Dagger (Marshall)
From Bristol, this track is from their forthcoming album, ‘Glitter’, out 2nd May. Well, this is by far my track of the month and may well end up being my track of the year. Molasses-thick riffage riding on irresistible rhythms using smart dynamics that showcase the interplay between guitar and sax in the verses and accentuate the boisterous chorus when it kicks in flinging aside all in its path. A collision of Fugazi, Public Enemy and Sons Of Kemet with a 21st century Bristol spin. Brilliant stuff.
The None - Care (Bandcamp)
Agitation and defiance drive this caustic EP of no wavey-noise rock with huge drums, hot-wired guitars, jagged bass and distorted, commanding vocals. Arrangements avoid the obvious rock trappings and at points this thrilling music hangs suspended or locks into patterns that crescendo before bottoming out. All the tracks are engrossing throughout and reveal more on each listen. This is their second EP, their first, ‘Matter’, is superb too.
Rolltreppe - Es Geht Bergab (Urban Lurk)
Austrian post-punkers with a sound not unlike Brazil’s Rakta in places. Vocal delay madness, speeded up motorik stomps and gothic guitars bending and reverbing. Opener ‘Kranke Welt’ takes off with sky-scraping guitars part East Bay Ray, part Southern Death Cult, ‘Schüss’ and ‘Domestic Comfort’ employ chattering, choppy riffs to great effect and ‘Mietenlied’ has and almost ‘My War’ feel albeit played through a Gothic hall-of-mirrors. All the tracks here use the same aesthestic and it’s this uniformity that gives the record its power. I reckon that with closed eyes and headphones on you could become positively unmoored.
Want to help us and the bands we cover keep the lights on, and get an exclusive tote bag to show for it? Become a subscriber of TDM and we’ll send you one, free postage worldwide. Also, never miss a post again (‘cause you’ll get ‘em in your inbox) and access our subscriber only posts. Get on it: