Why The Armed aren’t the most talked about band in modern hardcore is totally beyond me. Their 2015 debut full-length, ‘Untitled’, was the most chaotic, inventive and down-right barmy hardcore record that wasn’t written by The Chariot in the last decade, and easily one of my favourite albums released that year. It was also recorded by Converge’s resident uber-producer Kurt Ballou, and featured a typically unhinged drum performance from Baptists/Sumac’s Nick Yacyshyn. The band never achieved the profile that their talent and calibre deserves, though largely through their own self-imposed obscurity. 2016 live album ‘Unanticipated’ was recorded piecemeal across numerous completely unannounced appearances at open mics and impromptu set-ups under a series of pseudonyms. Not exactly making it easy for yourselves, guys.

‘Witness’ is our first taste of new album ‘Only Love’, due out in Europe via Throatruiner in April, and it’s business as usual for The Armed; every possible detail is in a state of extreme flux. For starters, their drum stool is now occupied by Ben Koller, percussionist extraordinaire of Converge/Mutoid Man/All Pigs Must Die fame, The Armed clearly throwing the dude a bone after the quiet year he’s just had… His wild abandon adds another layer of manic ferocity to the band’s already volatile sound, while the heavy use of synth and electronica pushes them closer to filling the void left by Genghis Tron. It’s a visceral, brain-rattling barrage, equal parts brainy and psychotically off-the-rails, and it’s as exciting as hardcore music gets in 2018. Say hello to your new favourite band. For realsies this time.

Whilst on a transatlantic trip over Christmas, I happened to pick up the January issue of the excellent US extreme music magazine Decibel, the primary reason being that it contained their always interesting and often polarising Top 40 Albums Of The Year list. After sifting through said list I reached Number 1 with a perplexed look about my face, mostly because I’d never even heard of the album OR band that had been handed the honour. That band was Khemmis: a Denver, Colorado quartet whose sophomore release, ‘Hunted’, was clearly something I should have heard. It took me another 3 months to actually get around to listening to said record, because goddamn I’m a busy man, but lord am I glad I got there in the end.

Khemmis could most easily be described as ‘melodic progressive doom’, which I’m aware isn’t a remotely easy concept to wrap one’s head around, but it’s a tag that fits the band well. Upon first spin, the most obvious point of comparison for the kind of grand, majestic gloom on offer would be current doom poster boys Pallbearer. The haunting vocals and commanding harmonised riffs are present in both bands’ sounds. However, whereas Pallbearer are content to keep proceedings at a funereal pace, Khemmis aren’t afraid to stamp on the accelerator every now and again. When they do, there’s a High On Fire vibe to their sound that many of their doom contemporaries wouldn’t dream of mixing in, and it’s a major element that helps Khemmis poke their head out through the black clouds. ‘Hunted’ is a grandiose, devastating album that packs both emotional and sonic wallop, and though they may not be a huge name internationally just yet, it’s only a matter of time before Khemmis are no longer the hunted, but the hunters. They’re coming for us all.

I’ve been a huge fan of Washington D.C. thrashers Darkest Hour since their rib-crushing 2003 opus ‘Hidden Hands Of A Sadist Nation’. Or at least I was a huge fan, until the band released their confounding 2014 self-titled album, on which they seemed to abandon much of what I’d fallen in love with to begin with. Gone was their signature brand of hardcore-informed melodic death metal, instead replaced with an ill-advised attempt at jumping on the ‘djent’ bandwagon, 7-string guitars and all. It was a gut-punch from a band I’d always been able to rely on (OK, maybe ‘The Human Romance’ wasn’t that great either, but that’s neither here nor there), and I couldn’t see how Darkest Hour could pull themselves back from the brink of stink-metal oblivion.

Turns out, all they needed to do was spend a couple of years reminding themselves who they really are, helped along nicely by their decision to spend much of 2015 and some of 2016 playing their 2005 thrashterpiece ‘Undoing Ruin’ live in its entirety. Oh, and also call master producer Kurt Ballou up to the plate to record their new album, ‘Godless Prophets & The Migrant Flora’. And what a difference those 3 years have made. This is arguably the finest work Darkest Hour have put out since ‘Undoing Ruin’, though rather than a step backwards towards their older sound, this is instead a quantum leap forward. It’s as thrashy as anything they’ve ever released, but with a progressive edge the band have only ever flirted with in the past dragged to the forefront. It also largely eschews the clean singing frontman John Henry has been employing on the band’s more recent records, his vocals here as vicious and imposing as they’ve ever been. ‘Godless Prophets…’ isn’t just a return to form for Darkest hour – this sounds like the start of an entirely new chapter for them, and with my hope restored I’m once more happy to heed their prophecies.

Traditionally Norway has been pretty excellent in providing the world with the best in frost-bitten extremity, so it comes as little surprise that progressive blackened hardcore troupe SIBIIR, who’s self-titled debut album dropped at the very tail-end of 2016, call capital city Oslo their home. Their country’s dark musical history drips ominously from every second of the album, though SIBIIR are far from a simple black metal legacy tribute act, encompassing elements of hardcore (the vicious opener ‘Bekmörke’), Cult Of Luna-esque post-metal (‘The Spiral’), or even shades of Mastodon’s early progressive sludge (‘Erase & Adapt’).

There are plenty of bands out there peddling ‘blackened’ variations of each of these sub-genres, but I struggle to recall any who have married all of them together so convincingly as SIBIIR. That they manage to slide between such disparate styles whilst retaining a cohesive sound is somewhat miraculous, and it’s only a matter of time before they gain some much-deserved wider attention from the extreme music community worldwide. The band’s name comes from the Norwegian word for Siberia, and that monicker accurately represents the harsh, inhospitable soundscapes that SIBIIR create. Listen to them today, or you chance being left out in the cold.

I’m a sucker for HM-2 soaked grind and hardcore, and thanks to good old Relapse Records I may just have discovered a new favourite band in Washington State’s The Drip. Having released their debut album this month in the shape of ‘The Haunting Fear Of Inevitability’, The Drip take Rotten Sound’s basic template (buzzsaw guitar, unrelenting blastbeats, pummelling D-Beat), and marry it to the winding deathgrind of the late, great Massachusetts bruisers The Red Chord to form a neck-snappingly savage new take on grindcore.

This might not be an album to partake in before you’ve had your morning coffee, though on the other hand it could quite effectively replace said coffee as your wake-up call, as it’s a relentless barrage of riffs and thundering drums that, at the right volume, could conceivably wake the dead. If Nails, Trap Them or the notion of being savagely butchered with a rusty chainsaw are your bag, hook yourself up to The Drip.