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Ghostbustin’ proton streams, blaster-packing astro clones, creatures from a galaxy far, far away, an astro clone army, and a hit song to die for. Meet The Ghoulstars, a fresh – and frightening blast from pop-culture’s past. Since beaming down onto their native haunt of Finland, these horror punks have tantalized crowds and captured the attention of CNN and other international press. Their blockbuster debut album, The Dark Overlords of the Universe, hits shelves on May 15.

After almost 50 years, Christian Death are still frightening the very fabric of society. The founding fathers of American goth rock are touring the U.S. next month. Valor Kand and Maitri will lead the Baby Bat Parade across more than 20 U.S. cities. They’ll be joined by Gene Loves Jezebel, Descartes a Kant and Black Season Witch.

With major international tours and chart placements around the world, after more than 30 years, Borknagar remain a consistently evolving force. Starting with their self-titled beginnings, the band quickly pushed past the boundaries set by traditional black metal by encompassing prog, neofolk and hard rock. Though a season of change would soon follow, their tenth album remains a true force of nature.

With their bluesy riffs, swampy rhythms and haunting vocals, Wailin Storms are one of the hottest bands in Southern gothic rock. The Durham, North Carolinians have received high praise from NPR, The Needle Drop, Brooklyn Vegan, Decibel and Metal Hammer. Thunderous applause has greeted them on both sides of The Atlantic during shows and tour dates with everyone from City of Caterpillar and This Will Destroy You to Acid Bath and Eyehategod. Now, with their upcoming fifth album,The Arsonist, the band are fanning their flames with reckless abandon.

No band embodies the spirit of black metal like Mayhem. The Norwegians set the standard for the genre with their canonical 1994 debut, only to return six years later and defy all convention on their daring follow-up. That fall, the band brought their grand declaration to life by seizing the stage at one of Europe’s oldest settlement with Live in Marseille 2000.

Though longtime masters of the vile art known as death metal, Defiled aren’t relics or custodians for the old-school. Since 1992, the living legends have shared the stage with Morbid Angel, Mayhem, Cannibal Corpse and Incantation, but their upcoming ninth album continues to take the genre in dark but unexpected directions. On Altered State, they deliver a dizzying blast of death metal straight from the future.

EMPTINESS, the Belgian extreme music apparition founded in Brussels in 1998, will release their seventh full-length album, Nowhere Speaks, through Season of Mist. The record spans ten tracks and opens not with an introduction but with continuation: the first sound heard is a riff picked up mid-bar, precisely where their 2014 album Nothing But The Whole ended in abrupt, unexplained silence. That break, long discussed among the band’s following, was not a mistake. Nowhere Speaks resolves it by entering the gap and closes by looping back to the opening riff of Nothing But The Whole, sealing the two records into a deliberate cycle. Between those structural anchors, the album builds a world defined entirely on its own terms: a dimension removed from all human presence, governed by forces and energies that operate without acknowledgment of whoever is listening. The music recorded for Nowhere Speaks is dense, live, and physically present in a way that distinguishes it sharply from its predecessor. Where Vide (2021) was distortion-free, sung in French, and recorded in the isolated conditions of the pandemic, the new album returns to weight, intensity, and a full-band physicality. The entire record, with the exception of vocals, keyboards and additional effects, was captured live in the studio after four years of preparation, testing and rehearsal. The result has a coiled, inhabited quality: the pressure is not processed or applied in post; it is played. Nowhere Speaks does not ask to be understood. It asks to be entered. Nowewhere Speaks is out July 17th, 2026 via Season of Mist.

Season of Mist is proud to welcome back Misery Index.

Season of Mist is proud to welcome Wailin Storms.

Season of Mist is proud to welcome Kriigerkvlt.

Season of Mist is proud to welcome Gåte.

Vilnius-based experimental metal band ERDVE have released “Ydos,” the second single taken from their upcoming album Epigrama, out May 29th, 2026 through Season of Mist. The track is accompanied by an official music video, available now: https://youtu.be/6Yi3rz38uxA. “Ydos” follows the band’s first single “Nyra” and continues the thematic arc of Epigrama, a record built around entropy, psychological erosion and the cumulative weight of unresolved regret. Where “Nyra” traced grief as entrapment, “Ydos” moves deeper into corrosion. Regret metastasizes into moral deterioration, agency dissolves, and self-doubt calcifies into something closer to self-destruction. The track speaks to the weakness of facing the truth, shame and the inability to impose judgement upon oneself, a descent from stagnation into what the band describe as the gradual consumption of the last remaining spark of life. Vaitojimas laid the foundation; Savigaila pushed against it until something cracked. What followed was not a next step but a deliberate pause, a period of stepping back from the noise to ask what the music was actually for, and what it would need to become in order to mean something true. Epigrama is the answer to that question, though not a comfortable one. Eight tracks, 42 minutes, every sound chosen with the kind of care that comes from having learned, through trial and error, what it means to create without compromise. The band wrote it, recorded it, mixed it, mastered it, photographed it and designed it themselves, because the alternative, handing any part of it to someone else, would have been a betrayal of everything the album is about. Accountability runs through it like a fault line. Pre-order & pre-save: https://orcd.co/erdveepigrama

From the beginning, it was clear that Beyond Creation possessed a special aura. Back in 2011, the Montréal four-piece quickly proved they were the next progressive evolution in technical death metal with their very first album. Now, fifteen years later, the genre still basks in the enduring glow of The Aura.