Recently, Nordic dark folk collective, Heilung, premiered a new song to a star-studded audience at The Game Awards in downtown Los Angeles. This song, including the soundtrack, was written in collaboration with Ninja Theory for the video game Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, due out next year. Watch the live performance video from the event below.
Download Festival, the greatest rock and metal festival of all time, returns for its 21st edition, reborn and recharged in 2024 as DLXXI. Nu Metal legends Limp Bizkit has been added to the festival bill. This year’s festival will take place on 14-16 June 2024 at the spiritual home of rock in Donington Park, Leicestershire. General tickets are onsale at 9pm on Thursday 9 November at the link below.
Invocation / Supplication (By Norse Music), the new offering from experimental cellist Jo Quail, is actually a compendium of two connected three-song cycles. The first, Invocation, features the contributions of Heilung vocalist Maria Franz, plus brass instruments, percussion, bass and a choir assembled from crowdsourced mobile phone recordings of individual syllables. Supplication, on the other hand, is a less embellished affair, with just vocals from Lorenzo Esposito Fornasari and Koen Kaptin’s trombone parts to augment Quail’s cello and sound design.
Download Festival, the greatest rock and metal festival of all time, returns for its 21st edition, reborn and recharged in 2024 as DLXXI. Announced today are headliners Queens Of The Stone Age, Fall Out Boy and Avenged Sevenfold, as well as over 70 more huge names from the rock world. This year’s festival will take place on 14-16 June 2024 at the spiritual home of rock in Donington Park, Leicestershire. General tickets are onsale at 9pm on Thursday 9 November at the link below.
ArcTanGent Festival, a yearly outdoor four-day fixture at Fernhill Farm near Bristol, attracts a devoted following to its niche yet eclectic lineups of artists who generally have an association with post-rock, progressive metal, or experimental rock. It’s “sort of” a metal festival, but the range of acts it showcases steers towards the more left-field and eccentric end of heavy music and at times stretches beyond what could reasonably even be labelled as “rock”.
The mighty Arctangent Festival 2023 today announces their final main stage headliner for this year’s event, The incredible, truly one-of-a-kind Devin Townsend will be closing out the whole festival on the main stage, Saturday night. The festival will be taking place between August 16th through to August 19th, at Fernhill Farm, a short drive from Bristol City Centre. Also announced today include Haken, Yourcodenameis:Milo, Ashenspire, Clt Drp, The Guru Guru, and many more. Acts already announced include Heilung, Converge, Deafheaven (playing ‘Sunbather’ in full as a UK exclusive), Swans, Empire State Bastard, Sikth, The Fall Of Troy, Cave In, Igorrr, Pigs7, Elder, Russian Circles, Chat Pile, Svalbard, Jaga Jazzist, Brutus, Loathe, Rolo Tomassi, Svalbard, and many more.Continue reading
Ghost Cult scribe Duncan Evans caught up with acclaimed music producer and artist Marc Urselli (U2, Foo Fighters) to discuss his new album Marc Urselli’s SteppenDoom, out now via Magnetic Eye Records. Duncan chatted with Marc about his producing career, the unique new album combining stoner doom with indigenous music, working with a bevy of special guests such as Matt Pike (Sleep, High On Fire), Aaron Aedy (Paradise Lost), Steve Von Till (Neurosis), Christopher Juul (Heilung), Dave Chandler (Saint Vitus), And Scott “Wino” Weinrich (The Obsessed) From The Metal Side, and masters of Throat Signing such as Alash Ensemble, Batzorig Vaanchig “Zorigoo”, Huun-Huur-Tu, Tanya Tagaq, Albert Kuvezin (Yat-Kha), and Alexey Tegin, and much more! Continue reading
This tour package is one of the many that were postponed from the pandemic, originally expected in early 2020, but now two years later, Heilung finally returns. Sadly, not with the original support of Gaahls Wyrd, but bringing the equally if differently impressive Eivør, and Lili Refrain. Tonight is a night with a theme of mythic vocals and the gods of old.
Steeped in Nordic mythology, France’s Skáld draw extensively on traditional folk music and employ the Old Norse language for many of their lyrics. Huldufólk (Decca / Universal Music) is the group’s fourth full-length release and is themed around the subject of its title: huldufólk, or “hidden people” is the name given to the mythical beings — elves, dwarves, trolls — that populate Nordic folklore. Moreover, according to the press release accompanying this record, the work honours “an entire people in whom many Scandinavians still believe”.
Press on, intrepid reader, to find out our top albums of 2022, as voted for by the cast, crew and hangers-on of the good ship Ghost Cult. Over 275 albums were nominated (including one stray and errant vote for Stryper… we’ve had words), some people lauded albums as the greatest of all time that no one else noticed, other albums picked up a steady stream of votes across the board without tickling the top of anyone’s charts, but through it all, we’ve been able to compile our team list of the best 75 albums of the year. And there are some absolute corkers, here. 75 of them, to be exact…