Seattle’s greatest blackened, crossover thrash export Black Breath is set to unleash their third full-length album on September 25th via Southern Lord Records. The album is called Slaves Beyond Death and their label Southern Lord has just released the title track via their Soundcloud page.

Check out the title track of Slaves Beyond Death here below.

St. Louis blackened thrash band Black Fast are having a pretty good year. Formed in 2010 and taking their name from an extreme form of fasting within Catholicism, they have previously released a self-titled EP and an independent full-length, the widely acclaimed Starving Out The Light. Black Fast has parlayed the momentum into a deal with eOne Music who, on August 7th, issued the band’s first official wide release album Terms of Surrender.

Check out the official video for the album’s first single “I Conspire” here below.

This week’s Black Metal Friday band needs no introduction. Norwegian legends Darkthrone are amongst a very small handful of bands that kick started the second wave of black metal in the early ’90s. Their “unholy trinity” of albums, A Blaze in the Northern Sky,Under a Funeral Moon and Transilvanian Hunger as well as their fiercely DIY ethic are widely considered to be the template for most of the black metal that followed.

The duo behind Darkthrone, Fenriz and Nocturno Culto have steered away from black metal in recent years in favor of a more crust punk approach but they will always be held in the highest reverence for their contributions to the dark genre. Here, from A Blaze in the Northern Sky, is Darkthrone with the classic anthem “In the Shadow of the Horns.” Crank it up and throw some horns of your own in honor of the masters, Darkthrone.

Aussie band Hope Drone deal in the sort of atmospheric black metal that might appeal to fans of Wolves in the Throne Room or Alter of Plagues. Founded in 2011, this Brisbane band released the critically acclaimed eponymous EP Hope Drone in 2013.

Today marks the release of Hope Drone’s spectacular full-length debut album Cloak of Ash on Relapse Records. The album clocks in at 77 minutes of run time filled by only 7 sprawling tracks. The opener “Unending Grey” is a whopping 20 minutes and 4 seconds long, divesting the listener immediately of any notion that this is music for quick consumption. The album demands to be heard as a whole, dissected and absorbed over the course of multiple listenings.

Chicago’s Immortal Bird defies classification. Their sound definitely runs thick with the hallmarks of black metal, but there’s also a bit of an “everything but the kitchen sink” vibe going on. The band shifts effortlessly from sludgy, doom metal to thrash all the way up through out and out hardcore. There are even beautifully dissonant, acoustic piano passages. That might sound like a schizophrenic cocktail on paper, but the underlying current of rage in both front-woman Rae’s voice and the band’s sonic battery manage to tie it all together in as a cohesive whole.

However, lest you think that Immortal Bird are only the bunch of angry individuals that they come across as sonically, consider this: the band eschews the label of “female fronted metal band” by labeling themselves “male backed metal” on their Facebook page. In the same space they also declare their hometown to be “Not China.” The latter is a tongue in cheek jab at South Dakota’s Ghost Bath, who convinced the press initially that they were in fact a Chinese black metal band as a publicity stunt.