Ethan Gruska spent his teen years as one half of The Belle Brigade. After that he built an impressive reservoir of behind-the-scenes work. Oh, and his grandfather is the John Williams. Since then, Gruska’s been bulking up his solo discography, first with 2017 album Slowmotionary, and now with its follow-up. En Garde…

To be fair, a band name like …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead could only have worked during the post-hardcore scene of the late ‘90s. The band proved a precocious contender within punk-rock intelligentsia, most notably on 2002’s Source Tags & Codes. These guys had…

Clockwise from top left: L’Acéphale, Nile, Opeth, Lingua Ignota, Swallow The Sun, Alcest, Car Bomb, Liturgy, Idle Hands and Inter Arma. Well, we’ve made it to the end of the road to hell. These are the best slabs of heavy goodness I heard this year. Sometimes you have to…

Clockwise from top left: Gatecreeper, Numenorean, False, Abyssal, The Great Old Ones, Russian Circles, Dead To A Dying World, Baroness, Archivist and Uniform & The Body. We’re nearing the end of our dastardly journey! The following records honestly would have made it into my top 10… if the final…

Norma Jean makes Max Heilman’s list of the best metal albums of 2019 with ‘All Hail.’ We’re past the point of no return. You’re this far into my cavalcade of concussive music, so you might as well stick around, right? If you thought I was throwing a lot out…

Life Metal by Sunn O))) Back for more, eh? Well, it’s not getting any lighter. We’re going to keep plugging away at my top 50 metal albums of 2019. I pride myself on listening to all kinds of decadent heaviness, so expect a broad spectrum of punishment. If this…

Editor Max Heilman kicks off his list of the 50 best metal albums of 2019 with Cattle Decapitation and nine more. It’s that time of year where everyone scrambles to compile their favorite albums lists. If you’re like me, this becomes a bit of a masochistic task. I’ve listened…

We’re about to cross into a new year, and a new decade! It’s been quite an eventful year for music of all kinds. At RIFF, we’ve been busy looking back over the past 365 days. Our editorial team has been fighting tooth-and-nail, and even passive-aggressively, over what to include, what…

Yann Tiersen may be best known for his songs that wound up in the sound track for the award-winning romantic comedy Amélie, his discography only gets more remarkable from there. Spanning French folk, classical, drone and ambient music, his 10 full-length albums fill a 24-year career with hidden classics and obscure…

The synthetic meditations of 2014’s Ghost Stories and the vibrant alt-pop anthems of 2015’s Head Full of Dreams saw Coldplay ruminate on its embrace of pop music. Granted, Chris Martin and co. have always remained rock more in name than in execution. The palatable timbre and sticky hooks span from…