Welcome everyone. Hope your start of the year has been pleasant. Here at Elegy Media, I’ve been pretty busy with family and new projects at my day job, but managed to squeeze in a lot of listening to new bands.

I started off the new year waiting for a few releases, mainly Tribunal’s The Weight of Remembrance, so with just singles in the early weeks of the year mostly listened to some older albums and some of my favs from last year. Heavy Vermilia, Blackbraid, Opeth, Morbid Angel mostly. A non-metal album I had going on in the early mornings was Ludovico Einaudi’s Moments of Peace. It’s laid back instrumental approach I find really fits in with my morning schedule before metal takes over later in the day.

Although, January started off slowly it picked up quite a bit around the third week of the month when some albums dropped fully. All in all, there were quite a few new bands that hit my radar in January. Above is a snapshot of those records (in no particular order).

All of them besides, Tribunal and Moonlight Sorcery were new bands to me. And of those two I knew coming into listening to them, I only had heard a few singles of Tribunal and the earlier EP of Moonlight Sorcery (which is a big miss on my end of year list last year).

Here are some early impressions:

Tribunal - The Weight of Remembrance

Lives up to all the hype. Early AOTY contender. The light/dark with the music and vocals plays well and above all else, there’s great songwriting on this album which makes it an enjoyable listen.

Moonlight Sorcery - Nightwind: The Conqueror from the Stars

After listening to this, super bummed I missed out on their EP last year. It’s a great ride and is packed with bangers even for a 4 song EP.

Inherits the Void - The Impending Fall of the Stars

Solid black metal out of France. Pretty strong second album and still digesting how I feel about it

Nothingness - Supraliminal

Great death metal. In the OSDM vein, doesn’t reinvent the wheel by any means but has tons of crunchy, filthy, headbanging riffs. Loving it so far, let’s see if it holds up over the year

Dryad - The Abyssal Plain

To be honest, at first wasn’t really feeling this album, but after spending some time with it found its appealing qualities. There’s a ton of energy on this album and when they focus it, they put out quality blackened crust but the album is weighed down by a bit of monotony in the sound

Conjureth - The Parasitic Chambers

Haven’t spent much time with this album and I feat it will get buried under some of the February releases I’m excited about. We’ll see. For what it’s worth, the few songs I did listen to were nice but nothing more