2012 is dead and gone, and by the time you read this, it’ll be as distant a memory as the trees who met their doom to give this story life. It was a good year for a lot of things, and a terrible one for others, of course (the passage of time is funny like that), but, to abandon the bigger picture and hunker down into our black metal bunkers for a few hundred more words, it’s been a goddamn fantastic year for the strange little beast known as British black metal. After years of enduring the dread goblin king Dani Filth’s stranglehold on the title, a good number of UK lads got their collective shit together and released a bumper crop of killer jams that roved from Winterfylleth’s grandiose Northern sagas and White Medal’s crippling Yorkshire steel down into Anaal Nathrakh’s Brummie madhouse and further into smoke with the return of London’s grimiest, Necrosadistic Goat Torture. Toss in Wodensthrone, Code and A Forest of Stars, and Blighty’s not doing too poorly. Now that said banner year has ended, one’s holding onto the hope that the trend will continue to bear fruit, and thanks to the Southern boys in Fen, … Read More

Comprised of four London-based devils, namely Peter Benjamin, David Gray, Samuel Loynes and Dan Abela, Voices set out to become “a diverse and experimental black metal band,” so says bassist Pete, although he now admits that “there is no telling where we may end up musically speaking.” These are names you might recognise; David and Peter played together in gentlemanly black metal outfit, Akercocke, while Dan has played with Cradle Of Filth minx Sara Jezebel Deva on her solo work and Samuel jammed with Peter in Diminished Fifth. But this is no supergroup. “We don’t want to be restricted creatively by any scene or genre of music,” scolds Peter. “We want to create cold, unusual and extreme music. From initially just jamming, we quickly moved into a deeply intense improvisational stance within the rehearsal space and then began to piece songs together, which happened naturally.” Elsewhere in this issue of Iron Fist we describe 2012 as a banner year for British black metal; bands like Fen, Winterfylleth, A Forest Of Stars and Wodensthrone breathed life into a scene that had been on its deathbed since, well, Akercocke. So how do Voices feel to be joining this band of blackened brothers? “There seems to … Read More