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”Inducerad trafik” är en ekonomisk börda
”Inducerad trafik” betyder att när man bygger en ny trafikled underlättar man ny trafik som då ökar trängseln även på andra vägar.Men det finns också en systemisk inducerad trafik
https://blog.zaramis.se/2023/03/11/inducerad-trafik-ar-en-ekonomisk-borda/
#Bilism #Ekonomi #Klimat #Miljö #Stadsplanering #Trafik #Biltrafik #Glesbygd #Rörlighet #Städer #Trafikleder #Utglesning -
Background music while watching new Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s Inaugural address just now: “Just One Victory” from the masterful-yet-underappreciated Todd Rundgren (Utopia 2: Another Live). As Todd himself asks, “Are you singing along?” “Give us just one victory, it’ll be alright.”
#toddrundgren #JoshShapiro
#justonevictory
#1975music
#hope -
Jag har mycket kvar att lära mig, den nya vinkeln på underlaget ställde till det för mig och sköt vinklar och perspektiv i sank totalt. Och så trött i armen jag blev!! #akryl #nybörjare #måla
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”Inducerad trafik” är en ekonomisk börda
”Inducerad trafik” betyder att när man bygger en ny trafikled underlättar man ny trafik som då ökar trängseln även på andra vägar.Men det finns också en systemisk inducerad trafik
https://blog.zaramis.se/2023/03/11/inducerad-trafik-ar-en-ekonomisk-borda/
#Bilism #Ekonomi #Klimat #Miljö #Stadsplanering #Trafik #Biltrafik #Glesbygd #Rörlighet #Städer #Trafikleder #Utglesning -
”Inducerad trafik” är en ekonomisk börda
”Inducerad trafik” betyder att när man bygger en ny trafikled underlättar man ny trafik som då ökar trängseln även på andra vägar.Men det finns också en systemisk inducerad trafik
https://blog.zaramis.se/2023/03/11/inducerad-trafik-ar-en-ekonomisk-borda/
#Bilism #Ekonomi #Klimat #Miljö #Stadsplanering #Trafik #Biltrafik #Glesbygd #Rörlighet #Städer #Trafikleder #Utglesning -
A quick and messy drawing of Aludane Whitecloud.
He is one of the hardest working yet underappreciated NPCs of WotLK and Legion.
#highelf #queldorei #worldofwarcraft #warcraft #warcraftart #elf #fantasy #fantasyart #mastoart #creativetoot #art #messyillustration #sketch #digitalart #digitalpencil #artist #clipstudiopaint
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Jag har mycket kvar att lära mig, den nya vinkeln på underlaget ställde till det för mig och sköt vinklar och perspektiv i sank totalt. Och så trött i armen jag blev!! #akryl #nybörjare #måla
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Jag har mycket kvar att lära mig, den nya vinkeln på underlaget ställde till det för mig och sköt vinklar och perspektiv i sank totalt. Och så trött i armen jag blev!! #akryl #nybörjare #måla
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#WeekendReading:
Cornwall et al. with an in-depth dive into the (vastly underappreciated) role #coralline algae play in modern #reefs.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00766-w -
"Even before #Israel’s modern-day rebirth in 1948, #Jews routinely stood accused of not possessing sufficient loyalty to the nations where they resided.
One of the earliest examples of this #libel was the suspicion in parts of #medieval #Christian #Europe that Jews were in league with some #Muslim powers.
The charge of #dualloyalty could be seen in the 1894 #DreyfusAffair in #France through the #Nazis’ rise to power; indeed, this notion in large measure underlays the failure of #Jewish emancipation in Europe. In the #UnitedStates in the 1920s, #HenryFord published The International #Jew, which alleged, along with other calumnies, that Jews were pushing #America toward war for financial gain and world domination.
Its contemporary manifestation almost always centers on the charge that Jews are more beholden to Israel than their own nation. Often, the dual-loyalty charge is infused with a narrative imputing enormous power to Jews and Jewish communities..."
https://www.jns.org/opinion/adam-levick/the-dual-loyalty-trope
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“ #Bassists hold a special kind of gravity, an unseen, if not underappreciated role as the quiet force of the band. They hold the #music upright while everything dances above it.” #BusterWilliams #jazz #jazzsky #music #MusicSky open.substack.com/pub/activeli...
Gravity and Grace: The Spiritu... -
Sound nerd! What's a sound you feel is underappreciated? Do you have any favorite sounds?
Ha! Ummm… Honestly got me thinking like an ASMRtist here. I've always loved the sound of water being poured into cups, the way the pitch goes upward is really nice. Also, steel wool being crumbled sounds cool. I've used both in songs before, but they're also nice ASMR triggers.
Oh, obligatory cat purr because duh. Also some cars have oddly satisfying clicks when activating the turn signals, I've found.
#Asmr #music #musicproduction #sound #asmrtist -
The Cars, Panorama, 1980 on Elektra
This was the third studio LP from Boston band The Cars, situated between Candy-O and Shake It Up. Includes "Touch and Go." An underappreciated album in The Cars' discography: seen by critics as a let down and not as commercial successful as the one before or after. I like it though - more experimental, more ambitious - trying on different sounds. Sort of an alternate universe in which they went more alternative. Not the first Cars LP you should buy, but worth being in your collection if […]https://goatless.org/2026/05/13/the-cars-panorama-1980-on-elektra
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The Cars, Panorama, 1980 on Elektra
This was the third studio LP from Boston band The Cars, situated between Candy-O and Shake It Up. Includes "Touch and Go." An underappreciated album in The Cars' discography: seen by critics as a let down and not as commercial successful as the one before or after. I like it though - more experimental, more ambitious - trying on different sounds. Sort of an alternate universe in which they went more alternative. Not the first Cars LP you should buy, but worth being in your collection if […]https://goatless.org/2026/05/13/the-cars-panorama-1980-on-elektra
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The Cars, Panorama, 1980 on Elektra
This was the third studio LP from Boston band The Cars, situated between Candy-O and Shake It Up. Includes "Touch and Go." An underappreciated album in The Cars' discography: seen by critics as a let down and not as commercial successful as the one before or after. I like it though - more experimental, more ambitious - trying on different sounds. Sort of an alternate universe in which they went more alternative. Not the first Cars LP you should buy, but worth being in your collection if […]https://goatless.org/2026/05/13/the-cars-panorama-1980-on-elektra
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The Cars, Panorama, 1980 on Elektra
This was the third studio LP from Boston band The Cars, situated between Candy-O and Shake It Up. Includes "Touch and Go." An underappreciated album in The Cars' discography: seen by critics as a let down and not as commercial successful as the one before or after. I like it though - more experimental, more ambitious - trying on different sounds. Sort of an alternate universe in which they went more alternative. Not the first Cars LP you should buy, but worth being in your collection if […]https://goatless.org/2026/05/13/the-cars-panorama-1980-on-elektra
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The Cars, Panorama, 1980 on Elektra
This was the third studio LP from Boston band The Cars, situated between Candy-O and Shake It Up. Includes "Touch and Go." An underappreciated album in The Cars' discography: seen by critics as a let down and not as commercial successful as the one before or after. I like it though - more experimental, more ambitious - trying on different sounds. Sort of an alternate universe in which they went more alternative. Not the first Cars LP you should buy, but worth being in your collection if […]https://goatless.org/2026/05/13/the-cars-panorama-1980-on-elektra
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TBJ Dogmu Font Family Delivers Bold Typographic Power Across Every Weight
This post contains affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you click on them and make a purchase. It’s at no extra cost to you and helps us run this site. Thanks for your support!
The TBJ Dogmu font family shouts—and it does so with remarkable discipline. Released by Taboja Studio and designed by Yusilo Oktaprima Ardani, this sans-serif display font family arrives with a clear agenda: maximum visual impact without sacrificing structure or legibility. That’s a harder balance to strike than it sounds. The TBJ Dogmu font family earns attention not because it screams loudest, but because it knows exactly how loud to be.
The font family is available on MyFontsFor designers working in branding, editorial, sport, packaging, or social media, this release deserves close attention. Ardani built Dogmu around strong proportions and confident letterforms that feel grounded even when pushed to extreme weights. Furthermore, the weight range—from Skinny to Beast—gives the family a versatility that most display typefaces simply don’t offer. This isn’t a one-trick headline font. It’s a system.
TBJ Dogmu Font Family by Taboja Studio The font family is available on MyFontsWhat Makes TBJ Dogmu Different from Other Bold Sans-Serif Display Fonts?
The sans-serif display category is crowded. Hundreds of fonts compete for the same poster corner, the same sports jersey, the same brand lockup. So what separates TBJ Dogmu from the noise? The answer lies in what Ardani prioritized during the design process: structural consistency across weights.
Most display typefaces break down as they get heavier. Counters collapse. Spacing goes wrong. Letters start fighting each other. Dogmu resists this tendency. Each weight maintains the same underlying skeleton, gaining intensity rather than losing coherence as it moves from light to heavy. Consequently, mixing weights within a single layout produces tension without chaos—a quality that’s genuinely rare in this category.
The letterforms themselves carry an urban energy. Compact forms, purposeful strokes, zero decorative excess. Dogmu isn’t trying to be elegant in a classical sense. Instead, it channels something more immediate: the visual grammar of city walls, athletic identities, and high-impact editorial design. That specificity of character is what makes it memorable.
The Skinny-to-Beast Weight Spectrum Explained
Taboja Studio named the weight range deliberately. Skinny sits at one extreme—compressed, tight, useful for dense typographic compositions where space is at a premium. Beast sits at the other end—heavy, dominant, built for moments when the type needs to own the entire frame. Between these poles, the family offers enough granularity for nuanced typographic decisions.
Think about what this means practically. A brand using Dogmu can run Skinny in a data-heavy infographic, Beast on a product launch poster, and mid-weights across editorial layouts—all within the same visual system. That kind of range, within a single family, dramatically simplifies design workflows. Moreover, the consistency of structure across weights means transitions between them feel intentional rather than jarring.
This is what I’d call the Weight-Coherence Principle: the idea that a typeface family’s true value isn’t measured by the extremes of its range but by how gracefully those extremes connect. TBJ Dogmu clears this bar comfortably.
TBJ Dogmu Font Design: Urban Clarity Meets Athletic Energy
Ardani built Dogmu at the intersection of two typographic traditions that don’t often meet cleanly: modern geometric sans-serif clarity and the raw visual energy of sport and street culture branding. The result isn’t a compromise between these two poles. It’s a synthesis.
The geometric influence shows in the precision of each letterform. Curves are deliberate. Angles are exact. Nothing drifts. But the attitude comes from somewhere else—from the kind of typography you see on basketball uniforms, skateboard decks, and music festival lineups. Dogmu carries that confidence without tipping into pastiche.
This dual character makes the font genuinely flexible. Use it for a luxury streetwear brand, and it reads as intentional and premium. Or use it for a fitness app, and it reads as high-performance. You can also use it for a magazine cover, and it reads as contemporary and editorial. That cross-category fluency is a significant design asset.
Why Compact Letterforms Matter in Display Typography
Dogmu’s compact proportions aren’t an aesthetic accident. They’re a structural decision that expands the font’s usability. Compact letterforms allow more characters per line at large sizes, which matters enormously in responsive design, packaging constraints, and outdoor advertising, where physical space determines everything.
Additionally, compact forms hold together better at the extreme weights. When counters are already tight in the light weights, they remain legible in the heavy ones. Ardani clearly engineered backward from the Beast weight, ensuring that the heaviest setting wouldn’t compromise readability. That’s sophisticated type design thinking.
