I'm very excited to announce that album reviews will soon be joining the content mix here at BKOH! The first review will drop at some point next week, and I'm actually listening to an advance copy of the album in question as I type this. I could have just dropped the review as a surprise next week, but I actually wanted to take a few minutes to explain my album review process and philosophy in advance before the first review arrived. 

In short, here's what you can expect to see from BKOH reviews: Essay-style reactions to reactions without scores. While I was briefly tempted to assign a Lemmy score to albums, I've decided to stick with an essay format for several reasons. First, that's simply what we do here on this site, and (for some reason) that's resonating with readers. Second, I know from experience that assigning scores to a work of art is messy business. Maybe some day I'll write more about this, but for many years in my early career I was a professional video game journalist and critic. I've had far too many conversations about whether the latest Call of Duty is that much better than the new Rainbow Six to want to go back to those days. 

You probably won't see a review of every high-profile metal album here. I'm a one-man operation with other obligations, so I simply won't have the bandwidth to cover every worthy album out there. You're also not likely to see me slamming an album. That's not because I'm an industry shill (or trying to become one). It's because I'm proactively going after albums I'm interested to hear, typically from bands I have enjoyed in the past. If an album I'm excited to hear turns out to be a disappointment, I will share that opinion honestly. But I'm not going to seek out albums I expect not to enjoy or find interesting on at least some level. Super negative reviews can be fun to read and to write, but I am much more interested in writing about music that I feel is worth promoting.

Unless otherwise noted, all advance album reviews on this page were obtained by working with a band directly, or their management. If any band is interested in having their album covered here, they can reach out to me via my contact form or at bothkindsofheavy@gmail.com. I cannot guarantee that I'll be able to cover everything submitted to me, but I promise to at least listen to everything sent my way.