Genevieve – Regressionism
Genevieve‘s experimental black metal is pretty widely known, now, thanks to their dedication. Regressionism is only their latest album, and it’s a great blend of post-metal and black metal, with a lot of Genevieve’s own idiosyncrasies embedded into their sound. It’s at times harsh and at times beautifully bleak, but it’s always sure to make you feel something.

Zombieshark! – The Digital Sea
Nintendocore is a very niche genre, where chiptune sounds are blended into hardcore or mathcore music to create a new kind of video game boss music. Zombie Shark is the latest iteration of the genre, with their EP, The Digital Sea. It layers melodic hardcore with chiptune sound imitations and video game sound excerpts in a pretty fun fashion. The only things that would need improvement are the drum programming and the fact that it’s awfully short. Those are only little critics, however, and the EP is very good as it is.

Feasting on Scaphism Remains – To Insanity and Beyond
This is one quarter of a four-way split between this Australian band, Rot in Space!, Intraocular Melanoma, and Industrial Hydrophobia on Fermented Bile Vomit Productions. It’s an exciting and very creative experimental cybergrind release that makes me curious to hear the other sides of the split… Now I just need to find those on bandcamp!

Technopath – Ontology
Technopath is a new project with members from South African bands Vulvodynia and Sketch the Sky. Ontology is a hidden gem of the new wave of instrumental progressive metal fusion, and it’s a delightful EP that appeals to traditional jazz harmony, but without sounding overly cliché or merely fan-service. Give it a shot!

Spinifex – Amphibian Ardour
Spinifex are back with their new experimental jazz fusion album, Amphibian Ardour! It took me a while to get into 2015’s Veiled, but, since then, I’ve only enjoyed this kind of music more and more. With this new release, the band breaks new grounds, and sounds more inspired by Middle Eastern music than ever. It’s an album that deserves to be on everyone’s playlist!

Ignis haereticum – Autocognition of Light
Colombia’s best avant-garde black metal band, Ignis haereticum, just released Autocognition of Light, their latest dissonant, progressive, and mythological release. During its forty minutes, the band’s sophomore album relentlessly drags us through muddy caverns tapestried with religious iconography. I love it.

Herd – Herd
The Herd‘s concise and sharp debut EP is perhaps one of the heaviest metalcore releases I’ve heard this year, blurring the lines with deathcore and djent. The four-track is just too short for its own good, so I just hope that more music is on the way!

01101111011101100110111001101001​ (Ovni) – S/2004S3
Brutal death metal bands seem to challenge themselves to come up with the most ridiculous names, enters international project 01101111011101100110111001101001​ – binary for Ovni; “UFO” in French and Spanish. Their similarities with Wormed are substantial, but most likely coincidental: both bands use complex science and science-fiction terms and concepts, both singers have a pretty low range, although Wormed’s is way more cavernous, and they play music that is not too dissimilar in nature. Ovni definitively have their own sound, however, and their EP shows a great potential for them, if they ever release something with more than ten minutes of music in it.

Doomeye – Doomeye
Ukrainian mathcore crew Doomeye recently released a self-titled EP, a compilation of their released singles, also known as 2014-2017. It’s a great way to put the band’s aggressive math-grind into a cohesive release instead of many disparate singles. Hopefully, there’s new material in the works, but, for now, this is a mighty great EP to blast!