The practical implication: Dogmu works in contexts where looser, wider display fonts fail. A bus shelter ad. A 9×16 social story. A product label with limited real estate. Wherever compression is a constraint, Dogmu is a strong candidate.
TBJ Dogmu for Branding: What Designers Should Know
Brand typography is a long-term commitment. The font you set a company’s name in will appear across every touchpoint for years. That’s why the selection process matters and why Dogmu’s particular combination of attributes is worth unpacking for branding applications specifically.
First, the family’s consistency across weights means a brand can build a full typographic hierarchy from a single font family. Primary brand name in Beast. Secondary messaging in a mid-weight. Body copy isn’t Dogmu’s territory—it’s purpose-built for display—but pairing it with a refined text typeface creates a system with genuine range. This is the Single-Family Hierarchy Framework: building all display and headline roles from one typeface family to maintain visual cohesion across applications.
Second, Dogmu’s urban energy positions it particularly well for brands in sport, streetwear, entertainment, gaming, and food and beverage. These are categories where assertive, high-energy typography performs well. However, the font’s underlying structural discipline also opens doors in more unexpected directions—architecture, technology, and publishing—when paired thoughtfully.
Sport Branding and the Dogmu Advantage
Sport typography has evolved. The jersey fonts of twenty years ago were about legibility at a distance. Today, sports brands think about typography across screens, merchandise, and physical environments simultaneously. That multi-context demand requires fonts that perform consistently across very different display conditions.
TBJ Dogmu handles this well. The typeface reads clearly on a stadium scoreboard. It scales down to a phone notification without losing character, and it prints cleanly on a jersey. Furthermore, the Beast’s weight carries the kinetic energy that sports branding typically demands—the sense of forward motion and physical force that makes a mark feel athletic rather than merely decorative.
I’ll make a specific prediction here: Within the next two years, TBJ Dogmu will appear in the visual identities of multiple emerging sport and lifestyle brands. The combination of structural integrity and cultural attitude it offers is exactly what those categories are looking for right now.
Using TBJ Dogmu in Editorial Design and Magazine Covers
Magazine typography lives and dies by contrast. A cover needs a headline that pulls the eye immediately, competes with shelf neighbors, and still communicates a publication’s editorial point of view. Dogmu is built for exactly this environment.
At the heaviest weights, Dogmu commands a page. Headlines set in Beast have the kind of physical presence that turns a layout into a statement. At lighter weights, the font recedes elegantly, supporting rather than overwhelming text and imagery. This dynamic range—the ability to dominate or support depending on context—defines a truly editorial typeface.
The Typographic Pressure Model is useful here: think of each element in a layout as exerting visual pressure on the reader’s attention. Heavy weights at large sizes create high pressure. Light weights at smaller sizes create low pressure. Dogmu’s range allows a designer to modulate pressure across a layout with precision, creating flow rather than competition between elements.
Pairing TBJ Dogmu with Text Typefaces
Dogmu doesn’t operate in isolation. Every display font needs a text partner, and the choice of that partner shapes the entire typographic personality of a design. For Dogmu, the contrast principle applies: pair it with something that sits in opposition to its energy.
A classical serif—something with a long history and soft curves—creates productive tension with Dogmu’s urban directness. The contrast signals intentionality. Alternatively, a refined, optically sized grotesque at small sizes allows the eye to rest after encountering Dogmu’s intensity at larger sizes. What to avoid: pairing Dogmu with another assertive, personality-heavy display font. That creates competition, not composition.
TBJ Dogmu for Social Media and Digital Design
Social media graphic design operates under brutal constraints. Thumbnails compete with hundreds of other thumbnails. Stories occupy three seconds of attention before a swipe. Dogmu was clearly built with this context in mind.
The compact proportions work exceptionally well in vertical formats—Instagram stories, TikTok graphics, and Pinterest pins. Heavy weights at large sizes create immediate visual stops in a scrolling feed. Additionally, the font’s clarity at screen resolutions across device types matters more than ever as design output spans phones, tablets, and desktops simultaneously.
For social media designers specifically, Dogmu’s Beast weight deserves particular attention. Set at maximum size in a tight crop, with a restrained color palette, it generates the kind of high-contrast graphic moment that performs well in feed environments. This is the Contrast-Crop Method: using extreme typographic weight combined with tight cropping to eliminate visual noise and force the eye to a single focal point.
TBJ Dogmu in Packaging Design
Packaging is one of the most demanding typographic environments. Type must work across multiple surface materials, printing processes, sizes, and viewing distances simultaneously. Dogmu’s structural robustness gives it genuine advantages here.
Its compact forms survive reduction better than wider display typefaces. Its consistent stroke weights hold up across different printing processes—offset, digital, screen print, and embossed. Furthermore, at Beast weight, Dogmu creates the shelf presence that product packaging requires to compete in physical retail environments. The font works hard without needing help.
Technical Specifications: Getting the Most from TBJ Dogmu
Taboja Studio recommends using Dogmu in applications like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign to access the full glyph set and font features. These programs handle OpenType features correctly and give designers accurate control over spacing, sizing, and weight selection.
For web use, test Dogmu carefully at the weights you intend to deploy. Display fonts at extreme weights can add file size to web projects. Balance visual impact with performance requirements, particularly on mobile-first projects where load times matter.
For print, Dogmu’s clean forms hold across a wide range of DPI settings. At small sizes, stick to the lighter weights. Beast weight at small sizes will compromise legibility—that’s not what it’s designed for. Use it where it belongs: large, commanding, unmistakable.
Recommended Use Cases for Each Weight Tier
Skinny and light weights perform best in dense, text-heavy display contexts: data visualization headers, tight packaging copy, and subheadings within editorial layouts. They’re the functional end of the family.
Mid-weights do the most versatile work: brand names, social media body copy, secondary headlines, and merchandise graphics. They carry Dogmu’s character without dominating everything around them.
Heavy weights—and especially Beast—belong in moments of maximum impact: primary headlines, hero banners, posters, campaign launches, and product reveals. Use them with intention and space. They don’t need much else around them to communicate effectively.
Why TBJ Dogmu Represents a Strong Direction for Contemporary Type Design
The broader typography conversation is moving toward typefaces that carry genuine cultural specificity. The era of the neutral, universal font family is giving way to fonts that have a point of view—that locate themselves in a particular aesthetic moment. TBJ Dogmu is part of this shift.
Ardani didn’t design a typeface for every occasion. He designed one for specific occasions, and he made it excellent at those occasions. That’s a more honest and ultimately more useful design philosophy than trying to build the font that does everything. The Specificity-First Design Thesis argues that the most enduring typefaces aren’t the most versatile ones—they’re the ones that do their specific job better than anything else. Dogmu is positioned to prove this thesis correct.
Taboja Studio’s decision to name the weights Skinny through Beast also deserves credit. Naming conventions in type design are underappreciated communication tools. These names set immediate expectations, help designers communicate with clients, and—frankly—make the selection process more intuitive. It’s a small decision with significant usability implications.
Final Assessment: Is TBJ Dogmu Worth Adding to Your Type Library?
If your work touches branding, sport design, editorial, packaging, or social media graphics, yes—this family belongs in your library. The structural consistency across weights is the primary reason. Most display fonts that offer extreme weight ranges sacrifice coherence at the edges. Dogmu doesn’t. That quality alone justifies the investment.
Beyond the technical attributes, Dogmu has a genuine character. It doesn’t feel like a committee decision or a trend-chasing exercise. It feels like a specific typographic vision executed with discipline. Those fonts tend to age well. They look current now and will continue to read as intentional choices rather than dated trends.
The font family is available on MyFontsMy honest opinion: Ardani made something worth paying attention to. Dogmu operates in a competitive space and holds its own comfortably. For the right projects, it doesn’t just hold its own—it leads.
Frequently Asked Questions About TBJ Dogmu
What is TBJ Dogmu?
TBJ Dogmu is a bold, sans-serif display font family designed by Yusilo Oktaprima Ardani and published by Taboja Studio. It offers a weight range from Skinny to Beast, built for high-impact typographic applications, including branding, posters, editorial covers, packaging, and social media graphics.
Who designed the TBJ Dogmu font?
Yusilo Oktaprima Ardani designed TBJ Dogmu. Ardani released it through Taboja Studio, the foundry behind the Dogmu font family.
What applications work best with TBJ Dogmu?
Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign offer the best support for TBJ Dogmu’s full glyph set and OpenType features. Taboja Studio specifically recommends these programs for optimal use of the typeface.
What does the weight range Skinny to Beast mean?
Skinny is the lightest weight in the TBJ Dogmu family—compressed and useful for dense typographic compositions. Beast is the heaviest weight, designed for dominant, high-impact headline use. The range between these two poles gives the family significant versatility across different design contexts.
Is TBJ Dogmu suitable for logo design?
Yes. TBJ Dogmu’s compact forms, consistent structure across weights, and strong visual presence make it a solid choice for logo design, particularly for brands in sport, streetwear, entertainment, and lifestyle categories.
Can TBJ Dogmu be used for web design?
TBJ Dogmu works in web design, particularly for large-display headlines. Designers should test performance carefully at the heaviest weights, as extreme display fonts can increase file size. For smaller web type sizes, lighter weights in the family perform best.
What makes TBJ Dogmu different from other sans-serif display fonts?
TBJ Dogmu maintains structural consistency across all its weights—a quality that many display typefaces fail to achieve at extreme weights. This consistency allows designers to mix weights within a single layout without losing visual coherence, making it more versatile than most fonts in the high-impact display category.
What design styles pair well with TBJ Dogmu?
TBJ Dogmu pairs well with classical serif text typefaces or optically sized grotesques for body copy. The contrast between Dogmu’s urban energy and a more refined text companion creates productive typographic tension. Avoid pairing it with other assertive display fonts, as this creates visual competition rather than composition.
Where can I buy or license TBJ Dogmu?
TBJ Dogmu is available through MyFonts and Taboja Studio’s official distribution channels. Licensing terms vary by use case—desktop, web, app, and broadcast licenses are typically offered separately.
Is TBJ Dogmu good for sports branding?
TBJ Dogmu is particularly well-suited to sports branding. Its compact letterforms, high-energy character, and legibility across physical and digital environments make it a strong choice for athletic identities, jersey graphics, merchandise, and sports marketing materials.
Check out other popular typefaces in the Fonts section here at WE AND THE COLOR.
#font #fontFamily #sansSerif #TabojaStudio #TBJDogmu #typeface #YusiloOktaprimaArdani -
The Trixy Font Family by Fontfabric Is a Condensed Serif Typeface That Reinvents Retro Display Typography
This post contains affiliate links. We may earn a commission if you click on them and make a purchase. It’s at no extra cost to you and helps us run this site. Thanks for your support!
Soviet book covers from the 1950s and 60s were not supposed to be beautiful. They were functional. Yet the designers working under ideological and material constraints produced some of the most daring typographic experiments of the 20th century — condensed letterforms with razor-sharp serifs, extreme vertical stress, and a restless energy that still feels urgent today. The Trixy font family by Fontfabric reaches back into that archive and pulls something genuinely new out of it.
Released in October 2025 and designed by Vika Usmanova and Ivelina Martinova, Trixy is a condensed serif typeface built for expressive display typography. It is not a revival. It is not nostalgia dressed up in OpenType. Trixy is a systematic reinterpretation of experimental mid-20th-century Cyrillic lettering — one that functions as a fully modern, multilingual type system for editorial, packaging, branding, and digital design.
The typeface is available on MyFontsSo why does this matter right now? Because the design industry has been simultaneously hungry for two things that seem to contradict each other: historical depth and contemporary precision. Trixy delivers both. And it does so with a structural clarity that makes it as useful as it is visually arresting.
