After a couple weeks without any truly huge album releases, we've got a couple of big ones this week: Mastodon and Russian Circles. There are also a few big-name albums out this week that I'm entirely disinterested in, so we're skipping those! As always, I've got a selection of stuff I'm pretty excited about waiting for you after the break.

The biggest release today is clearly the new album from Mastodon. Marrow Deep is the first album from the band since the departure and death of Brent Hinds. Unsurprisingly, it's sonically heavy and emotionally heavy. Hmm, two kinds of heavy, you say? Something about that speaks to me...

The new Russian Circles album Nine is always going to hold a special place in my heart as the first album I reviewed for this site. Read my review here if you are so inclined, but to summarize, it's another very solid album from one of metal's most consistent and genre-defining bands. 

Nephila is a new band to me as of this morning, but I'm really digging their new album, Huldra. This album wears its 1970s space rock influences on its sleeve. You get a pair of harmonizing female vocalists over a Hammond organ and proggy, blues-y guitar work. It's upbeat and soaring, but still delivers the riffs. Great stuff. 

Kulk hails from England and bills themselves as a psychedelic doom band. They've got a few other releases, and maybe those tags fit their earlier releases better, but the new album, Choosing to Die, strikes me more as post hardcore or very heavy noise rock. Whatever you call it, it rules. This album is noisy, discordant, swampy, and punky. Most tracks jump in, punch you in the face, and jump back out - there's only one track that's longer than four minutes. The riff on "To Take Life" is one of the greatest things since the invention of apple fritters. I really, really like this one. 

Satanic Planet is a band made up of Lucien Greaves of The Satanic Temple (the actual organization, not a band), Luke Henshaw of bands like Planet B and First Power Crew, Justin Pearson of The Locust and Deaf Club, and the legendary Dave Lombardo (who I shouldn't need to introduce). They have a new album coming out in October, and you can listen to the first track, "Sam Alito's Mom," right now. Man, I love this track. Heavy, spooky, and politically pointed with some amazing percussion - this is like evil catnip for me. We'll see if the rest of the album is as strong. 

We haven't done any shoegaze recommendations for a while, which is why I'm glad I stumbled across this new EP by Sleep Club this week. This isn't the most original sound I've ever heard - it reminds me a lot of the very solid album by Griefeater that came out late last year (which, in turn, sounds like a ton of other shoegaze bands) - but clean, gentle vocals backed with loud, fuzzy guitars is a formula that pretty much always works for me. 

And speaking of shoegaze, let's close out with the new EP from Cold Gawd. This is definitely not the heaviest release of the week, but tracks like "Grease, " with its pairing of clean shoegaze vocals and barking metal shouts, demonstrate why its on this list. There's also a hip hop influence on many of these tracks, which is not something I hear in many of the bands I feature in this column. 

That's all for now! I have two reviews in the hopper for next week, and hopefully some other fun surprises as well. Oh, and a note for Kelvin: Sorry the new Kamelot album didn't make the cut.