Summer stoner riffs, heavy weirdness, extreme doom and loads of death: This month’s highlights from the underground

Oh, summer, you sunny thing. What you need is a soundtrack that fits snugly into the bits where you’re agreeably hot and there’s a barbecue going and everything is just lovely. Did the underground listen? Sort of. This month, there’s some stoner-y stuff that’s just the ticket for those warm nights, plus a load of thrash, doom, death and black metal that, actually, sounds great in the garden, as per our testing. Weyyy.

First up, we have Brit stoner metallers 1968 with the excellently titled Royal Bastards. With big, hairy riffs and moments of dreamy, almost psych vibe-out, they’re a bit like a dirtier, heavier Soundgarden if they came from Britain and Chris Cornell was actually a caveman. New frontman Andrew Valiant – also of the brilliant Flamebearer – is a singer blessed with mighty lungs and loads of soul, but also with an earthy grit and unhinged wildness that comes along rarely, particularly in his distorted performance on album highlight Scorched Earth. Royalty, indeed.

Straight outta Scotland, King Witch return with their third album, III, and pleasingly metal it is, too. Which has always been the case for the Edinburgh collective, but they’ve hit a new level on rollocking opener Suffer In Life, and the epic moments of Deal With The Devil. Laura Donnelly’s vocals are of the Ronnie James Dio school of ‘make everything awesomely massive and like you’ve got lungs made of leather’, while the riffs on Sea Of Lies are full-on late-Sabbath stank face. They also do a neat line in quieter diversions, such as Behind The Veil, or vast, eight-minute closer Last Great Wilderness.

From the glossy to the dirty, it’s Wales’ Spider Kitten and The Truth Is Caustic To Love. While outwardly a very fine purveyor of music that sounds somewhere between Kyuss and the abrasive heaviness of Alice In Chains (see: The Spoiler here), they’re also prone to eccentricities. Plenty of the tracks clock in at less than two minutes, with a fondness for going off on odd little side quests, like on the dark country of Three Shots, or the slow-build of Revelation #1, which builds, Swans-like, into a wall of guitar. Weird, but wonderful.

Heaviest of the bunch – and, indeed, any bunch you’d care to put them in – is the long-awaited return of Southport doom trio Coltsblood with Obscured Into Nebulous Dusk. Where Spider Kitten serve their heaviness in loads of small chunks, this comes as four tracks that break the 10-minute barrier. They are in no rush to get to the end of their slow, ultra-weighty doom-death tunes, but they also cover a surprising amount of ground within them. Until The Eidolon Falls dirges away with singer/bassist John McNulty’s filthy vocals intertwining with Jem McNulty’s guitar harmonies, before halfway through stepping up a gear to a more normal tempo, and crashing down again. On Waning Of The Wolf Moon, meanwhile, there’s an almost black metal quality. A very slow black metal quality. A welcome, superb comeback from one of the jewels of the British doom underground.

To faster climes, and to Germany, where Gelsenkirchen thrash legends Sodom have fired out their 17th album, The Arsonist. At 62 years old, mainman and sole original member Tom Angelripper may sound slightly less crazed and demonical than he did on early belters like Outbreak Of Evil, but like his hero Lemmy, the man’s dedication to belting out stuff that’s louder and faster than most of his contemporaries remains firmly intact here. As does a wild sense of bloody, sweaty grit that flicks off killer opener Battle Of Harvest Moon, Trigger Discipline (a song that makes prime Slayer sound lazy) and Taphephobia, the best song about being buried alive you’ll hear all week. Even the tributes to late drummer Chris Witchhunter (Witchhunter) and Algy Ward from NWOBHM legends Tank (A.W.T.F.) are lessons in brutality. Once again, Sodom rule.

For some brutality from closer to home, London death squad Under The Ashes are taking no prisoners on Sacrifices Heaped. Resolutely old school in their attack, there’s obvious nods to Bolt Thrower throughout, with enough wild-eyed devotion to death to give a character all of their own. Not to mention tearing through Circling Above, Flash Of Light and Deus Vult with a genuinely invigorating energy. With the current uptick of interest in new bands dealing in older death metal sounds, don’t let this lot pass you by. Hopefully they won’t remain in the shadows much longer.

Looking to the world of black metal, Sheffield’s Ba’al follow up last year’s Soft Eyes EP with their second full-length, The Fine Line Between Heaven And Here. As anyone who’s followed them for a while will know, they’re just as much about creating vast, post-rock space as they are delivering the metal heft. And so it is here, but crafted to much larger degree than previously. Thirteen-minute opener Mother’s Concrete Womb takes a full four minutes to get standing up and charging, before calming right down into quiet, Radiohead-y territory, while Waxwork Gorgon is more concerned with doom than speed. The metal, though, hits hard, particularly on the thumping Floral Cairn and the heavy parts of the massive The Ocean That Fills A Wound.

More direct and old fashioned, California one-man project Chamber Of Mirrors are clatteringly evil on Tales Of Blood. Firmly embracing the coldness and harsh production values of ’90s Scandinavia, there’s something reassuring about the way mainman Mortem goes about his business here. Chilling as it may be, he attacks the speedy Dominion and Ancient Ember Of Endless Time with malevolent energy, bringing to mind early Dark Funeral or Emperor, with a particularly good ear for when to stick an atmospheric keyboard into the blasting.

Finally, for something old and new: black metal oddities Sigh have re-recorded their 2007 opus Hangman’s Hymn, presented now as I Saw The World’s End (Hangman’s Hymn MMXXV). Not that there was anything wrong with the original, capturing as it did the Japanese outfit’s take on the genre in all its bananas glory just fine. But mainman Mirai Kawashima is a fussy and particular man, so he went back and fixed the problems he found. Whether it needs it or not, the lick of paint they’ve given here definitely adds enough newness to Inked In Blood and Me-Devil to at least make the overhaul feel thorough. Their delightful romps through black metal with loads of touches of NWOBHM, jazz and whatever else he wants to throw in remain entirely Sigh’s own, and the free-form madness, even captured a second time, is still unlike anything you’ll find anywhere else.

Read this next:

• The 15 greatest death metal albums of the ’90s
• The story of doom metal in 29 songs
• Blood Incantation: “You don’t need to have drugs to take a trip with our music. But if you do, it’ll be even crazier”