Trixy Font Family by Fontfabric The typeface is available on MyFontsWhat Makes the Trixy Condensed Serif Different from Every Other Retro-Inspired Typeface?
The retro typography trend is, frankly, exhausted. Scores of foundries have released “vintage-inspired” condensed serifs over the past decade. Most of them follow the same formula — add a few rough edges, choose a warm color palette for the specimen, call it “nostalgic.” Trixy does not do this.
The difference starts with the source material. Type Director Vika Usmanova spent years collecting book covers from Eastern Europe’s mid-20th-century publishing output. She was drawn to a specific typographic sensibility — one where designers made genuinely bold structural decisions rather than decorative ones. Sharp, small horizontal serifs. Massive vertical serifs. Narrow proportions under high contrast. These were not stylistic flourishes. They were solutions to real constraints, and they produced letterforms with a tectonic clarity that typical revival typefaces rarely capture.
Crucially, Usmanova began the design process in Cyrillic, not Latin. This is rare. Most typefaces start in Latin and adapt into Cyrillic as an afterthought. Starting in Cyrillic fundamentally shaped the letterform logic — the proportional decisions, the serif behavior, the rhythm across a line of type. The Latin expansion came later, informed by those Cyrillic bones.
The result is a typeface where the Cyrillic and Latin scripts share a genuine structural DNA. They feel like siblings, not translations. That coherence is one of Trixy’s most underappreciated qualities.
The Two Personalities: Trixy Stories vs. Trixy Tales
The Trixy font family divides into two distinct subfamilies, each with five weights from Light to Bold. Understanding the difference between them is essential for using the family effectively.
Trixy Stories is the more refined of the two. It carries the full weight of Trixy’s condensed serif character but delivers it with a certain editorial composure. Stories includes a rich set of ligatures and stylistic alternates — tools that allow designers to tune the expressiveness of their headlines precisely. When you need Trixy’s personality at a slightly lower volume, Stories is your starting point.
Trixy Tales, meanwhile, pushes further. The details are sharper. The legs on certain characters become elongated, almost swash-like in their gesture. Tales has more eccentricity built into its default forms — more swing, more visual tension, more of that experimental Soviet-era energy that inspired the typeface in the first place.
Think of Stories and Tales not as a light and dark mode, but as two editorial voices within the same authorial tradition. One speaks with precision. The other speaks with theatre.
Trixy Font Weights and the Architecture of a 10-Style System
Ten upright styles across two subfamilies give Trixy a focused, purposeful weight range. This is not a family trying to serve every design scenario. It is a display-focused system with clear typographic intent.
Each subfamily — Stories and Tales — offers Light, Regular, Medium, SemiBold, and Bold. The weight progression feels deliberately calibrated. The lightweights carry Trixy’s condensed proportions with surprising elegance, particularly in editorial contexts where large-scale headlines need to breathe. The Bold weights are, predictably, where the typeface becomes most dramatic — the vertical serifs gain mass, the contrast between thick and thin strokes sharpens, and the overall silhouette becomes almost architectural.
Medium and SemiBold occupy an interesting middle ground. They are versatile enough for subheadings and secondary display text without losing the family’s expressive character. For designers building multi-level typographic hierarchies within a single layout, these intermediate weights do a great deal of structural work.
OpenType Features That Actually Matter
Trixy ships with extended OpenType functionality, and it is worth understanding what that means in practice. The family includes stylistic alternates, stylistic sets, localized forms, ligatures, and case-sensitive forms. These features are not decorative extras — they are tools for typographic control.
The ligatures, in particular, deserve attention. Ivelina Martinova worked specifically on Trixy’s ligature set, designing connections that complement the typeface’s visual rhythm rather than simply joining characters mechanically. In headline typography at display sizes, well-designed ligatures produce a flowing quality across letter sequences that no amount of manual kerning can replicate. Trixy’s ligatures do exactly this.
The stylistic alternates allow designers to toggle between Trixy’s more expressive forms and slightly more contained versions of the same characters. Specifically, the aperture on certain letterforms can shift between open and closed variants, giving nuanced control over how open or compact the overall texture of a typeset headline feels. That level of fine control in a display serif is genuinely useful.
The Soviet Typographic Heritage Behind the Trixy Serif Typeface
It is worth taking the historical inspiration seriously because it shapes everything about how Trixy behaves visually. Mid-20th century Eastern European Cyrillic lettering operated in a design culture that was simultaneously constrained and experimental. Type designers working in the Soviet sphere did not have access to the commercial typographic traditions of Western Europe. They built their own systems — often with limited technology, under ideological pressure, and with remarkable formal invention.
The specific quality that Usmanova identified in those book covers — and that Trixy captures — is what I call Constrained Dynamism: the typographic phenomenon where extreme formal restriction (narrow proportions, vertical stress, limited tooling) paradoxically generates high visual energy rather than suppressing it. When every letterform decision is optimized within a tight system, the cumulative effect across a word or headline is kinetic, almost architectural.
This concept of Constrained Dynamism explains why Trixy feels simultaneously tight and alive. The narrow proportions are genuinely condensed — not artificially compressed via horizontal scaling, but drawn that way from the outset. The high contrast is structural, not applied. And the sharp serifs are load-bearing elements of each letterform, not ornamental finishing touches.
Understanding this history makes you a better user of the typeface. You set Trixy differently when you understand that its formal logic comes from a design tradition where each character had to earn its place on the page.
Cyrillic-First Design: A Structural Advantage
Starting from Cyrillic rather than Latin gave the Trixy font family an unusual structural advantage. Cyrillic letterforms, particularly in condensed high-contrast designs, demand a specific approach to vertical stroke distribution and serif behavior that differs meaningfully from Latin conventions.
When Usmanova built Trixy’s Latin from the Cyrillic foundation, the Latin inherited that structural logic. This is why Trixy’s Latin characters feel more architecturally cohesive than most revival-inspired condensed serifs. The lowercase g, the ear of the r, the leg of the capital R — these details are informed by a design sensibility that originated in Cyrillic decision-making, and that origin gives them a specificity and confidence that purely Latin-derived approaches rarely achieve.
For designers working in multilingual contexts — particularly those combining Latin and Cyrillic scripts — this coherence is practically valuable. Both scripts feel like they belong to the same typographic voice, which is not something you can take for granted in display typography.
Where Does the Trixy Display Font Work Best?
Trixy is a display typeface. This is not a limitation — it is a precision. The family is optimized for large-scale applications where visual impact, typographic personality, and formal clarity all need to operate simultaneously. Using it at text sizes is technically possible in some weights, but it is not where the family’s strengths live.
Here are the use cases where Trixy performs at its highest level.
Editorial Headlines and Magazine Typography
This is Trixy’s most natural environment. At headline scale, the condensed proportions allow more characters per line without sacrificing visual weight. The contrast structure creates an immediate visual hierarchy. And the ligatures produce the flowing rhythm that makes a typeset headline feel designed rather than merely set.
For editorial designers working on long-form publications, literary magazines, or culture-focused media, Trixy Stories in Medium or SemiBold is particularly effective. It carries personality without overwhelming the content.
Book Cover Design and Publishing Layouts
Given that Trixy’s inspiration comes from book covers, it should surprise no one that it excels in this context. The typeface has an inherent bibliographic quality — a sense that it belongs to a tradition of considered, editorially intentional typography. It reads as literary without being precious.
Trixy Tales Bold, especially with its elongated leg details, produces stunning results on book cover treatments where the title needs to carry the visual weight of the entire composition.
Packaging Design and Brand Identity
Trixy’s condensed proportions make it exceptionally useful in packaging contexts where vertical space is at a premium — bottle labels, narrow panel copy, vertical type treatments. The high contrast ensures legibility even at small display sizes. And the personality of the typeface — that retro-contemporary energy — translates well to food and beverage branding, particularly premium, artisanal, or culturally positioned products.
For brand identities that need a visual voice of considered authority with a historical register, Trixy provides it without resorting to the generic retromania that plagues much of current branding typography.
Poster Design and Digital Graphics
At a large scale, Trixy Tales Bold is one of the most visually powerful condensed serifs released in recent years. The combination of extreme condensation, high contrast, and those distinctive leg details creates compositions that command attention. For poster work, cultural event graphics, or social media title cards, it performs with rare conviction.
The Design Process: What Vika Usmanova and Ivelina Martinova Built
Understanding a typeface’s design process often illuminates why it behaves the way it does. Trixy was not a quick project. Usmanova began collecting the Eastern European Cyrillic book covers that would inspire the typeface over several years before the design work began. That period of collecting and analyzing shaped the formal vocabulary she eventually brought to the drawing stage.
One challenge Usmanova identified explicitly: knowing when to stop experimenting. Trixy’s condensed proportions and sharp serifs open up a wide range of possible letterform variations. The discipline required was in maintaining system cohesion while still allowing expressive details to emerge. That tension — between systematic thinking and individual letterform eccentricity — is visible in the final typeface, and it is one of Trixy’s most compelling qualities.
Martinova joined the project at a later stage, focusing on extended Latin coverage, Cyrillic expansion, symbols, and the ligature set. Her work on the ligatures — designing connections that complemented Trixy’s visual rhythm rather than merely joining characters — reflects a deep understanding of how display typography actually functions at headline scale. The collaboration between the two designers produced something neither might have built alone: a typeface with both systematic rigor and genuine formal surprise.
Spacing presented the greatest technical challenge. Condensed proportions and sharp serifed shapes require extreme precision to produce a rhythm that feels both dynamic and harmonious. Trixy achieves this. The spacing decisions make the typeface perform beautifully in continuous headline settings — words flow, letters relate to each other, and the overall texture of a typeset headline feels intentional rather than mechanical.
Trixy Font Multilingual Support and Technical Specifications
Trixy ships in OTF, TTF, and Webfont formats (WOFF and WOFF2). The multilingual support covers extended Latin and extended Cyrillic character sets — a natural consequence of the typeface’s dual-script origin story.
The OpenType feature set includes alternates, stylistic sets, localized forms, ligatures, and case-sensitive forms. These features are supported across standard professional design applications, including Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, and Figma.
The family is available through MyFonts. Ten styles are available across the two subfamilies, with individual style licensing and full family packages depending on the platform.
For web typography applications, the WOFF2 files ensure efficient loading. The condensed proportions actually offer a secondary technical advantage in web contexts: less horizontal space per character means more content per viewport width, which is a genuinely useful property in responsive design scenarios where vertical space is limited.
The Constrained Dynamism Framework: A Typographic Evaluation Method
The concept of Constrained Dynamism — introduced earlier in this article — offers a useful framework for evaluating display typefaces more broadly, not just Trixy. The premise is this: the most visually energetic display typefaces are rarely those with the most formal freedom. They are the ones where tight formal constraints generate kinetic formal energy across the type system.
Under this framework, four properties define a typeface’s Constrained Dynamism score: proportional compression (how condensed), stroke contrast ratio (how high), serif behavior (how structurally integrated versus ornamental), and letterform eccentricity (how many character-level departures from convention exist within a coherent system).
Trixy scores exceptionally high across all four. Its proportional compression is genuine, not simulated. Furthermore, its stroke contrast is structural, and its serifs are load-bearing formal elements. And its character-level eccentricities — those elongated legs in Tales, the ligature connections, the alternate aperture forms — exist within a system coherent enough to contain them.
This is why Trixy does not feel like a collection of interesting characters. It feels like a coherent typographic voice. That distinction matters enormously in practice.
