Friday is here, praise Dracula! It's a pretty solid new release day, with two albums I reviewed and really liked and a couple more good ones I didn't get to. We've got all flavors of metal for you below, or all the flavors that matter, anyway. Into the pit with you!

The Bite That Grows Up, the new album by Great Falls, is absolutely harrowing. It sounds like a person walking right up to the edge of complete collapse and dangling a foot over the edge. So obviously I loved it - you can read my full review here. BKOH guest contributor Josh Burke saw Great Falls at a festival last weekend and said they were absolutely incredible. He also said they were quite gracious when he took a great fall of his own and fell into their merch table. My wife gets all the credit for that joke. 

Rebecca Vernon of SubRosa is back with her second album as The Keening, and it is a sad and lovely record. Read my full take on it here. If all goes according to plan, I'll have an interview with Vernon about this doomy folk metal album and her career in general in the next week or two. 

Temilotzin is a new EP from Tzompantli that was released this week to coincide with Indigenous Peoples Day. It draws heavily from the traditional folk side of the band's soundscape. It is all acoustic and sung entirely in the Náhuatl language, with many of the lyrics drawn from the words of Náhuatl warrior-poets. I absolutely love this release and expect that it's going to be in regular rotation for a long time. 

Here's another one released to coincide with Indigenous Peoples Day. Howling Piercing Darkness by Pan-American Native Front is for you if you like the indigenous sounds of the Tzompantli EP but wished it was heavier. This EP gives you four songs of blistering black metal about the Mixton war of 1540.

I'll admit I'm a little bit on the fence with this new Fervence album. At times, it's a little too close to symphonic metal for me, which is a genre that largely doesn't click with me. But when it gets down into the nasty metalcore, it works for me. Listen and judge for yourself. 

This one is fun. The new self-titled Caspian album is peppy and upbeat by the standards of instrumental post-rock. On this one, you get six tracks of instrumental earworms that are a nice change of pace from all our typical doom and gloom. Not that we don't love doom and gloom in this little corner of Al Gore's internet. 

Looking for some sludge metal? Firebreather has you covered. The Blood That I Spill Turns To Fire reminds me a looooot of Mastodon, but that's not a complaint. This Swedish band have been cranking out doom-inflected sludge since 2016, and this new record makes me want to go back and check out their earlier stuff. 

Looking for some death/doom? Mother of Graves has you covered. The Light That Keeps Us is heavy and sorrowful, eight tracks of crushing riffs and aching humanity. Let's get sad, y'all. 

Looking for me to stop repeating myself? Okay, you got it. Here's a synthy, proggy new single from Master Boot Record. It's a lot of fun. Sometimes that's all you need to say.  

It probably says something about me when I listen to a song and think "Hell yes, this sounds like a nightmare." Probably work discussing with my therapist, huh? Anyway. That's all a way for me to say that The Body & Cel Genesis have a third single out for their upcoming collaborative album. Like the first two, "To Be Eviscerated" is chaotic, noisy, and terrifying. I love it. 

Finally, here's this week's horror movie recommendation. Deadstream is a horror/comedy about a disgraced livestreamer in a haunted house. It's a great setup for a modern found footage movie, but what really sets it apart is the Evil Dead 2 vibe and transports it to the modern day. It's the movie I've seen that most closely captures the manic vibe of Sam Raimi's early work. It's a blast.

Have a great weekend, everyone.