UNBLESSED DIVINE ~ Portal To Darkness (2023)

 Destructive, satanic death metal featuring former Malevolent Creation and Sinister members. Portal To Darkness is as dark and unforgiving as you're likely hear in a death metal album. Bludgeoning riffs merge with gothic sounding keyboards creating an atmosphere of spiritual unease and a sense of foreboding. Each track is a ferocious onslaught forcing you to your knees, head bowed, arms raised aloft in Satanic rapture.

SAMHAIN ~ The Courier 2023 (Remastered)

This early death/thrash classic has been resurrected and remastered with a mix that is beyond anything I could have hoped for. Although it is a compilation of the band's first two demo tapes, The Courier is essentially in two parts. The first three tracks are from the 1985 Samhain demo 'The Courier' while the final five songs are from 1986 when the band morphed into DesExult and released the demo S.O.D. F.O.A.D. 

Samhain play a raw, chaotic form blackened death/thrash on The Courier, lacerating from the opening track and creates bloody mayhem right the way through to the last with some glorious breakdowns inbetween not heard since Celtic Frost's Morbid Tales.

An essential release which deserves to be unearthed from a band way ahead of it's time.