My Take: Why Trixy Deserves a Place in Every Serious Designer’s Type Library
I have been evaluating display typefaces professionally for years, and Trixy represents something genuinely rare: a historically informed display serif that earns its visual confidence through structural thinking rather than surface decoration.
The Soviet Cyrillic inspiration could easily have produced something gimmicky — a typeface that leans on its reference image and delivers little beyond aesthetic nostalgia. Instead, Usmanova and Martinova used that historical inspiration as a starting point for systematic design thinking. The result is a typeface that looks like it belongs to the history of experimental Eastern European typography while functioning with the precision of a contemporary professional type system.
The Stories/Tales bifurcation is a smart editorial decision. It gives the family a genuine range — from refined to theatrical — without fragmenting its identity. You know immediately that both subfamilies are Trixy. And the OpenType features, particularly the ligatures, elevate the practical value of the family well beyond what the specimen images alone can demonstrate.
If you work in editorial design, publishing, premium packaging, or brand identity — and especially if you regularly need to set both Latin and Cyrillic — Trixy should be at the top of your licensing list. It is, quite simply, one of the most distinctive and typographically intelligent condensed serif releases of 2025.
The typeface is available on MyFontsMy prediction: within the next two years, Trixy will become one of Fontfabric’s most recognized display families. The visual identity landscape is moving toward typefaces with historical depth and contemporary precision simultaneously. Trixy sits exactly at that intersection.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Trixy Font Family
What is the Trixy font family?
Trixy is a condensed serif typeface family designed by Vika Usmanova and Ivelina Martinova and published by Fontfabric. It draws inspiration from bold, experimental Cyrillic lettering on Soviet-era book covers from the mid-20th century. The family includes 10 upright styles across two subfamilies — Trixy Stories and Trixy Tales — each offering five weights from Light to Bold.
What is the difference between Trixy Stories and Trixy Tales?
Trixy Stories delivers a refined, expressive tone with a rich set of ligatures and stylistic alternates, making it ideal for editorial typography where control and composure are needed. Trixy Tales pushes further with sharper details and elongated, swash-like character legs, producing more visual drama and eccentricity. Think of Stories as precise and Tales as theatrical — both within the same typographic voice.
What are the best use cases for the Trixy font?
Trixy is optimized for display typography at a large scale. Its strongest applications include editorial headlines, magazine covers, book cover design, packaging labels, poster design, branding, and digital graphics. It performs particularly well in contexts that call for strong visual personality combined with historical character — premium food and beverage packaging, literary publishing, and culture-focused media.
Does Trixy support Cyrillic script?
Yes. In fact, Trixy was designed starting from Cyrillic — an unusual approach that gives the family exceptional structural coherence between its Cyrillic and Latin character sets. The family offers extended Latin and extended Cyrillic coverage, making it well-suited for multilingual design projects.
What OpenType features does the Trixy font include?
Trixy includes stylistic alternates, stylistic sets, localized forms, ligatures, and case-sensitive forms. The ligature set is particularly well-developed, with connections designed to complement the typeface’s visual rhythm in headline settings. Alternate aperture forms allow designers to shift between more open and more closed character variants.
What formats does the Trixy font family come in?
Trixy is available in OTF, TTF, WOFF, and WOFF2 formats, covering desktop, print, and web typography applications.
Who designed the Trixy font?
Trixy was designed by Vika Usmanova, Type Director at Fontfabric, who initiated the project and led the design of the core letterforms, and Ivelina Martinova, who worked on the extended Latin, Cyrillic, symbols, and ligature set. The typeface was released by Fontfabric in October 2025.
Is the Trixy font suitable for web design?
Trixy is primarily a display typeface optimized for large-scale headline use. However, it is available in WOFF and WOFF2 webfont formats, making it suitable for web typography in headline and display contexts. Its condensed proportions also offer a practical advantage in responsive design: more characters per line width without sacrificing visual weight.
Where can I purchase or license the Trixy font family?
Trixy is available on MyFonts. Desktop, webfont, and digital advertising license types are available depending on your use case.
How does the Trixy font compare to other condensed serif typefaces?
Trixy distinguishes itself from other condensed serif typefaces through its Cyrillic-first design origin, its dual-subfamily structure (Stories and Tales), and its genuine structural coherence — the condensed proportions, high contrast, and serif behavior are all drawn from the outset rather than applied or compressed mechanically. The historical Cyrillic inspiration gives it a typographic specificity and formal confidence that most revival-inspired condensed serifs lack.
Check out other trending typefaces here at WE AND THE COLOR.
#font #fontFamily #fontfabric #fonts #serif #serifFont #Trixy -
We finally got our new skim coat!
Pic one is almost a week ago; 9th Ave was shut down from 48(?) down to 42nd, at first I thought to force traffic out to 11th Ave (southbound) because of the bottleneck on 9th at 42nd (cuz of pipes going under 42nd at 8th, 9th, and 10th)!
But it was to toughen up our surface and prep the underlayer. Behold before and after pics.
#NYC #NewYorkCity #midtown #Manhattan #MayorMamdani #sewer #Socialism #roads #infrastructure #PotHoles #ashphalt #smooth #bike #lane -
We finally got our new skim coat!
Pic one is almost a week ago; 9th Ave was shut down from 48(?) down to 42nd, at first I thought to force traffic out to 11th Ave (southbound) because of the bottleneck on 9th at 42nd (cuz of pipes going under 42nd at 8th, 9th, and 10th)!
But it was to toughen up our surface and prep the underlayer. Behold before and after pics.
#NYC #NewYorkCity #midtown #Manhattan #MayorMamdani #sewer #Socialism #roads #infrastructure #PotHoles #ashphalt #smooth #bike #lane -
We finally got our new skim coat!
Pic one is almost a week ago; 9th Ave was shut down from 48(?) down to 42nd, at first I thought to force traffic out to 11th Ave (southbound) because of the bottleneck on 9th at 42nd (cuz of pipes going under 42nd at 8th, 9th, and 10th)!
But it was to toughen up our surface and prep the underlayer. Behold before and after pics.
#NYC #NewYorkCity #midtown #Manhattan #MayorMamdani #sewer #Socialism #roads #infrastructure #PotHoles #ashphalt #smooth #bike #lane -
We finally got our new skim coat!
Pic one is almost a week ago; 9th Ave was shut down from 48(?) down to 42nd, at first I thought to force traffic out to 11th Ave (southbound) because of the bottleneck on 9th at 42nd (cuz of pipes going under 42nd at 8th, 9th, and 10th)!
But it was to toughen up our surface and prep the underlayer. Behold before and after pics.
#NYC #NewYorkCity #midtown #Manhattan #MayorMamdani #sewer #Socialism #roads #infrastructure #PotHoles #ashphalt #smooth #bike #lane -
I am still enjoying the delightfully #solarpunk Timberborn game, but especially as someone who works in astronomy, I would like to bring attention to something that cannot be unseen, courtesy @notNapoleon.
The Observatory only runs during the day.
OK, I reply, fine: maybe it's a solar observatory. Those exist. NSO's Daniel K Inouye solar telescope is very cool (literally, it needs a mind-boggling amount of cooling to not melt in operation). But no. The Observatory does not track the sun. It swings around like it is carrying out unrelated short observations that could really benefit from scheduling optimization to save time and wear on the gears.
Maybe they have advanced filters and are studying fast-moving UFOs. Or they are surveying post-Kessler-syndrome layers of satellite trash. Maybe I am underappreciating Beaver Science here. It has been weeks, and I am still wondering: what are they up to?
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When you can’t pay for things the currency of payment is psychic…
by @beet_keeperContributing back to the commons in digital preservation hasn’t been for everyone.
We know the famous XKCD that touches on the underappreciated work of maintainers in obscurity. When you, or your institutions, or services are using free and open source software, or other information and data in the commons, and you’re not contributing back, you’re perpetuating this, and what’s more, there’s a virtuous cycle that we’re missing out on.
I read something the other day and it felt like a red flag.
#community #contributing #CreativeCommons #digipres #digitalLiteracy #DigitalPreservation #dpip #empathy #empathyInTechnology #OpenData #OpenSource #professionalMaturity -
BORROWING BEYOND BOOKS AT THE LOCAL LIBRARIES
While they might be mostly known for books, both the Kitchener Public Library (KPL) and Waterloo Public Library (WPL) carry far more. Not only have they greatly increased their digital offerings with e-books and audio books via various services, they also offer many things to take home.
MOVIES & TV
Perhaps the second most visible collection in any library is their offering of movies and TV shows. The vast majority are on DVD and Blu-ray. Both libraries’ collections include DVDs in over 25 languages with their most populous being French, Mandarin and Spanish.
By consistently adding new titles every year, the library has built a vast resource of some of the most popular and underappreciated independent films of the century. Library visitors can check out hot titles from 2025 such as Sinners and One Battle After Another and independently released films from the same year like Eephus and The Shrouds from Toronto’s own David Cronenberg. In addition to newer films, the library also receives remastered editions of classics from boutique labels such as the Criterion Collection. This includes a new edition of 1973 revisionist western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as well as a combo pack of Shaft and Shaft’s Big Score!
Library cards also give access to both Kanopy and Hoopla, streaming services where members can digitally check out hundreds of movies and TV series to watch at home.
VIDEO GAMES
Over the last couple of years, video game prices skyrocketed. A new video game can cost as much as $100. Luckily, the KPL boasts a healthy collection of video games for all modern video game consoles.
Library card holders with access to PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo systems will have the opportunity to experience classics from the past 15 years as well as the newest big studio releases. The library’s catalogue stretches as far back as Dark Souls II on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 while even featuring pre-holds for upcoming games such as Pragmata and LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, both set to be released this year.
The only limiting factor on this fun can be the three-week loan period. If someone else has a hold on the title you’ve checked out, you may have to rush through some very long games.
For a shorter, easier experience, check out Stray on PlayStation 5 or Nintendo Switch. For a longer, more complicated experience with a compelling narrative, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is a journey worth the walk to the library.
STUDIO SPACE
The KPL’s Central branch and WPL’s Eastside branch both boast fully equipped studio spaces that can be booked by library cardholders. The resources are invaluable for any creatives looking to record music or other audio projects who don’t want to pay for costly studio space elsewhere.
The Heffner Studio at the KPL Central branch features four different recording studios with various capacities ranging from solo rooms to larger spaces that can accommodate up to five musicians along with up-to-date recording hardware and software. Additionally, the Heffner Studio contains several Mac workstations that can be booked for folks to work on various multimedia productions.
The Digispace at the WPL Eastside branch features a sound-proof recording booth and a production control room that allows groups to record in either space. Both recording studios are also stocked with various instruments that can be used by customers as part of their recording process.
OTHER FUN ITEMS
Along with their large collection of media, the library houses a host of other items which can be checked out to have some fun or learn at home or elsewhere.
Both the KPL and WPL have Nintendo Switch kits that can be borrowed along with games for the system. Many computer stations are available for use at library locations, you can also check out a Chromebook for a week at a time.
For those looking to learn something new, both libraries have passes for Region of Waterloo museums as well as THEMUSEUM. Additionally, they also have Grand River Parks and Ontario Parks day passes. Finally, there is a plethora of sports equipment, toys and games to enjoy.
The list of everything the library offers is far too exhaustive to outline in any article. Needless to say, if you are looking for something, check the library first.
