10 Nazi-Punching Metal Albums to Celebrate May Day

By Kim Kelly. Happy May Day! Around the world, May 1 is traditionally celebrated as International Workers Day (except in the U.S. where our craven authoritarian government pushes “Loyalty Day” on us instead). It’s a time for love, and solidarity, and joy, but is also a day for rage and protest.

By Kim Kelly.

Happy May Day! Around the world, May 1 is traditionally celebrated as International Workers Day (except in the U.S. where our craven authoritarian government pushes “Loyalty Day” on us instead). It’s a time for love, and solidarity, and joy, but is also a day for rage and protest. Normally, many of us would be in the streets today, but given the current reality of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the best thing we can do for our fellow humans right now is stay inside. One small silver lining there is that, right now, we have an opportunity to extend some support to our fellow members of the music community who are struggling to make ends meet right now—the bands and artists who are stuck at home alongside the rest of us, unable to tour or play live during what would usually be a busy springtime touring season.

Bandcamp will be waiving their fees today, which means that every penny of every purchase will go directly to artists. They did this last year, too, and the response was so enormous that their website could barely handle all the traffic (I have a feeling there will be a repeat this year, but at least now we know we’ll need to be patient in getting our precious new tunes). As a small token of my appreciation for their labor, I wanted to put together a little list of bands that I am especially excited to support today, and share a few of them with you (a much longer list of recommendations will be public on my Patreon as of 2PM EST). Some may be familiar to you already, and some may not, but all of them have two very important things in common: they’re actively trying to make the world a better place, and they fuckin’ hate Nazis (which you could roll up into one, really). Happy listening!


Voarm doesn’t just dabble in darkness; this Richmond black metal collective (gathered from the ashes of Argentinum Astrum) invites it in, offers it a cup of tea, and settles into its lightless, suffocating embrace. Their doom-laden spin on the genre summons up punishing, magisterial riffs, weighed down with swaths of smothering distortion, and beckons you closer into the abyss.

It’s been over a decade since we last heard from these black/death anti-civilization stalwarts, but recent stirrings of life on their end (and the enduring timeliness of their anti-racist, anti-oppressive, pro-environment message) made me want to include them on this list. As the world burns around us and an invisible plague lays bare the gaping structural flaws upon which our modern society has been hastily constructed, bands like Peregrine remind us that things don’t have to be this way.

These Texas troublemakers skirt the line between punk and metal, but their fierce leftist politics and battering-ram intensity make them the perfect candidates for mention on a day celebrating radical working class resistance. Their live presence is unsurpassed, and their music—a gritty melange of hardcore punk, crust, sludge, doom and even skramz— is the perfect soundtrack for an uprising.

This Boston outfit bends sharp fragments of noise to suit its paranoid vision, drafting in elements of grindcore, industrial, and depressive black metal as they go. Their debut LP is discomfiting, ambitious, and impossible to tear oneself away from once its horrors begin to unfurl.

Denver's premier sludgy black/death miscreants are back with some new blood; this time, there's some nice, rotten Domination vibes involved, and their death metal proclivities are on full display. This is just one teaser track for what hopefully will be a new album, but even that is enough to whet the appetites of the unholy (and I still haven’t gotten over their “Fuck Nazi Sympathy” cover).

One of the prime architects of post-black metal has uploaded some of his most cherished releases on Bandcamp, and not a moment too soon. I’m especially partial to the Manchester, UK artist’s 2009 self-titled EP, but there are lots of gems to sift through for those who enjoy their black metal with a twist of the experimental, the spacey, the emotional, and the strange.

Artwork by Guang Yang.

Straight outta the Bay Area’s hyper-capitalist hellscape, these California nightmares dole out bloody HM2 worship with sacrilegious glee. Sworn to the old school, rooted in the classics, and armed with the chops to pull off aggressive modern death without lapsing into proggy fretboard Olympics territory, Ripped to Shreds is a disgusting delight.

Artwork by Florian-Ayala Fauna.

Adzes’ raison d'etre has long been to churn out socially conscious, noisy, atmospheric sludge with teeth, and this latest entry into their anti-capitalist canon seems finds them even more woebegone over the fate of our dying planet. Taken off the band’s upcoming full-length debut, the pair of tracks currently live on Bandcamp tell a dreary tale of dashed hopes and burning radical potential.

