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Mining Metal is a monthly column from Heavy Consequence contributing writers Langdon Hickman and Colin Dempsey. The focus is on noteworthy new music emerging from the non-mainstream metal scene, highlighting releases from small and independent labels — or even releases from unsigned acts.
I started May, lucky me, by being let go by my day job. 2025 being the absolutely wonderful world state and job market it is, I have yet to find a replacement for it, despite making it to second rebound interviews a few times now. At least the world of romance must be a solace, right? After all, I’m in a non-monogamous marriage and my spouse is my best friend, and the warmth of love is often a boon to these startling occurrences. Except what a lot of people who actually live the life of non-monogamy rather than, you know, just mess about tend to know about it is that it’s also a way to microdose being broken up with when you’re in a stable relationship, an experience that is frankly awful. Add in continued genocide plus the nihilistic stirrings of what could have blown up into another world war based merely on supposition and imperial aggression, not to mention a heatwave in an increasingly hot planet, and my head space was just superb going into the start of summer. To boot, the novel I’ve been reading, Berlin Alexanderplatz, is a Jewish avant-garde novel from Weimar-era Germany about rising Nazism. I make wise emotional decisions.
So when I get ahold of a heavy metal record, one that has that invisible magic to it, it feels not just like breathing fire and shaking the thunders of my heart but also like I am blowing away in one mighty breath the corona of miasma that clouds me. There is a time for more sobering and mature relationships to music; the breadth of the musical and more broadly art landscape are testament to the innumerable shapes and relations we can make. But heavy metal to me is often a mythic music, something of an image of the heart. You listen to Metallica or Sepultura or Death or Cultes des Ghoules or Sumerlands and this transformation takes over you. It is not quite the return to youth that we sometimes paint it as, but instead to that idealized non-being element that we could see more clearly when we were young. There is this window of the heart that we peer through in those ages, a vision of not a real but an idealized adulthood, clad in leather, shedding free the dead skin of the limitations of a sexuality or a gender, the pureness of the eruptive self-without-limit. Life complicates those plans; politics emerges naturally in adulthood as we navigate not just the self but the interrelation of things in the world, an understanding of the purpose of sacrifice and compromise toward more meaningful goals. But that image remains lurking inside somewhere.
It’s part of what I find so fascinating about our human relationship to art and the kind of reactionary psychosis we’ve been seeing take off all over the world. Art is, much to our eternal vexation, doggedly non-political. It may invoke in us and provoke from us various responses, but none of these seem to be inherent by any stretch. One person listens to the ferocity of black metal and through the lupine hunger comes out as trans and stakes their true self in a hostile world; another person becomes an avowed white supremacist, joins that other wolf-themed group, buys a rifle and becomes a domestic terrorist. It would be less vexing, and less fascinating, if it felt like art and in this case heavy metal had nothing to do with these shifts. Instead, we get the perplexing reality of it sparking fires in multiple directions.
That’s because at root what I think heavy metal is is not an intensity toward something but mere intensity itself. We ourselves are the lenses and directional vectors of this force. Our fantasies and desires and capacities for imagination shape the ways in which that inward intensity can outwardly flow. The path of chewing over questions of philosophy and being-in-the-world, either in my clear and obvious more academic path or the way that frankly normal regular people who probably are more employed than me ponder them, likewise craft that lens, the corridor of fire. This can alleviate us of a certain burden. Is art made by a troubling individual bad because of its origin or is that moral judgment altered if it spurs us to become better for the world, become braver and stronger and more capable of protecting those who need it? But that too misses the point. Heavy metal is intensity without nomen. That shapelessness is its ultimate power. An electric guitar, properly distorted, hurling lightning.
— Langdon Hickman
The Black Mysteries – These Are the Keys to Your Endlessness. Your Endlessness Is the Key to These Keys
The person behind Gnaw Their Tongues is psychotically productive. This is another of their umpteen projects, this time a much more ritualistic black metal project beating out sharp competition in the field of black metal for me against the likes of Spellgate and Hexvessel largely off of the back of that mid-paced macabre and magical mood. Satan and Lucifer in black metal are old hat and require a deft hand to make mobile; here, the focus is beyond that, a mystical fixation that allows it to bypass some of the more tedious cliches while retaining that strange wild spirit. I swear, I keep discovering records I think are sick and learning they’re all by this guy. A great problem to have, honestly. Buy it on Bandcamp. — L. Hickman
Cromlech – Of Owls and Eels
On his sophomore record, Cromlech offers a withered take on black metal that comes from two decades of playing with the long-standing German act Dies Ater. Patience and pacing are Of Owls and Eels’ cornerstones. It unfolds at a doomish pace, even on tracks that have a higher-than-resting heart rate like “Mordlust.” Though it sends roses to various aspects of black metal, symphonic black metal on “Past Forever,” melodic strains on “Ice Curse,” pagan folk excursions on “Eels (Part 1),” Cromlech avoids its reactive and rebellious undercurrent. He instead presides as an elder statesman marveling at his own property. Of Owls and Eels is a broad overview of a young man’s game from a studied eye. That’s why “The Quiet Witness” is its highpoint. With gothic synths bleeding down its walls, it speaks with a burnt tongue. It cements Of Owls and Eels as a black metal release for sunsets. Buy it on Bandcamp. — Colin Dempsey
Hægtesse – The Edible Self
You, like me, might see “British pagan doom” and start Googling frantically to gauge how suss something might be. Fear not: Hægtesse not only aren’t associated with, uh, some of the issues of that scene, but also manage to craft a specifically intense doom that feels haunted and severe rather than bong-addled and repetitive. It helps that you can hear real heavy metal songwriting behind the riffs rather than the kind of toothless Sabbath worship we are often fed. The guitar tone is sharp and craggy, the vocals wide and balanced between a haunted feminine vocal and a quite morose growl. There is a real sense of magic and grandeur to this that bespeaks to the Crowleyan influence; think the same way that Anna von Hausswolff or Esben and the Witch feel at their best. This kind of work is nourishing to me. Buy it on Bandcamp. — L. Hickman
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