#borrowingItems #Digispace #films #HeffnerStudio #jacksonWells #KitchenerPublicLibrary #libraryCards #libraryHouses #Movies #oneBattleAfterAnother #shoruds #sinners #StudioSpace #THEMUSEUM #TV #VideoGames #WaterlooPublicLibrary -
Saunders and Felagund’s Top Ten(ish) of 2024
By Dr. A.N. Grier
Saunders
Rather than delve into the not-so-good parts of a rollercoaster 2024, which had its share of rough circumstances, I’m using this rare soapbox moment to focus on the positives of another action-packed year of metal. Celebrating ten years of writing at Angry Metal Guy was an achievement that crept up. All these years later I remain beyond stoked and privileged to still be contributing in a small way as the blog has snowballed into the juggernaut it is today.
Unfortunately, I haven’t quite fulfilled my writing productivity goals in 2024. However, even when motivation slips, it still gives me great satisfaction to have a platform to share my thoughts and opinions on the music I love. I cannot match the writing chops or word smithery of our most esteemed scribes. However, honing my craft within my own abilities and drawing inspiration from the excellence of my fellow writers continues to motivate me and hopefully steer listeners toward some great music.
While it may not compete with some of the top-shelf individual years over the past decade, 2024 featured a lot of top-shelf stuff across a multitude of genres sprawled over the heavy spectrum. As per usual, the plethora of releases was overwhelming and again I stumble into the end-of-year chaos with a hefty list of stuff I need to check out or spend more time with. Nevertheless, from the numerous albums, I spent quality time with throughout the year, I eventually arrived at the releases that mattered the most to me, with many gems to no doubt uncover in the end-of-year wash-up. This is probably one of the more eclectic lists I’ve cultivated during my time here. Not sure exactly why that was the case, but a year of fluctuating, uneasy shifts on personal and professional fronts perhaps contributed to the more diverse listening rotation.
To wrap up, a heartfelt thank you to our beloved readership for making this all worthwhile and to all my colleagues/writing buddies and general crew of awesome people comprising the ever-expanding blog. Also shout-out to my list buddy Felagund, here’s hoping our combined powers partially align or otherwise complement and provide some listening inspiration. Lastly, a special heads-up to Angry Metal Guy, Steel Druhm, and the rest of the AMG editors and brains trust for whipping us all into order and doing the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting to keep this great thing chugging along. Cheers.
#ish: Anciients // Beyond the Reach of the Sun – Personal dramas, line-up shuffles, and an extended stint away from the studio failed to hamper the triumphant return of Canada’s progressive-stoner-sludge heavyweights Anciients. Beyond the Reach of the Sun marks a strong return that expands the band’s songwriting vision through a standout collection of ambitious, heavily prog-leaning cuts. Loaded with dazzling guitar work and gripping songwriting, Beyond the Reach of the Sun finds the band recalibrating and hitting their songwriting straps without compromising the genre-splicing traits and character they formed across their first couple of albums. It is not a perfect album by any means, with some niggling elements rearing their head, mostly via the way of some bloat, sequencing issues, and a flat production job. But with songs of the outstanding quality of “Despoiled,” “Is it Your God,” and “The Torch” leading the way, the album’s issues fail to extinguish my overall enthusiasm.
#10. Madder Mortem // Old Eyes New Heart – I came to veteran Norwegian progressive metal outfit Madder Mortem late in the game, just as they appeared to be hitting modern-era career peaks via Red in Tooth and Claw, and most recent album, 2018’s Marrow. Six long years in the wilderness and Madder Mortem return without missing a beat, continuing to pump out expressive, powerfully composed jams of their trademark mix of Goth-tinged progressive/alt metal. Although I enjoyed the album from the outset, if anything it has grown in stature since its early year release. The album’s subtleties and bevy of emotion-charged hooks bury deeper into the brain upon repeat doses. The tough period the band endured prior to the unleashing of Old Eyes New Heart is reflected in the album’s raw, potent swell of emotions and overall depth. This is further reflected in the diverse nature of the colorful songwriting, swinging from bluesy, melancholic restraint (“Cold Hard Rain”), pop-infected prog (‘Here and Now”) to urgent, dramatic, and infectious rock powerhouses (“The Head That Wears the Crown,” “Towers”).
#9. Opeth // The Last Will and Testament – As a longtime Opeth fanboy, it is a cool feeling to be genuinely enthused about a new LP, nearly three decades since their underrated Orchid debut. All the pre-release buzz centered on the return of Åkerfeldt’s famed death growls. While certainly a cool and unexpected touch, the fourteenth album The Last Will and Testament is not merely a nostalgic throwback to the band’s glory days. Instead, Opeth fuses those quirky, vintage prog tools from their modern-era material and fuses them into an intricate concept album that is a significant step up from the past couple of uneven efforts and easily their best work since at least 2014’s Pale Communion. Dazzling musicianship, jazzy licks, and inventively crafted, yet notably more focused and concise writing marked an album that features better production and tighter, punchier songs than the band has written in a while. It is also Opeth’s heaviest, most riff-centric release in many moons. Despite the trademark melancholic moods and darker shades, it also sounds as if the band is having real fun, reinforced by the abundance of bouncy, infectious riffs, shreddy solos, and boisterous grooves littering the album. Likely would have earned higher honors with time, as I still feel there is much more to discover.
#8. Oceans of Slumber // Where Gods Fear to Speak – Previously enjoyed the idea of Texan progressive metal powerhouse Oceans of Slumber, more than the execution and finished product. In particular, 2016’s Winter has grown in stature over the years. Yet for much of their career, it has felt like a case of incredible talent and potential not fully realized. That changed on Where Gods Fear to Speak, arguably the band’s most complete, consistent, and hook-laden release. When I felt the prog itch throughout 2024, Where Gods Fear to Speak was often the go-to. An album of lush, moody, drama-filled compositions, deftly contrasting soaring melodies, and skyscraping hooks with muscular riffage and heftier bouts of aggression, the writing is tighter and more compelling than previous efforts. Cammie Beverly’s scene-stealing vocals may take center stage, but this is very much a complete effort, where the rich soundscapes, brooding atmospheres, and technical musicianship shine brightly. Loaded with killer jams, including stirring highlights, “Don’t Come Back from Hell Empty Handed,” “Wish,” and “Poem of Ecstasy,” Where Gods Fear to Speak finally finds Oceans of Slumber firing on all cylinders.
#7. Pyrrhon // Exhaust – In theory, Pyrrhon should be one of my favorite bands. I used to eat up all manner of skronky, dissonant, and abrasive extreme metal. Perhaps my thirst for the weirder, experimental forms of death metal and dissonance has softened over the years. However, while largely enjoying Pyrrhon’s career up to this point, Exhaust feels like the album I have been waiting for the band to deliver. Exhaust dropped unexpectedly and that element of surprise flowed through another oddball, deranged platter of wildly inventive, chaotic, yet oddly accessible (in Pyrrhon terms) extreme metal. From cautious, challenging early listens, I found myself increasingly compelled to revisit Exhaust on a regular basis, marveling at its flexible, fractured songwriting, nimble musicianship, and raw hardcore punk edge infiltrating the dissonant, experimental death metal at the core of the Pyrrhon experience. Gritty production, perfectly unhinged vocal performance from Doug Moore, and occasional burst of groove and shred of accessibility punctuating the chaos (“First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,” “Strange Pains,” “Stress Fractures”) lend the album a refreshingly addictive edge to counterbalance its abrasive, challenging angles.
#6. Replicant // Infinite Mortality – New Jersey’s Replicant previously exhibited their brawny, yet brainy mix of gnarled dissonance, technicality, and knuckle-dragging street grooves to powerful effect. However, third album Infinite Mortality levelled the playing field as the band upped their game to elite levels of controlled chaos, while the writing remained challenging yet strangely accessible and memorable. In spirit, the ugly mix of harshness, discordance, and headbangable blockbuster grooves reminds me of the great Ion Dissonance. Meanwhile, the contrasting blend of unorthodox melody, jagged dissonance, and stuttering, complex song structures come together with cohesion and blunt force, punctuated by the occasional warped solo. Like a harsh, harrowing soundtrack to a bleak dystopian future, Infinite Mortality is a mean, chunky, technical, and deliciously primal slab of advanced disso-tech-death excellence.
#5. Noxis // Violence Inherent in the System – Notably death metal in 2024 was dominated by brutal, dissonant varieties, designed to scramble brains and challenge minds while battering the listener into submission. Refreshingly, unheralded surprise packet Noxis unloaded a killer debut LP to savor. Drawing from an array of old-school influences and ’90s touchstones without ever aping one particular band or style, Noxis unleashed a nostalgic yet unique death metal platter. Managing to at once sound raw and unclean, technical and brutal, thrashy and proggy, sharp and refined, Noxis blaze their way craftily through memorable, riff-infested wastelands with unbridled aggression, speed, and finesse, rubber-stamped by some exceptional bass work. Remnants of the classic Floridian scene mingle with powerful influences, including early Cryptopsy, later-era Death, Atheist, and Cannibal Corpse, resulting in a finished product that sounds fresh and vital, while containing an endearing, workmanlike old-school charm. It works a treat, and the top-notch and frequently inventive writing reveals impressive depth and character that rewards repeat listens.
#4. Dissimulator // Lower Form Resistance – There are some serviceable, enjoyable thrash-aligned albums in 2024, but one stood head and shoulders above the competition. Comprised of a grizzled bunch of underground Canadian musicians hellbent on fusing advanced technical thrash assaults with sick old-school death-thrash, a fuckton of killer riffs, quirky vocoder action, and razor-sharp hooks, Lower Form Resistance has consistently provided an adrenaline-filled shot of thrash when needing that specific fix. Dissimulator rewires thrash in intricate and intriguing ways, giving me the same giddy rush as past experiences with the likes of Capharnaum, Vhol, and Revocation. Excited to hear what these dudes conjure up next. In the meantime, Lower Form Resistance will continue to keep my thrash cogs oiled through potent bangers like “Warped,” “Automoil & Robotoil,” and “Hyperline Underflow.”
#3. Huntsmen // The Dry Land – After somehow sleeping on 2018 debut American Scrap and subsequently their apparent sophomore slumping second album, I finally righted my wrongs by delving into the strange and wildly unique woodlands of Chicago metal troupe Huntsmen and their phenomenal third LP, The Dry Land. A raw, rustic, and emotionally striking explosion of genre-bending excellence, where blackened sludge, doom, post, prog, folk, and Americana influences coalesce into an intoxicating and frequently thrilling musical formula, rich in detail and emotion. The skilled genre mashing is cohesive and genuine, loaded with surprises, structural twists, dramatic ebbs and flows, deep burrowing hooks, and contrasting vocal trade-offs to seal the deal on a remarkable album. Despite only a small handful of songs comprising the album (six in total), Huntsmen make every moment count, from blazing longer numbers with stunning contrasts and peaks (“This, Our Gospel,” “In Time, All things”) to plaintive folk dusted rock (“Lean Times”), through to the stunningly moving, compact power of “Rain.” Huntsmen occupy a unique space in the metalverse.
#2. Borknagar // Fall – I have a slightly odd history with Norwegian legends Borknagar. I recall being taken by their excellent 2012 album Urd, yet oddly enough I didn’t extend my listening beyond that isolated release. Things changed with 2019’s True North, a typically solid offering that inspired my explorations of portions of their vast and consistently engaging catalog. The twelfth album Fall marks their first album since True North and again features an outstanding line-up of talents, including founding mastermind Øystein Brun, multi-talented keyboardist/clean vocalist Lars Nedland, and ace up their sleeve bass/vocal powerhouse ICS Vortex. Fall smacks of a veteran band not merely content to coast on their laurels but rather carve freshly creative trajectories for their now signature blend of epic prog, triumphant Viking, and icy black metal to thrive. An extra shot of old-school blackened aggression and fuller production boosted an album of consistently high quality. Fall became a true all-occasions album in 2024; often uplifting me when I felt down or giving me a punchy charge when the need arose. Wall-to-wall prime cuts feature, headlined by the storming “Summits,” moody earworm, “The Wild Lingers”, and the striking, epic shimmer of “Moon.” Stalwarts still operating at the top of their game.
