Archive for March 18, 2025

ULTHAR – Cosmic Blackened Death Metal Trio To Launch North Eastern Campaign 2025 Tour This Week

Posted in Death Metal, death metal bands, Metal, metal bands, metal music, Music, music news, news with tags , , , , , , on March 18, 2025 by Metal Odyssey

photo by Melissa Petisa

Cosmic blackened death metal trio ULTHAR is preparing to launch their North Eastern Campaign 2025 tour this week. The tour begins this Thursday, March 20th in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and will crush its way across the East Coast and into the Midwest and back, ending in Baltimore, Maryland on March 31st where they’ll share the stage with Undergang and Torture Rack. See all confirmed dates below.

ULTHAR North Eastern Campaign 2025:
3/20/2025 The Golden Pony – Harrisonburg, VA
3/21/2025 Bonk’s Bar – Philadelphia, PA
3/22/2025 Gold Sounds – Brooklyn, NY
3/23/2025 Ralph’s Rock Diner – Worcester, MA
3/24/2025 Cabaret Foufounes – Montreal, QC
3/25/2025 The Baby G – Toronto, ON
3/26/2025 Psychic Garden – Rochester, NY
3/27/2025 Reggies – Chicago, IL
3/28/2025 Bug House – Fort Wayne, IN
3/29/2025 Shred Shed – Pittsburgh, PA
3/30/2025 West Edge Factory – Huntington, WV
3/31/2025 Metro Baltimore – Baltimore, MD

ULTHAR will be touring in support of their critically praised Anthronomicon and Helionomicon LPs released together in early 2023 via 20 Buck Spin.

Anthronomicon album cover

Anthronomicon embodies the continued progression of ULTHAR’s mastery over its art. From the opening blasts and twisting mania of “Cephalophore,” ULTHAR baffles with angular warped riffage, dipping in and out of various dimensional spheres. Each of Anthronomicon’s eight tracks represents a fractious piece of a larger puzzle, each a maze unto itself that when taken together allows one to traverse this inverted surrealist conundrum.

Where its sister album Anthronomicon presents an eight-piece puzzle of labyrinthine tumult, Helionomicon takes those elements and creates two towering twenty-minute monoliths of radiant avant-garde immensity. Each track, appropriately titled “Helionomicon” and “Anthronomicon,” transports the listener on a vast journey of psycho-cerebral spectacle where hitherto unimagined landscapes take shape and strange intangible structures pierce the disintegrating firmament.

Helionomicon album cover

Anthronomicon and Helionomicon are available on CD, LP, cassette, and digital formats. Find physical orders at THIS LOCATION.

Find digital orders for Anthronomicon HERE and Helionomicon HERE.

Anthronomicon and Helionomicon were each recorded in April 2022 at Developing Nations in Baltimore, Maryland by Kevin Bernsten and mastered at Signaturetone in Minneapolis, Minnesota by Adam Tucker. Each album cover is half of a larger original piece created for ULTHAR by Ian Miller (Stormkeep, Bolt Thrower, Games Workshop). Additional artwork was created by the bad’s Steve Peacock.

https://www.instagram.com/ulthar_oakland

https://ulthar666.bandcamp.com

https://www.20buckspin.com

Source: EARSPLIT PR

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Swedish Thrash & Speed Metal Masters HEXENHAUS To Reissue Their First Three Legendary Studio Albums On May 16th via ROAR!

Posted in Heavy Metal, heavy metal bands, Metal, metal bands, metal music, Music, music news, news with tags , , , , , , , on March 18, 2025 by Metal Odyssey

On May 16, 2025, powerhouse label ROAR will proudly reissue the first three, iconic records by Swedish thrash and speed metal legends Hexenhaus: A Tribute To Insanity (1988), The Edge Of Eternity (1990), and Awakening (1991)! 

Available on CD, colored vinyl and digitally, the physical products will also come with new liner notes and an exclusive history text. All formats got remastered by Ronnie Björnström (Mezzrow a.o.). Find pre-order options listed below!

Depending on the path you chose, one could say that the story of Sweden’s best kept thrash metal secret starts all the way up in the northern parts of Sweden. In a city called Boden to be more precise. That’s where the metal force Maninnya Blade took it’s form during the middle of the 80:s. Their take on speed metal caught the interest of the young guitarist Mickael Vikström, better known as Mike Wead and later on the guitarist in both Mercyful Fate and King Diamond. He would start out as a fan of the band, but it didn’t take long until’ he was their new guitarist and the talk of the town.

“When I joined them they already had four great songs more or less done already. It was; “Requiem”, “The Dead Are Restless”, “Delirious” and “Eaten Alive”,“ Wead reveals. “The style was much heavier than the music we had done before and to mark the fresh start of the band, at least that’s how we saw it, we also decided to change the name from Maninnya to Hexenhaus. The name is German for witch’s house and is a reference to the Malefizhaus in Bamberg, Germany. A frightful place where hundreds of suspected witches were tortured and executed during the early 17:th century.”

To call the material “heavier than before” is an understatement. The music on the four songs that ended up on the today highly sought after demo cassette “Demo 1988” drew its inspiration from bands like Metallica, Slayer and Mercyful Fate. A stellar testimony of what was going around in the early thrash metal scene around that time. The lucky ones that possess the “Demo 1988” cassette got a true gem on their hands.

After signing with Axis Records, the band entered the studio to record their stellar debut album A Tribute To Insanity. Half of the album contains the four songs that made up the demo, as well as four more songs that seen the band combine ideas and trading riffs like never heard before on a Swedish metal album. A Tribute To Insanity was originally released on vinyl on the 17th of October 1988. Pre-order the ROAR reissue, a must-have that belongs into every well-sorted speed and thrash metal record collection, now on https://Hexenhaus.rpm.link/tributePR 

The follow-up album, The Edge Of Eternity, was released on November 1st 1990. To pre-order this reissue from ROAR, visit: https://Hexenhaus.rpm.link/eternityPR 

During the same time as The Edge Of Eternity was released in the early 90’s, Megadeth released their classic album Rust In Peace, Exodus came out with “Impact Is Imminent” and Germany’s Mekong Delta (who also was a big influence on The Edge Of Eternity) came out with their most popular album Dances Of Death (And Other Walking Shadows). To say that the thrash scene was looking good is an understatement, it was boiling hot!

In the midst of it stood Hexenhaus just waiting for the big breakthrough. “We thought that we would get approached by different management and offered tours that would take us all over Europe but that never happened”, Mike Wead sighs. “We were amateurs when it came to promote ourselves and how could we be anything else? We didn’t know that we needed to do more than creating albums to get a breakthrough!”

The re-release of Awakening, the band’s final album, is also now available for pre-order at: https://Hexenhaus.rpm.link/awakeningPR

When the offers didn’t come as expected, Mike and the band started to work on new material. But just like the last time it was with a new line-up who was more than ready to give their all for the band. Besides the broken bones, the blood and the gated reverbs, the recordings of Awakening went smooth. The album was released in August 1991 and much to the bands dismay nothing happened for them this time either. 

“Once again we got great reviews from abroad”, Mike recalls. “Big and important magazines like Metal Hammer, Kerrang, Metal Forces and Aardschok gave us fantastic reviews! Even better than the ones we’ve received before, but we just couldn’t break through. We were still stuck in Sweden doing small shows put together by fans.” The band called it a quits in 1992. 

Visit ROAR online: 
Homepage: https://www.roar-records.de
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rpmroar
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rpm_roar/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@rpmroar

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