Michael Nelson

It was almost a year ago to the day that we first premiered “The Paradise Gallows,” the lead single and title track from Inter Arma’s third full-length. Paradise Gallows closed out 2016 with the top spot on our list of the year’s best metal albums. Inter Arma are old-school road warriors: They tour…

There’s this documentary that came out maybe 15 years ago called Between Resistance & Community: The Long Island DIY Punk Scene. Like its subject matter, the film is unpolished, amateurish, and almost impenetrably insular, but it’s also a pretty fascinating document of a very particular subculture.…

I already penned a lengthy appreciation of Elder’s upcoming fourth LP, Reflections Of A Floating World, when we premiered its lead single, “The Falling Veil,” a couple weeks ago — so I’ll keep this one short. Reflections is one of my favorite albums of 2017 so far, and I’m reasonably confident it wo…

Last week, Baroness announced the departure of longtime guitarist Pete Adams, at the same time also naming Adams’ replacement: Philadelphia’s Gina Gleason. Filling Adams’ shoes in Baroness is no easy feat: Not only is he a superb guitarist, he also displayed ESP-level chemistry with the band’s front…

Podcasts about music tend to be pretty uneven and largely inessential. That’s primarily because licensing fees make it prohibitively expensive to include actual music in podcasts. It’s kind of unsatisfying to listen to people talking about a song without ever actually playing the damn song they’re t…

Back in the early aughts, the Boston-adjacent city of Waltham, Massachusetts produced a pair of the decade’s best power-pop bands — one named after the city the two groups called home (Waltham), the other named after a character from Fast Times At Ridgemont High (Damone). The two bands literally grew up together and had some […]

A few weeks ago, the NYC post-hardcore institution Quicksand announced a new LP — their third overall, and first in 22 years — and dropped that LP’s first single, “Illuminant.” If you click either of those links in the preceding sentence, you’ll see me waxing ecstatically about both these developmen…

Krallice never stop. They’re always working on new Krallice material, and every member of the band is also always doing like half a dozen other projects. Considering (A) the complexity of the material and (B) the laws of physics, I’m honestly not sure how they’re able to produce so much music in suc…

Guys, it’s been awhile. But FINALLY the lads from Liverpool known as U2 are back with a new album! Which, of course, gives us two other truly wonderful things. Uno? Outrageously astronomical placement in Rolling Stone’s Best Albums Of The Year list. And dos, tres, catorce? A new ep of the undisputed…

Leaving aside all the abject horrors of the real world, yesterday was the raddest: MLB Opening Day! Also? Giancarlo crushed two taters in his first game with The Best Team! Also? Super-fun ep of Drag Race! And what else? At some point during all that sickness, I landed an advance of At The Gates’ up…

If you were gonna write a Great Jones Street-esque postmodern novel about an American black metal artist, you could do worse than to base your protagonist on Austin Lunn. It’s not that Lunn himself seems like a DeLillo character, per se, but his story is just so perfect that, like … well, like … you…

We’re three weeks out from the release of At The Gates’ To Drink From The Night Itself. It’s the Gothenburg death metal band’s sixth LP all counted, their second following a 19-year hiatus, and for my money — right now — their best to date. To be clear, that’s absurdly high praise: In 2008, Decibel…

Deafheaven’s new album, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love, drops in mid-July, and the first single, “Honeycomb,” came out in late April. I dunno when single #2 will arrive — there’s only seven tracks on the LP, which complicates the long-rollout strategy — but today, you at least get some new music: the f…

Sometime in fall 2015, on the streets of Soho, I noticed this manhole cover plastered with a few years’ worth of stickers from graffiti artists-turned-gallery artists and punk bands-turned-guerilla marketers, with one sticker in particular jumping out at me. It was a weird juxtaposition of two very…

Hola, amigos. I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I am seriously in the weeds over here. What’s going on? Heard any good tunes lately? Me, I been neck-deep in an ever-flowing stream of killer jams, and I’m trying to write a whole thing about all that, but life […]

In early November, the Japanese post-hardcore band Envy released a two-song digital single titled Alnair In August. I wrote about the record when it came out, and I started off by saying this: If you listen to heavy music circa now, you know Envy. Even if you’ve never actually listened to Envy, you’ve heard them. […]

Black metal has been atomized beyond the point of recognition, perhaps even beyond the possibility of recognition. Perhaps it has always been this way. Perhaps, in fact, “black metal” exists only in the negative: an oppressive caricature inherently absent any actual characteristics, whose sole stable element is internecine discord. Even before there could be some […]

Ever since My Bloody Valentine dropped m b v in winter 2013, heavy-style shoegaze has enjoyed a nice little moment. Maybe more than a moment, actually, and maybe something bigger than “little.” All the way up top you’ve got that band Deafheaven, obviously, but it goes all the way down the line, too. I’m just […]

On one wall in my apartment, I have two things hanging: On the left is a large American flag that covers most of the wall, so big it took two people to hang up when we moved in. To the right of the flag is a notably less patriotic, more anti-establishment emblem: a poster I […]

Elliott Smith was born on August 6, 1969, and thus, August is Elliott Smith Month, according to his onetime label, Kill Rock Stars. To celebrate, KRS has been generously offering fans alternate versions of some old Elliott tracks: previously unheard versions of songs that appeared on Smith’s 1995 an…