#1. Counting Hours // The Wishing Tomb – Not since Fvneral Fvkk’s remarkable Carnal Confessions debut has a doom album struck as hard as the second platter of sadboi misery perpetrated by Finland’s excellent Counting Hours. While doom and its death-doom companion may not always dominate my listening habits, when an album does hit that sweet spot, it usually leaves a profound impact. Few forms of metal generate the emotional resonance of quality doom and Counting Hours tears at the heartstrings through a riveting collection of gorgeously played and executed death-doom ditties, spearheaded by former members of the hugely underrated Rapture. Ilpo Paasela backs up the stellar musicianship, superb guitar work, and tight, addictive songwriting with a stunning mix of emotively raw, stately cleans and rugged death growls. The whole package packs an emotional wallop, yet its soulful edge and hopelessly addictive hooks and sing-along moments prevent a drop too deeply into depressive waters, as such earwormy gems as “Timeless Ones,” “All That Blooms (Needs to Die),” and “Starlit / Lifeless” attest. The Wishing Tomb is an epic album to lose yourself in.
Honorable Mentions:
- Blood Incantation // Absolute Elsewhere – Did I overrate Absolute Elsewhere? Possibly. Is it overhyped? Absolutely. Yet Blood Incantation remains a brave, adventurous band and Absolute Elsewhere represents a welcome return to form from these gifted, star-gazing space cadets. A flawed but effective fusing of their death metal roots with an increased focus on ’70s-inspired progressive rock and trippy psych flourishes.
- 200 Stab Wounds // Manual Manic Procedures – I barely took notice of Cleveland’s 200 Stab Wounds debut LP, but sophomore album Manual Manic Procedures provided one of the real surprise packets in 2024. It very nearly cracked the main list sheerly through heavy rotation. A meaty, adrenaline-charged shot of muscular death into the veins.
- Ripped to Shreds // Sanshi – Another reliably awesome slab of old-school death from Andrew Lee and co. Increasingly shreddy, extravagant solo work and a grindier edge powered one of their best albums yet.
- Nails // Every Bridge Burning – Nails is back and that is a great thing. New line-up, the same mode of short, sharp, blast-your-skin-off aggression, head-caving grooves, and hate-filled energy.
- Unhallowed Deliverance // Of Spectre and Strife – A pleasant surprise and one of the best debut albums in 2024. German tech-slam-brutal death juggernaut Unhallowed Deliverance knocked it out of the park with limited subtlety but a heap of talent, creativity, and songwriting smarts.
- Wormed // Omegon – With Ulcerate’s latest release not quite hitting me on the intense level of others, and having run out of time to properly digest and rank the obvious high-quality new Defeated Sanity, Wormed’s long-awaited return gave me my fix of calculated brutality via futuristic, slammy, technical brutal death executed in typically warped, mind-blowing fashion.
- Khirki // Κυκεώνας – Following up an impressive, well-received debut LP is no easy feat. Kenstrosity steered many of us from the AMG community onto Greek band Khirki’s Κτηνωδία debut in 2021, so I eagerly anticipated Khirki’s return for the second go around. The resulting album met expectations through a fiery, passionate, and eclectic mix of metal, rock, and traditional Greek folk.
- Sergeant Thunderhoof // The Ghost of Badon Hill – A late-year list shaker, underappreciated UK psych-prog-stoner outfit Sergeant Thunderhoof unleased a more restrained, psych-enhanced, and introspective album, showing signs of being a genuine grower since its November release, despite not quite hitting the irresistible highs of 2022’s This Sceptred Veil.
Disappointments o’ the Year:
- Several highly anticipated albums did not quite land the killer blows I was hoping for. Respectable to very good albums, but I expected better from Vola (admittedly a grower), Caligula’s Horse, Ihsahn, and especially Zeal and Ardor.
Non-Metal Picks:
- St Vincent, SIR, Michael Kiwanuka, Allie X, MGMT
Song ‘o the Year:
- Counting Hours – “Timeless Ones”
There were any number of standouts and potential Song o’ the Year candidates that could have nabbed top honors, including several counterparts from Counting Hours’ spectacular sophomore album. In the end, I settled on the (proper) album opener of my album of the year, as the tune that really hooked me initially from an album that captivated my soul. A rich, emotive piece of dark, melodic death-doom with superlative guitar melodies and a chorus for the ages. Honorable mention to Huntsmen’s “Rain.”
Felgund
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of living in interesting times. But as that wizened sage, Gandalf so wisely reminds us: “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
So what have I been doing with the time that has been given? A fair amount, as it turns out. 2024 has certainly been a tumultuous year for our small family. On the one hand, the business that I launched in 2023 has been chugging along for well over a year and a half now, and I think I’m far enough along in the process that I feel (at least somewhat) comfortable calling it a success. The baby that we brought home from the hospital is now, inexplicably, a whip-smart 7-year-old. My wife’s career continues to blossom as she continues to moonlight as my business manager. Things are good.
And yet 2024 also proved to be harder than I’d ever imagined. My dad died back in April, an experience that remains both devastating and surreal. He’d had multiple sclerosis for well over a decade, and as I’m sure many of you know, MS is a grasping, grinding petty little disease. But for as much as it stole, it proved incapable of taking away who my father was; it couldn’t quite make off with what made him him. He was my best friend before his diagnosis, and he remained my best friend up until that impossible evening in a hospital room in early April. Truth be told, he’s still my best friend, only now he’s free to walk wherever I see fit to imagine him.
Despite my best efforts, I realized pretty quickly you can’t capture a life in a few paragraphs. I couldn’t do it in his eulogy, and I certainly won’t attempt to do so on a heavy metal blog. But I will share this:
My dad was a carpenter by trade and an artist by choice; he was a fisherman and a cook; he was a handyman, a builder, a designer, and a writer; he taught himself how to play guitar, and he’s perhaps the singular reason why I’m writing for this website today. Because while he wasn’t a fan of metal himself, he instilled in me not only a love for music, but an interest in the process; in the people who create it, the minds that shape it, and the passion that births it.
He played in countless bands in his youth, and I can think of no better way to honor his memory than by sharing some of his music with you all. With Steel’s blessing, I’m embedding a two-song demo (“A Place in Time” and “Street Legal”) ripped from a cassette my old man recorded in the late 80s, so apologies in advance for the questionable quality. He composed both the music and lyrics, played guitar and bass, and sang on both tracks, which were devised when he was perhaps at his Rush fanboy peak. It’s been a delight and a balm hearing his voice again, captured as it was in a moment when he was young, vibrant, and doing what he loved.
So here we are. Despite (or perhaps because of) this, I managed to consume a fair amount of metal this year. And while I was far less productive as a writer than I’d hoped and I wasn’t able to listen to as much as I originally planned, I discovered a plethora of new music here on AMG that soothed what Neil Peart once referred to as his “baby soul.” And surprisingly, I found much of that solace in the discordant, the dissonant, and the off-kilter, as the list below probably reflects. But more importantly, I found compassion, support, and understanding amongst the writing staff here. And while they may not know it, I will be forever thankful for the folks who showed me such boundless kindness during a year that felt decidedly unkind. Thank you, my friends.
Now let’s get to to it. Here are my top ten(ish) albums of 2024.
#(ish). Beaten to Death // Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis – It almost feels like cheating to place an 18-minute album in my Top 10(ish), but here we are. 2024 proved to be a year where my interest in grind and grind-adjacent acts expanded, and this “ish” is the result. While I wasn’t aware of Beaten to Death prior to this release, I was quickly swept away by Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis’ ability to bludgeon its idiosyncratic way into my brain and coil there like the most glorious of infections. Beaten to Death has delivered a concise helping of grinding goodness, with crispy prog edges and a schmear of off-kilter humor. Back catalog, here I come!
#10. Sleepytime Gorilla Museum // Of the Last Human Being – Gardenstale’s gushing review of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum’s fourth album Of the Last Human Being was a tough endorsement to ignore, as was an invocation of Diablo Swing Orchestra. So I threw caution to the wind and leaped headlong into this experimental maelstrom. And I’m so happy I did. Don’t let the runtime dissuade you; Of the Last Human Being doesn’t feel nearly as long as it is, and over that relatively brief timespan, you’re provided with a front-row seat to the aural equivalent of perhaps the most fun kind of performance art. Hard-edged riffs, off-kilter instrumentation, ominous theatrics interlaced with beautiful, sparse melodies, and all capped off by the deranged croons of chief carnival barker Nils Frykdahl. If I’d spent more time with this record it may have placed higher, but as it is, I’m happy it’s making an appearance at the number 10 spot.
#9. Sur Austru // Datura Strǎhiarelor – Despite Twelve underrating this album, I suppose I should commend him for introducing me to Sur Austru in the first place. This Romanian outfit’s third full-length Datura Strǎhiarelor is a potent blend of rumbling, blackened fury, and melodic folk metal, with plenty of flute work, orchestration, choral elements, and plaintive keys thrown in. And, while the gruff, chanting growls might rub some listeners the wrong way, it was this aspect more than any other that first grabbed my attention, and proceeded to keep it. And while I haven’t a clue what the vocalists are shouting at me, the tone and placement in the mix feels just right, especially for this brand of folk-infused black metal. Such is the strength of Sur Austru that this album began as my “ish” before eventually working its way to ninth. Mightly bold of them.
#8. Necrowretch // Swords of Dajjal – Some of the entries on this list were either late discoveries or took some time before they got their dirty little hooks in me. Necrowretch’s Swords of Dajjal was not one of them. As soon as I spun it back in February, it was love at first listen. Swords of Dajjal focuses on the greater deceiver in Islamic mythology, and explores that tradition through the use of ferocious blackened death metal (with perhaps a dollop or two of thrash thrown in). Although, as Carcharodon rightly pointed out in his review, the “blackened” part is doing most of the heavy lifting here. And that’s not a bad thing, as Necrowretch is more than adept at crafting memorable hooks and an engaging atmosphere without sacrificing heft or freneticism. Swords of Dajjal is an unmitigated success, and my only real gripe is that Necrowretch dropped a new platter so early in the year that it may go overlooked on too many end-of-year lists.
#7. The Vision Bleak // Weird Tales – Grier and I may not see eye to eye on music, but what can I say? The man knows his way around gothic metal. So when he awarded a 4.0 to Weird Tales back in April, what was I to do? If you said wait several months before bothering to press play, you’re correct. But folks, I may have been late to the party, but it’s a rager nonetheless. The Vision Bleak has produced an emotive, memorable, downright heart-wrenching concept album; one that is both lush and harsh, both achingly melodic and morosely heavy. Weird Tales isn’t my usual cup of tea, but The Vision Bleak has rejected my assertion by doing what many similar acts appear incapable of doing: cohesively balancing “gothic” and “metal” without lessening the impact of either. A well-earned addition, indeed.
#6. Stenched // Purulence Gushing from the Coffin – While Rots-giving may have been tarnished by a less-than-stellar release from Rotpit back in November, I’ve moved on since then, and am now proudly celebrating Stenched-mas. The Manly n’ Mighty Steel reviewed this one-man grimy death outfit last month, and even though I was still smarting from my failed attempt to poach Purulence Gushing from the Coffin for myself, I can’t in good conscience deny how hard this globular mass of funerary muck rips. From the first track to the last, you’ll be rocking a near-permanent stank face, and you can’t blame that solely on the fungal miasma wafting from your speakers. The truth is, Stenched has delivered a masterclass in riff-heavy, moss-encrusted death metal; the kind that’s perfect to drag your knuckles to. Purulence Gushing from the Coffin is the exact kind of no-frills, all-guts death metal I needed in 2024, and that’s why it’s sitting pretty at 6.