The buzz around Cascadian black metal as a micro-genre has lain dormant for the past few years, but Awenden is a shining example of how lovely the form can be when executed well. Golden Hour offers shimmering melodic black metal that's bursting with light, and aligned against the evils of empire, fascism, and civilization.

Talk about an antifascist metal (and hardcore) dream team. This four-way split between reactivated metalcore greats Racetraitor, antifascist war machine Neckbeard Deathcamp, high-intensity grind force Closet Witch, and raw black metal storm Haggathorn makes for an essential combination of brutality, integrity, and blastbeats.

Dawn Ray'd - Behold Sedition Plainsong

By Kim Kelly. “It’s time for new tales of resistance!” is a hell of a way to open an album, but in Dawn Ray’d’s case the bravado is warranted. “Raise the Sails,” the string-speckled opening salvo on the Northern UK trio’s sophomore album, Behold Sedition Plainsong, is more of a warning than anything.

By Kim Kelly.


“It’s time for new tales of resistance!” is a hell of a way to open an album, but in Dawn Ray’d’s case the bravado is warranted. “Raise the Flails,” the string-speckled opening salvo on the Northern UK trio’s sophomore album, Behold Sedition Plainsong, is more of a warning than anything. When vocalist and violinist Simor Barr lets loose his mighty roar and lays out the bones of this latest manifesto, it’s hard not to feel a shiver of excitement (or dread) run up one’s spine.

This is a wild, powerful modern black metal record steeped in the language of revolution, and executed with the deadly precision of a battle-hardened firing squad. Melodic, aggressive, and heavy in all the right places (“Until the Forge Goes Cold” provides a masterclass in dynamic tension), Behold Sedition Plainsong is a brilliant piece of militant propaganda, designed to delight and inflame in equal measure. Its canny blend of epic black metal, winding folk melodies, and even funereal doom (as on “Soon Will Be the Age of Lessons Learnt,” which at certain moments sounds all the world like a cleaned-up Thou) is as refreshing as it is compelling, offering a thoroughly modern take on the genre while at times harkening back to the great old 90s folk black metal bands (but mercifully devoid of any cryptofascist heathen underpinnings).

Dawn Ray’d is a unique property in a genre flush with tired dogma, hokey theatrical bluster, and sly cryptofascist signaling, and the attention they’ve raked in as modern black metal’s premier anarchist standard-bearers is a breath of fresh air amidst cloying clouds of rot. It’s in that way they channel their venerable UK predecessors by exemplifying the Bolt Thrower creed: in a world of compromise, some don’t. This violin-powered, often grandiose black metal trio, with its roots in the industrial North of a politically-fractured island and its black flag flying high, have been on the vanguard of a new kind of metal resistance—and that influence is spreading.

Over the past several years, as the rise of global fascism has emboldened dotted cesspools of fascist scum and energized a new generation of radicals, the world of heavy metal has reacted in two ways—first, in the new wave of antifascist extreme metal has increasingly made its presence known, and secondly, in an upswing in reactionary or outright fascist elements rearing their ugly heads and caterwauling in defense of “keeping metal dangerous” (Never mind that most of the revered Second Wave black metal bands were founded in liberal social democratic Nordic countries and made up of spotty proto-edgelord teenagers practicing in government-subsidized studios).

Dawn Ray’d's contributions here cannot be understated. The very fact that a vocally, proudly antifascist band—let alone with one with an explicitly working class anarchist politic— has been invited to spread their message on some of metal’s biggest stages and been covered positively in all manner of publications (metal-focused and otherwise) continues to be a source of amazement. And, for those of us who came of age during a time when getting many metal fans to care even a little bit about injustice seemed like an insurmountable feat, it feels downright miraculous. It is even more satisfying to note that, politics aside, the quality of their compositions, musicianship, and songwriting have remained utterly top-tier; I cannot fathom why one would want to ignore a message like theirs, but if needs must, there is plenty for the alleged “apolitical” metalhead to appreciate here. One of Dawn Ray’d's greatest strengths has been their ability to write undeniably excellent black metal songs, and this sophomore effort is no exception; I’d challenge any black metal aficionado to stick on “To All, To All, To All!”— a blistering screed against wage slavery—and find fault with its icy melodic core, merciless blasts, or medieval-sounding folk passages torn straight from the Windir playbook, or for that matter, with the feral, melancholic roar of “Salvation Rite.”

