Heavy Blog Is Heavy

Heavy Blog (also known as Is Heavy) is a website focused on capturing and exploring the Golden Age of underground music.

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Release Day Roundup: 6/20/25

1 week ago | heavyblogisheavy.com | Joshua Bulleid

Top PickThe dominant narrative surrounding Cryptopsy is that their modern period, beginning with 2012's self-titled record, is generally seen as a return to form, following a severely rocky middle period. While I'll happily conceded that None So Vile (1996) is undoubtedly the band's best album and a defining album for death metal as a whole, even if 2005's perplexingly overlooked Once Was Not will always be my favourite.
Black Majesty - Oceans of Black

1 week ago | heavyblogisheavy.com | Joshua Bulleid

Power metal is only ok, sometimes. Despite its entrenchment in the '80s, time once was—during the early 2000s—when Australia had all the best power metal bands (that aren't called Blind Guardian). These days, I think you have to give it up for Sweden, what with the rise of Ordan Ogan and Sabaton, along with Hammerfall's recent semi-return to form.
Helms Deep - Chasing the Dragon

1 week ago | heavyblogisheavy.com | Eden Kupermintz

Power metal is good, actually. I don't really enjoy post-modern art very often (even though I do enjoy the broader fields in which it is created). That doesn't mean that post-modern art is bad. The goal of all art is to communicate something, to illicit a response from the one experiencing it. To be sure, some art can fail to do that because it's bad: its message is muddied, its expressions of that message trite or boring or just shallow, or any other reason that art might be bad.
Release Day Roundup: 6/13/25

2 weeks ago | heavyblogisheavy.com | Joshua Bulleid

Top PickTaking stick at this almost-halfway point, and I can say, with wholehearted certainty that the sub-genre that has been irking me the most in 2025 is absolutely blackened death metal. It isn't as uninspired or low-effort enough for me to eliminate entirely, like its more classically blackened brethren, but the genre is undoubtedly over-represented and under-delivering.
Editors' Picks // June 2025

2 weeks ago | heavyblogisheavy.com | Eden Kupermintz

It's June, which means the year is once again reaching its apogee (or zenith or aphelion to be honest, they all fit) and we start to look back at everything that happened in the last six months. But just before we do that, we still have July to reckon with and it was, once again, a fantastic month for music.
EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE: Rosa Faenskap Find "Clarity In Chaos"

2 weeks ago | heavyblogisheavy.com | Eden Kupermintz

public The Norwegian band returns with "Klarhet i Kaos" ("Clarity in Chaos") and they couldn't have picked a better title for the track. Two years ago, I got the chance to premiere a truly pissed off track in the form of Rosa Faenskap's "Reform". The album it came from, Jeg blir til deg, was a truly underrated slab of hardcore, black metal, and punk, mixed together into something with spikes and a lot of energy.
Release Roundup: 6/6/25

3 weeks ago | heavyblogisheavy.com | Joshua Bulleid

Top PicksAs much as I love the band Death, I've never really bothered with Gruesome. Perhaps that's because—in addition to some questionable artwork choices—I'm much more taken with Death's later, more progressive 90s period than I am with the earlier 80s era that Gruesome have so far been aping.* As good as the early Death albums are, plenty of bands have come along since and pushed the realms of traditional death metal much further.
Katatonia - Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State

3 weeks ago | heavyblogisheavy.com | Eden Kupermintz

At this point, you probably know what you're getting when you click play on a Katatonia album and that's not necessarily a bad thing. At this point, you probably know what you're getting when you click play on a Katatonia album and that's not necessarily a bad thing. This wasn't always the case; as I've said before, the band have been marked by "eras", several consecutive albums that hit on a theme or, more aptly, a timbre.
Transmissions From Europe - A Telepathy Tour Diary

3 weeks ago | heavyblogisheavy.com | Eden Kupermintz

Editor's note: veteran readers of the blog might recall that nine years ago (!), we sponsored a tour by one of our favorite post-metal bands, Telepathy. We also ran a tour diary from that round of shows and it turned out to be one of my favorite things we've posted.
Release Day Roundup: 5/30/25

4 weeks ago | heavyblogisheavy.com | Joshua Bulleid

Top PicksIn its lead-up, Rivers of Nihil had all the hallmarks of a band making a self-titled album in a defiant effort to re-capture and redefine their identity amid such a turbulent and unsure period. Unlike many (lesser) bands in their position, however, Rivers of Nihil have not only succeeded in making a triumphant statement, but perhaps a definitive one as well. For one thing, they seem to have taken the right lessons from The Work.