Prog Metal

🟢 Dreamy, Heartfelt and wholesome! Karmanjakah skillfully merge the thundering power of djent and thall with a warm, gentle ambience that makes their music shine like the sun onto the progressive world.

- The Progressive Subway

🟢 Blast beats, tremolo riffs and downtuned bends have rarely sounded as graceful and uplifting as they do on Karmanjakah's sophomore album Diamond Morning, pointing towards a potential shift in their own corner of heavy music.

- Noizze

🟢 If every other thall band is the winter, Sweden’s Karmanjakah is exactly 8pm on the sunniest July 31st of your life. They’ve built their name on taking technical metal to its most upbeat extremes, with the term ‘happy thall’ coined in their name. The band matches their sound with their visuals, declining the endless grit of 2020s heavy music for dressed-down golden hour analog charm.

- Boolin Tunes

🟢 With so many technical and creative concepts interplaying, Diamond Morning is a triumph of positivity, where the heavy elements are mountains lifting you up, and the fresh, lighter ideas are the wind pulling you higher on wings you never knew you had.

- Distorted Sound Magazine 📊 Ratings: Hive Magazine: 10 💎 Metal Temple: 10 💎 Boolin Tunes: 9 Distorted Sound Magazine: 9 Metal Trenches: 9 Noizze: 9 The Progressive Subway: 8 🟢 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐞: 9.1

◖ Band: Karmanjakah ◖ Album: Diamond Morning ◖ Origin: Stockholm, Sweden 🇸🇪 ◖ Released: 8 May 2026 ◖ Genre: Happy Thall, Progressive Metal, Djent ◖ Recommended Tracks: - Eyes Seeing Eyes - Thousand horns - Diamond Morning - Diamond Train 💎 ◖ For Fans Of: - Periphery - The Contortionist - Tesseract - Intrøspect - Vildhjarta 🔗 Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube -------------------------- - 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙜 𝙈𝙚𝙩𝙖𝙡 -

🟢 Darkly beautiful, achingly desolate, and haunted as the rural North which inspired this project.

📊 8/10 - The Progressive Subway

🟢 Pulling from their previous experience in other bands (Wills Dissolve, Altars of Grief), Northern Graves unleashes a singularly powerful creation. Captivating in its beauty and unimaginably deep in how it communes with the darkest pits of the soul, all throughout this gorgeous record are we treated to a masterful juxtaposition of raw suffering and calculated heaviness brought together in such a form that can be tear-inducing.

- Headbanger Reviews

🔴 From a production standpoint, Derelict Heart sounds amazingly clear and energized, but the blast beat drumming is so high in the mix as to be distracting.

📊 7/10 - Angry Metal Guy

◖ Band: Northern Graves ◖ Album: Derelict Heart ◖ Origin: Canada 🇨🇦 ◖ Released: 17 June 2026 ◖ Genre: Progressive Blackened Doom/Death Metal ◖ Recommended Tracks: - Endless (Feat. Nick Block) - Nocturne - Derelict Heart (Feat. Déhà) ◖ For Fans Of: - Loneshore - Dawn of Ouroboros - Dawhn - Draconian - Altars of Grief 🔗 Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube -------------------------- - 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙜 𝙈𝙚𝙩𝙖𝙡 -

🟢 Heavy and catchy, technical and diverse! Bound to Burn is an adventurous, refreshing, and forward-thinking work of music and fiction sure to please prog fans of every stripe.

📊 8/10 - Angry Metal Guy

🟢 Psyclops’ compositions resemble Between the Buried and Me with their constant evolution, sharp contrasts between neighboring passages, and expansive storytelling that incorporates off-the-wall sonic elements.

🔴 In creating such an aspirational story, Bound to Burn feels incomplete, hampered by its short thirty-minute length.

📊 7/10 - The Progressive Subway

◖ Band: Psyclops ◖ Album: Bound To Burn: Melody of the Martyr ◖ Origin: Oregon, United States 🇺🇸 ◖ Released: 22 May 2026 ◖ Genre: Progressive Metal, Progressive Death Metal ◖ Recommended Tracks: - Consequences (I, II, III) - Indomitable (I, II, III) - Manifest (I, I, III) [I don't get why they've butchered these already-short tracks into pieces. It's mildly infuriating] ◖ For Fans Of: - Between The Buried And Me - Novena - Luna's Call - The Odius - Parius 🔗 Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube -------------------------- - 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙜 𝙈𝙚𝙩𝙖𝙡 -

🟢 An instant contender for album of the year. Words can barely do justice for what Cryptic Shift has accomplished in the 79-minute runtime. “Overspace and Supertime” is Cryptic Shift breaking and surpassing any possible mold that the scene may place around them to make themselves known as a wholly unique entity that holds nothing back, offers no reprieve, and makes it all look damn good the entire time.

- Headbanger Reviews

🟢 Incredibly complex, unpredictable and otherworldly.

- Toilet Ov The Hell

🟢 Cryptic Shift’s new record is a massive, ambitious work, and it is mostly a resounding success.

- The Elite Extremophile

🟢 Overspace & Supertime does not just give Tech-Thrash another landmark. It gives it a new horizon.

- Veil of Sound

🟢 This is an album of purely aggressive, dissonant, esoteric, and oddly-timed stuff; Cryptic Shift made no obvious move, and they’re clearly not gunning for radio play.

- Angry Metal Guy

🟢 One thing I love about Cryptic Shift is the absolute commitment to their craft. For fuck’s sake, even the instrumental breaks and solos are given names in their album’s lyrics, showing that the band see their music as more than a mere platform to tell a story, it’s part of the story, an active voice with things to say

- Everything Is Noise 📊 Ratings: Metal Temple: 10 🔥 Mystificationzine: 10 🔥 Sonic Abuse: 10 🔥 Toilet Ov The Hell: 10 🔥 Angry Metal Guy: 9 Blabbermouth: 9 Boolin Tunes: 9 Distorted Sound Magazine: 9 Metal Epidemic: 9 The Elite Extremophile: 8.5 The Progressive Subway: 8 Sputnik Music: 7.6 🟢 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐠𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐞: 9.1

◖ Band: Cryptic Shift ◖ Album: Overspace & Supertime ✦ #Masterpiece ◖ Origin: Leeds, UK 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 ◖ Released: 27 February 2026 ◖ Genre: Progressive Death Metal, Technical Thrash Metal ◖ Recommended Tracks: All or nothing. ◖ For Fans Of: - Blood Incantation - Siderean - Stargazer - Vektor - Voivod 🔗 Bandcamp | Spotify | YouTube -------------------------- - 𝙋𝙧𝙤𝙜 𝙈𝙚𝙩𝙖𝙡 -