As heatwaves scour many parts of the world, the Progressive Subway Department for Cooling Down has put forward its best (and only) solution to beat the stifling summer heat: Cover the earth in permafrost. By our intrepid researcher’s calculations, the best and most kvlt way to achieve this is to disseminate a chilly blast of Progressive Black Metal to all our listeners.
Mathis, Sam, Sebastian, Will, and Zach are already doing their part: Can you do yours? Stay Hydrated; Think icy thoughts; Break out the corpse paint and enjoy the Progressive Subway’s playlist ov the month!
As always, keep scrolling to see what each contributor chose and why. You’ll also find album links at the bottom of the page.
Sebastian:
Selections: Tomarum, IER, Cicada the Burrower, Kreationist, She Said Destroy, Dreadnought, The Chemical Mind, Thy Light, Dark Fortress, Antipope, Stormkeep, Summoner’s Circle, Esoctrilihum
Well, it looks like the time is here. The fun, bright, and carefree days of summer are coming to an end, and many of us (Zach, Sam, and I included) are going back to school. So, what better music is there to prepare us for the grueling hardship of graduate school than the cultish land of black metal. Yep, this is not only a playlist to put on when you’re in the mood to get brain-blasted into another realm, but it is a playlist for when you’ve abandoned all hope and need a playlist to cry along to.
I added a general variety of progressive black, and a couple of borderline prog black metal songs from Thy Light’s legendary DSBM album Suici.De.Pression, and Stormkeep’s perilous debut album. I also wanted to provide a mix of more abrasive prog black metal artists along with lush and melodic artists. The harder songs I added were pulled from the putrid soundscapes of hell that come out of Esoctrilihum, the demonic Japanese spirits of the damned that lurk in the music of IER, or the awakening whirlwind present in Tómarúm’s debut album.
A song on the opposite side of the spectrum of filth is from Cicada the Burrower’s 2021 album, Corpseflower; this is an incredibly beautiful album with crystalline guitar tones, saccharine hooks, and an overall gorgeous atmosphere. Stuff like this is very common in blackgaze stuff, but this album is unique. Similarly, I added songs from Summoner’s Circle, Kreationist, and The Chemical Mind because they are primarily prog-black most of their duration but have isolated moments of juxtaposing sonic beauty, like an oasis on a hateful desert. Other songs I chose because of their focus on catchy lead guitar melodies are “Sharpening the Blade” by She Said Destroy and “Apostle of Infinite Joy” from Antipope.
Other songs I like for more miscellaneous reasons. For instance, the ending to Dark Fortress’s “The Spider in the Web” is just sick, in a similar way to the closing riffs in the songs on Opeth’s Deliverance. Another is from Dreadnought’s 2019 album Emergence, one of the most detailed and progressive atmospheric black metal albums I’ve heard, with loads of keys, varied female clean vocals and screams, odd song structures, and tempo shifts galore.
Will:
Selections: Dragged into Sunlight, Hoth, Stortregn, Batushka, Ultar, Epitaphe, Numenorean
My selections here reflect my being more drawn to melodic, atmospheric themes in music. Hoth, Numenorean and Ultar offer unforgiving soundscapes and cosmic horror themes in an immersive blackened post-metal style that threaten to swallow the listener whole.
Though I haven’t chosen a track from their excellent new album II, I certainly wanted to include some Epitaphe, just for the amazing jagged soundscapes the french band is capable of producing.
In terms of oppressive melody, it doesn’t get much icier than Batushka, whose Eastern Orthodox Christian-infulenced imagery with a dark twist is sure to cool you down during the rampant heatwaves of summer.
Mathis:
Selections: IATT, Deconstructing Sequence, Antisoph
I know very little about black metal or progressive black metal. I also do not like or listen to black or prog black metal. However, there are some cool things happening in that terrifying void of distant screams and relentless blast beats that are actually pretty neat.
Zach:
Selections: Aquilus, Abduction, Doldrums, Galar, White Ward
Let it be noted that I am a lifelong death metal fan. In the seemingly never-ending subgenre wars on which one is cooler, I’ll always say death metal. But for some reason, progressive black metal just hits different. I find something incredibly soothing about the long-winded nature of proggy black metal, like an ever constant ebb and flow between soft acoustic parts with a sampled wind sound and trem riffs that sound as dark as the winter nights themselves. Because I’m a native Floridain, I don’t know what anything besides summer is, so for the sake of this playlist, let’s merely pretend to be in a winter cabin in the middle of nowhere, shall we? For the sake of atmosphere, just go along with it.
The members of Galar might as well be the human embodiments of winter. They do everything a proggy black metal band should, and then some. The frigid riffs, strings that don’t sound programmed, and plenty of triumphant clean vocal sections. If you need to fill that Windir hole left in your heart, these guys are for you. And speaking of doing everything right, White Ward’s brand new opus was too popular to join the ranks of Subway Approved albums, but that doesn’t mean I can’t sneak it onto this playlist. Just like our first choice, the unconventional sax and noir atmosphere make you feel like you’re standing in the middle of a snowy, quiet city after dark. On the other side of things, the symphonic, sweeping music of Aquilus will take you to an abandoned campground in a dark fall afternoon, just as the sun is setting. I feel like it’s cheating to include one song, so if my pick is up your alley, make sure to check out the whole album! Abduction piles on the old fashioned production with modern writing sensibilities, with song structures more Opethian than the traditional black metal buildups. But enough with black metal to chill (ha) to, I know you want a little primal aggression in there too, so I added Doldrums’ and their beautifully horrific new album into the mix.
Sam:
Selections: Enslaved, Phendrana, Fjoergyn, Massen, Dordeduh
As the planet downloaded TR 43 and used Overheat, we from the Subway opened our underground cooling systems and brought out some winterly chill in the form of some nice and cold black metal to counterbalance. Unfortunately for the planet though, we’re a bunch of cowards and have eluded the raw Nokia recordings in the arctic forests of Norway in favor of the warmer progressive variant with fashionable turtleneck sweaters. And I have opted for an even warmer route by going folky as well. Dordeduh brings the Romanian pagan atmosphere with dream-like songwriting and Massen adds a violin to a dynamic prog/black/death concoction. Phendrana is an atmospheric band full of yearning and melancholy, and Enslaved add in the Floydian touches to really hammer in that our planet is fucked. Finally Fjoergyn goes for the epic route as a soundtrack to the incoming apocalypse. Perfect.
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