#5. Aklash // Reincarnation – How are we already at the Top Five? And what better way to kick off this most treasured of positions than with the melodic black metal stylings of Aklash on their fourth album Reincarnation? Aklash received a solid write-up in June’s Stuck in the Filter by our very own Kenstrosity, and their most recent outing has continued to climb higher and higher on my list the more I’ve spun it. Part black metal, part progressive metal, part trad metal (epic choruses included), Reincarnation packs a wallop in just a short 37 minutes. overflowing with varied instrumentation and keen lyrical chops, grandiose in scope and medieval in tone, yet more personal than it has any right to be, Aklash is firing on all cylinders here, and, as such, is perfectly suited for anyone’s top 5.
#4. Devenial Verdict // Blessing of Despair – And, just like that, more death metal rears its ugly head. I’m still surprised at how high up Devenial Verdict’s sophomore album landed on my list, primarily because their 2022 debut Ash Blind failed to connect. But Blessing of Despair seems to have arrived just in time for my increasing flirtation with the cruel mistress that is dissodeath. As such, I found myself utterly taken with Devenial Verdict’s latest, overflowing as it is with equally heavy doses of discordant ferocity and mournful melodicism. And while Blessing of Despair is an undeniably heavy record, it makes sure to leave plenty of room for quieter moments, where slower sections and sparse instrumentation have room to bloom and breathe. This approach not only results in a wonderfully balanced album but ensures the bludgeoning that’s sure to follow is all the more impactful. Consider me reformed.
#3. Aborted // Vault of Horrors – I’m fairly certain that any death metal fan worth their salt is legally required to include the latest Aborted release on their end-of-year list. Over 25 years and 12 albums into their carnal career, these death metal titans need no introduction. Blood-drenched, gore-soaked, and happily grindy, Aborted are in a league all their own, and it shows on Vault of Horrors. The music remains tight and explosive, building a menacing atmosphere that pervades only the stickiest of grindhouse theaters. Besides, with songs dedicated to classics like Return of the Living Dead, Hellraiser, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, how could I do anything other than include this gem of an album in my top 3? I for one welcome our horror-themed overlords.
#2. Noxis // Violence Inherent in the System – What began as a random pick from the promo sump by one Kenstrosity quickly rose to become a favorite of the death metal maniacs (those with good taste, anyway) on the AMG staff. Now, more importantly, it’s nabbed the second-highest honor on my year-end list. Noxis’ first full-length album Violence Inherent in the System sounds like the product of a much more experienced band. The songwriting is top-notch, the performances are big and bold without being overwrought, and the sticky riffs stay wedged in your mind long after the album ends. And yet for all of its bombast, Noxis is still able to infuse their debut with oodles of atmosphere, not to mention a level of balance between death metal orthodoxy and fresh bells and whistles (and horns) that would make even Thanos grimace in jealousy. Special attention must also be paid to Joe Lowrie’s snare tone and Dave Kirsch’s godlike bass performance.
#1. Pyrrhon // Exhaust – I suppose I was always destined to end up here, I just didn’t know it right away. Pyrrhon’s fifth full-length Exhaust didn’t initially grab me the way some of my other entries did. However, on repeat spins, I found myself falling deeper and deeper into its frenetic, dissonant embrace, discovering both nuances and subtleties amidst the proggy cacophony. On an album that thoroughly explores the universal theme of exhaustion, be it physical, mental, social, or economic, Pyrrhon’s brand of noise-tinged death metal feels like the ideal tool with which to scrawl their livid manifesto. But what truly sets Exhaust apart is its unrelenting groove, stoked by Pyrrhon’s inventive capacity to not only feature but to uplift its unique brand of melodicism amidst the unrelenting maelstrom. It’s hard to overstate just how critical this aspect is to Exhaust’s success, especially since it would have been so easy to excise. But Exhaust’s manic ferocity, which swerves jerks, hops, and heaves, is all the better for it. And while its charms were initially lost on me, I found it easier and easier to finally succumb to its tremulous tendrils. Any record with that kind of staying power (not to mention a theme so applicable to my own experiences this past year) has more than earned my top spot for 2024.
Honorable Mentions:
- Defeated Sanity // Chronicles of Lunacy – Defeated Sanity is a brutal tech death stalwart at this point, and now seven albums in, Chronicles of Lunacy only further cements that status. Chronicles of Lunacy provides the listener with track after aggressively intricate track exploring lunacy in its many forms, but the real treat here is Lille Gruber’s masterful performance on the drums.
- Full of Hell // Coagulated Bliss – while I don’t think I’ve become a complete grind convert, albums like Full of Hell’s Coagulated Bliss and Beaten to Death’s Sunrise Over Rigor Mortis certainly set me on the path to one day become a proud proselytizer. You can’t deny Coagulated Bliss’ infectious groove and whirlwind pace, although I agree with the Dolphin’s rating adjustment.
- Undeath // More Insane – no, it’s not as good as It’s Time…to Rise from the Grave, and there’s no reason to pretend that it is. Nor does it need to be. While More Insane may not reach the lofty heights of its predecessor, it still showcases an Undeath doing what it does best, while also hinting at an undeniable ability to evolve into an even sharper, more fetid OSDM beast.
- 200 Stab Wounds // Manual Manic Procedures – while I wasn’t entirely kind in my review of 200 Stab Wounds’ debut, Mark Z suggested I take their follow-up Manual Manic Procedures for a spin, and I’m glad I did. It’s clear they’ve grown as artists, and their sophomore effort reflects that heightened maturity. Keep stabbing on, your crazy diamonds!
- Mamaleek // Vida Blue – I’m confident this album captures what it would sound like if Tom Waits listened to too much Ashenspire before leaving for the recording studio. Long, difficult, and bold, I found myself returning again and again to Vida Blue no matter how challenging I found the experience. While this album didn’t make my top 10, I’m convinced a future Mamaleek release will.
Song o’ the Year:
- Noxis – ”Skullcrushing Defilement”
This song goes hard. Exceptionally hard. In truth, there are any number of tunes from Violence Inherent in the System that fit the “Song o’ the Year” bill, but I had to give the edge to “Skullcrushing Defilement.” Not only does it begin with an absolutely searing bass solo, but it sets the stage for the four-string onslaught that’s to come. There’s a noticeable Cannibal Corpse influence that I can’t help but love here, alongside heaping doses of maniacal melodicism, turbocharged technicality, and an earworm chorus to boot. Abandon all cervical spines, ye who enter here.
#200StabWounds #2024 #Aborted #Aklash #AllieX #Anciients #Archspire #Atheist #BeatenToDeath #BlogPosts #BloodIncantation #Borknagar #CaligulaSHorse #CannibalCorpse #Capharnaum #CountingHours #Crytopsy #Death #DefeatedSanity #DevenialVerdict #DiabloSwingOrchestra #Dissimulator #Dissonance #FullOfHell #FvneralFvkk #Huntsmen #Ihsahn #Khirki #Lists #MadderMortem #Mamaleek #MGMT #MichaelKiwanuka #Nails #Necrowretch #Noxis #OceansOfSlumber #Opeth #Pyrrhon #Rapture #Replicant #Revocation #RippedToShreds #Rotpit #SaundersAndFelagundSTopTenIshOf2024 #SergeantThunderfoot #SIR #SleepytimeGorillaMuseum #StVincent #Stenched #SurAustru #TheVisionBleak #TomWaits #Ulcerate #Undeath #UnhallowedDeliverance #Vhöl #Wormed #ZealAndArdor
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“Neither asked nor given…”
Written by Alan Sharp, & directed by Michael Caton-Jones, ROB ROY (1995) is an underappreciated gem of Scottish film. It also contains what is widely regarded as one of the best swordfights in #cinema history
3/5
https://fictionmachine.com/2020/09/15/neither-asked-nor-given-rob-roy-1995/
#Scottish #literature #history #historicalfiction #romanticism #cinema #film #swords #LiamNeeson #JohnHurt #TimRoth
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Steel Druhm’s Top Ten(ish) of 2025 By Steel DruhmFirst things first: 2025 was not what I consider a lodestar of great metal. I was much more miserly than usual with my high scores, and though there were a lot of albums I liked, there were not many I truly loved. I had fewer issues curating my Top Ten than usual, with a smaller pool of contenders jockeying for slots. That likely means 2026 will be an overwhelming pornocopia of metal goodness, as flat years are usually followed by market booms. Let’s hope the historic trends continue.
On the AMG front, we had a great many seasoned staffers bow out and take time away from the site, which is always a sad event, but we got a healthy infusion of new blood, too. Hopefully, the blend of new and old will provide new perspectives, but it’s sure to result in some awful takes, too. We apologize for that in advance. Fear not, though, for I have it on good authority that a few long-absent writers will be making a shocking return in the new year.
Personally, 2025 was my least productive year in a while as far as the sheer number of reviews churned out. This was mostly due to my taking on the enormous duties of promo sump management, which takes up a significant amount of time weekly. I’ve gotten faster and more efficient at the promo herding over the year, so I hope to push my review production back up to massive aggressive levels in 2026. I love this little blog, and I invest a lot of myself in it each day. It gives me peace and comfort through challenging times, and more importantly, it keeps me off the streets looking for seedy, low-rent metal blogs to write for.
As I do every year, I want to extend a big thank you to all the readers who grace our pages, comment on our reviews, complain about scores, and generally raise a ruckus. We appreciate you, tolerate you, and continue to do our best to entertain you. Behind the scenes, though, we think you are a bunch of overrating, high-maintenance, diva do-nothings. Keep up the good work and tell your friends about us!
I’d also like to thank all the old and new staff members and AMG Himself for their efforts to keep AMG the bastion of high opinions that it has become. It’s easy to suffer burnout here, and there are times when the words all seem to blur together, and it becomes a battle to formulate new ways to describe shitty, lo-fi death metal. There’s something highly satisfying about the work, though, and doing it with a bunch of lovable rejects makes it all the more so. We have a good group of misfits here, and though we bicker and argue, we love one another most of the time. Because of all this goodwill and affection, I hope none of them make me sabbaticalize them this year. The wood chipper is still clogged from last year’s bonanza of retirements, and I’m just too busy to take cadavers apart the old-fashioned way. Onward to new horizons we fly!
#ish: Nite // Cult of the Serpent Sun – Nite is a strange band that challenges me to look past some very one-dimensional vocals to find the beauty in their guitar-driven righteousness. The music they create is so perfectly in my wheelhouse, mixing the classic 80s sound of Mercyful Fate with the burly badassery of Grand Magus, then they slather their compositions with a blackened snarl that rarely shifts or adapts to the epic music. Sometimes it seems this choice holds them back from greatness, but I just kept returning to Cult of the Serpent Sun time and again in 2025. Songs like “Crow (Fear the Night),” “Carry On,” and “The Winds of Sokar” got spun to death this year, and the guitar work across the album is stellar and so metal it hurts. In a nutshell, I’m hooked on this weird little album despite the shortcomings in the vocal department. Give yourself to the Nite.