Lest one assume that the album is a joyless manifesto punctuated by blastbeats, rest assured that there is still hope to be found among the ashes. Extreme metal has a long history of building power from below, and it’s that exact political strategy that will lead us out of perdition. As Dawn Ray’d ask plainly on “A Time for Courage at the Borderlands,” a smoldering folk-inflected elegiac for the refugees left to die at arbitrary settler-colonial borders,

What if all it took
To help get people through
Was someone else who could resist
What if that was you?

What if it was all of us? Imagine what a better world we could build.

Derkéta - In Death We Meet

By Kim Kelly. Comebacks and reunions have lost their sparkle. They’re a dime a dozen nowadays, fueled by rising guarantees and nostalgia and buoyed by fans' all-consuming urge to see a band play "the old shit." Missed Carcass or Emperor

By Kim Kelly.

[Last week Derkéta updated their Bandcamp with a remixed/remastered version of In Death We Meet done by Ola Lindgren from Grave. The remix has replaced the existing version of the album, meaning you can download it free of charge from your Bandcamp fan page if you already bought it. And you definitely should do so, it sounds so good! To celebrate the new version of In Death We Meet here's a reprint of Kim Kelly's review plus a couple of photos by Brian Krasman from their recent set at Migration Fest.]

Cover art by Richard Schouten

Comebacks and reunions have lost their sparkle. They’re a dime a dozen nowadays, fueled by rising guarantees and nostalgia and buoyed by fans' all-consuming urge to see a band play "the old shit." Missed Carcass or Emperor the first time ‘round? No sweat, they’ll be right over (provided the money’s there). Nostalgia is now a thing of the past, but what of the bands that never got a chance to fade away? Derkéta's 2012 opus In Death We Meet may have felt like a comeback, but, improbably enough, served as their first proper introduction - one that took them nearly twenty-five years to make.

Far away from New York's brutish glamor or Florida's swampy heat, an ex-member of pioneering all-female death/doom band Mythic came together with two like-minded Rust Belt ladies and unwittingly launched what would become one of American death metal's unsung greats. It's taken nearly two decades for them to start getting the kind of recognition they so richly deserve, and even now, their first (!) proper album In Death We Meet is still flying further below the radar than one might like. The band's decision to quietly release the album themselves cut down on hype; I only found out the album existed during a chance encounter at a MDF distro stall, but happily plunked down those ten bucks faster than you can say "essential purchase."

There's never really been a core lineup, so to speak - members of Nunslaughter, Mythic, and now Cattle Decapitation have lent their talents to the cause, but at the heart of it all has been Sharon Bascovsky, a slight woman with a penchant for tuning down and possessed of a hugely powerful, caustic roar that'd bring Beelzebub himself trembling to his knees if he found himself on the wrong end of it. Joined by bassist Robin Mazen, drummer Terri Lewis, and guitarist Mary Bielich, Bascovsky has crafted a masterful collection of morbid, unerringly brutal death metal songs that would sound right at home on the band's cult Nineties output. They proceed at a relentless, measured stomp, shrouded in grim resolve. There isn't the faintest whiff of sterile modernity about it, and for good reason. In Death We Meet is the sound of a "Record" button being pressed on songs that have been hanging in the ether since 1990. Dérketa sounds old school because they were there - they lived it, and what's more, they created it. They helped build that fucking school, brick by muddy brick.

Derkéta at Migration Fest 2018. Photos by Brian Krasman from Meat Mead Metal

The album itself is everything a fan would want, and more. In Death We Meet feels far darker and heavier than your run-of-the-mill OSDM recording. The weight its creators carried on their shoulders press down upon its chords, and the album is intensely personal for reasons beyond its long gestation and perennially uncertain future. As Bascovsky shared with me during an interview last year, the title track on In Death We Meet was inspired by and dedicated to the memory of a close family friend who'd passed away unexpectedly. The death she screams of is not the glorified, incense-swathed reaper of popular metallic imagery; it's deeper than that. This death is all too familiar. Its hands aren't icy cold, but cool and papery, marked with hospital scars and bitten fingernails. It's death in its reality, not its fantasy - a heavy realization, a struggle to understand, and ultimately, the yawning chasm of rage, confusion, and grief that awaits us all. Derketa howl into the void, and come back gasping for air and clawing for purchase.

They have awakened from the cold embrace of their premature burial once more, and seem stronger than ever. Happily enough, Derketa have been playing live with a new drummer, and one can only hope that new material is forthcoming. Above all, they're survivors, and have fought hard for this second chance to shine. It's been a long time coming.

Hail the Goddess(es) of Death!