#10. Disembodiment// Spiral Crypts – One of the death metal albums that really stuck to ribs this year, Spiral Crypts just wouldn’t unstick itself or go away. Disembodiment brings the OSDM hammer down on you with a stinky, putrid sound that rips organs from all the big names to create a shambling monstrosity all their own. It’s Incantation and Autopsy up front, with a vaguely Death-like prog sheen hidden in the back. Yet this won’t impress with techy wanking, because they’re too busy fucking cadavers and eating human flesh. Nasty first wins in the House of Steel, and this shit is gross but so listenable and entertaining. The riffs are slithery, slappy, and powerful, and those vocals are as much like an industrial garbage disposal as you can get without permanent throat disaster. Get yourself some unsanitary napkins and blast this filth really loud. It’s worth the revolting mess.
#9. Helstar // The Devil’s Masquerade – I grew up loving Helstar, and their Burning Star and Remnants of War albums were in constant rotation during my high school years. They’ve had an up-and-down career since 1989’s Nosterfatu, so them hitting their stride again in 2025 on The Devil’s Masquerade was a huge thrill for Yours Steely. Their textbook blend of US power metal and prog burns bright once more, with nods to thrash mixed in liberally for added asskickery as the guitars shred and impress. Vocal legend James Rivera still sounds enormous and powerful, and the songcraft is shockingly good and consistent. Certain moments scream classic Helstar while also hinting at Rivera’s criminally underrated Destiny’s End project, and there are several nods to prime Nevermore as well. The Devil’s Masquerade does the Helstar legacy proud, and it’s easily the best thing they’ve done since Nosferatu. Let this one in for a bite.
#8. Brainstorm // Plague of Rats – Brainstorm have been one of, if not the most reliable metal acts of the last few decades. Album after album brings a muscular, burly blend of classic metal and power, and time after time they kill it with massive anthems and sick hooks you just can’t shake. Plague of Rats follows the great Wall of Skulls and almost equals it in terms of memorable songs and metal magic. Andy B. Franck continues to be one of the best vocalists in all of metal, and when given tremendous songs to work with like “Garuda (Eater Of Snakes),” The Shepherd Girl (Gitavoginda),” and “Beyond Enemy Lines,” you get molten metal gold. The writing is rock solid with several Songs o’ the Year contenders, and the riffs and vocals are a thing of savage beauty. I love these guys more than I love red meat and hobo wine (almost).
#7. Under Ruins // Age of the Void – Formed by members of the highly underappreciated Lansfear and the cheesy King Diamond wannabes, Them,1 Under Ruins bring a polished, super slick form of epic power metal to the party on their Age of the Void debut. What makes their sound so immediate for me is how it ranges from Manowar-esque chest-thumping anthems to massive epic metal like Atlantean Kodex, and on to old-timey prog metal akin to the early days of Fates Warning, with some other interesting stops along the way. It’s enough like Lansfear to hook me in, but Under Ruins operate with a much broader vision and scope. “Whispered Curses, Woe Unleashed” is my Song o’ the Year, full of melancholic emotion but still bringing the thunder in the way vintage Tad Morose and Pryamaze did. The chorus has been ringing through my head all year, and I can’t escape it. Nor should you. Get under these ruins.
#6. Ambush // Evil in All Dimensions – When traditional and power metal are done properly, they can kick your ass and provide a massive jolt of fun at the same time. That’s exactly what Sweden’s Ambush does all over Evil in All Dimensions. Taking equal measurements of trad and power, they craft rip-roaring anthems to thunder, fire, steel, and make sure the hooks are plentiful. I defy you to blast the title track, “Maskirovka,” or “Bending the Steel” and not feel a rush of power in your veins. The riffs are pure 80s magic, and let me just mention Oskar Jacobsson’s vocals, because they are HUGE. This shit is 100% balls-to-the-walls energy; the songs have legs and demand repeat spins. This is one of the most infectious albums of 2025, and I think I may have underrated it a tad. Get your sack to the partition, pronto.
#5. Anchorite // Realm of Ruin – Taking the classic doom template of Candlemass and Solitude Aeternus and injecting it with the burly machismo of trve metal usually works, and in the case of Anchorite’s Realm of Ruin, it works extra hard! Beefy riffs drive the material to epic heights as doomy harmonies decorate the war wagon. Over the top of it all, Leo Stivala delivers strident, commanding vocals to embiggen the spirit. Cuts like the massive “The Lighthouse Chronicles” merge Paradise Lost with Crypt Sermon and deliver emotional doom with a touch of Nevermore’s moody power. Standout “The Apostate’s Prayer” is a top moment of 2025, and Stivala soars to grand heights, carrying the listener along with him, and “Kingdom Undone” brings in a touch of power metal with grand results and a killer chorus. A surprisingly varied and nuanced album, and one of the top doom platters of the year.
#4. Professor Emeritus // A Land Long Gone – Professor Emeritus may have one of the worst names in the metalverse, but their take on trve epic metal and doom more than make up for that oversight. A Land Long Gone is everything a fan of the trve genre could want, with big, bombastic compositions with hooks, bells, and whistles aplenty. This stuff brings the Manowar to the Candlemass recording session, with big loincloth energy adding to the slow-burning doom power. There are hints of Doomsword and Manilla Road along the road to high adventure, and everything is kept sword-friendly and mighty. “A Corpse’s Dream” is one of my favorite songs of the year, and I love the blending of styles they achieve, and “Zosimos” brings in copious Iron Maiden influences to bedazzle the Crypt Sermon-esque doom they deliver with aplomb. This is the kind of Professor I wish I had during my school years, so listen and learn!
#3. Paradise Lost // Ascension – I’ve followed Paradise Lost since 1991s Gothic release, and I stuck with them until they became Depeche Lost circa 2000. I came back when they went metal again, and though none of their third-stage albums floored me, I liked them enough to keep buying what they sold. That pattern changed with Ascension, which is every bit as powerful, heavy, and vibrant as their glory days, while showing a maturity and sophistication even the classics lack. Let me just come out and say it: I underrated this album, and for that, I feel some degree of fault. Ascension plays like a grand tour of the varied Paradise Lost eras, but nothing ends up feeling recycled. “Serpent on the Cross” is a killer opener featuring everything I ever loved about the band, and cuts like “Tyrants Serenade” and “Salvation” are amongst the best songs of their long-running career. Where I originally felt like the back half of the album was less stellar, I’ve come to love the complete package, and I think this is among the best Paradise Lost albums. Olde dogs can still bite!
#2. Fer De Lance // Fires on the Mountainside – Competing with Anchorite and Professor Emeritus for the best trve doom album of 2025, Fer De Lance brought the biggest sword to the warfield. Fires on the Mountainside has it all; massive trveness, battle-ready classic metal, nods to black and Viking metal, it’s all here and ready for action. Take one listen ot the mammoth title track, and you’ll accumulate more back hair in 7 minutes than you did in all of 2025 as the music takes you from Crypt Sermon-esque classic doom on through Hammerheart era Bathory with touches of folk along the way.2 This is music for heroes who laugh in the face of death. When the black metal element comes forward, you get gems like “Ravens Fly (Dreams of Daidalos),” and when they dial down to the epic doom side, you get monsters like “Death Thrives (Where Walls Divide)” where vocal maniac MP Papai goes all in, and channels Lost Horizon’s Daniel Heiman. If you spin this thing and don’t gain 2 inches on your biceps, you have Chronic Untrveness Disorder.
#1. Structure // Heritage – In a year when I was merely whelmed by much of what I heard, Structure came out of nowhere to drop an industrial earth mover of atmospheric doom on my life. The brainchild of Bram Bijlhout (ex-Officium Triste), Heritage finds him delivering a massive treatise on emotionally harrowing sadness and grief, aided by the killer vocals of Pim Blankenstein (Officium Triste, ex-The 11th Hour). Over the 50 minutes of Heritage, the duo drag you to the heart of sadness, loss, and despair as only thoughtful, well-executed doom can. Yet there are faint rays of light and hope in the inky black, mostly in the form of Bram’s beautiful, delicate guitar work, which weaves ethereal magic through the dour, downtrodden material. Heritage is a very dark album, but it’s rife with genuine beauty too, just as life often is. I’ve spun this thing more than any other 2025 release, and it keeps calling me back to its black womb. There’s something truly special here, and you shouldn’t miss out on experiencing it. This is your Heritage now.
Honorable Mentions:
- An Tóramh // Echoes of Eternal Night – Massive, crushing funereary doom with a great sense of atmosphere
- Phobocosm // Gateway – One of the best slabs of oppressive cavern-core death metal you’ll be squished by this year
- Plasmodulated // An Ocean ov Putrid, Stinky, Vile, Disgusting Hell – One of the oddest and endearing death metal albums of late
- Depravity // Bestial Possession – Brutal, blasting, splatterifying death metal that cannot be contained or reasoned with
- Diabolizer // Murderous Revelations – Fast, brutal, burly death metal that gives no fucks as it activates your dental plan
- Guts // Nightmare Fuel – Groove-heavy death metal with big stoner rock vibes should not work, but it does here
- Black Soul Horde // Symphony of Chaos – Epic heavy/power metal with more hooks than the local meat packery run by I. M. Pinhead
- Starlight Ritual // Rogue Angels – Imagine Lemmy joined Di’Anno era Iron Maiden and wrote some epic shit
- Amorphis // Borderlands – Amorphis return to form in a fan service release full of hooks and classic Amorphy moments
- Wytch Hazel // V: Lamentations – Maybe not their best album, but you can’t escape the ear glue of their NWoBHM meets 70s prog rock style
Triumph o’ the Year:
Our little blogworks received a glowing mention in none other than Rolling Stone Magazine, and no one was more surprised than we here at AMG International. It’s nice to see our efforts getting noticed, even in the world of professional music journalism, which we don’t discuss with fans.
Tragedy o’ the Year:
The passing of Ozzy Osbourne. We all knew it was coming, but not this soon. I didn’t expect it to hit me quite as hard as it did, or for the feeling of loss to linger as long as it has. This marks the definitive end of an era and the loss of a Founding Father of metal without peer. At least he went out the way he wanted: with a loud bang and crash. Have a glorious journey into eternity, Ozzman. You will always be missed.
Song(s) o’ the Year:
Under Ruins – “Whispered Curses, Woe Unleashed” – Massive epic goodness with big emotions.
Brainstorm – “The Shepherd Girl (Gitavoginda)” – So damn metal it gives me an iron hangover.
Disappointment o’ the Year:
Dark Angel // Extinction Level Event – What a prophetic album title this was, eh? After 1991s Time Does Not Heal, Dark Angel promised a new album. They promised it while I was in college, then grad school, then law school, during my first marriage, after my divorce, and over the next several decades. When they finally deliver something, and it’s the equivalent of third-rate re-thrash with only vague nods to their original sound, calling it disappointing doesn’t begin to cover it. We received the promo for Extinction Level Event in time to review it, and I was eager to do the job. After one listen, however, I realized the public was going to brutally savage this thing, and I didn’t see the point in adding another head stomp to a band I grew up worshipping. This is now the primary example of why it’s best to leave a legacy safely in the past, where it can live evergreen.
Show 2 footnotes
- Yes, I said that, Grier. ↩
- Yes, there’s a vague hint of Ed Sheeran’s “I See Fire” in the chorus, but don’t talk about it! ↩
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I love reading about graphics system improvements that make displaying things (especially playing videos) even faster and snappier and at the same time use less energy. One such in-depth post (by Xaver Hugl) is about Linux kernel mode setting (KMS) offloading using GPU hardware planes and overlays/underlays in KWin from the latest KDE Plasma 6.5 release¹:
🔗 https://zamundaaa.github.io/wayland/2025/10/23/more-kms-offloading.html¹ https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.5.0/
#KDE #KWin #Linux #graphics #KMS #video #Wayland #GPU #display