London’s SEVEN SISTERS have been kicking around since 2014, steadily building a fanbase and receiving no small share of critical acclaim for their high-energy, NWOBHM-inspired heavy metal. After extensive gigging both in the UK and across Europe, the band have finally released their much anticipated eponymous debut album on High Roller Records.

The album is an extremely polished piece of work, paying homage to early Iron Maiden, amongst others, while avoiding the trap of derivation or the tiresome “tribute” sound. IRON FIST sat down with guitarist GRAEME FARMER to get the skinny on the origin of the band, what inspires them and why the hell they’re named after a nondescript tube station in North London.

Tell us how Seven Sisters got started. How did you all come together as band? Graeme: Me and Kyle had been talking about working on a project together for quite a while, but never really got around to doing anything about it until late 2013/early 2014. I went round his for a jam, and we ended up writing ‘The Warden’ and ‘No Guts, No Glory’ in the space of a few hours. After that, the rest of what became our demo tape came together pretty quickly and we recorded … Read More

In this issue of Iron Fist we celebrate the legacies and careers of two bands responsible for the progression of extreme music as we know it; CELTIC FROST and MAYHEM. Both celebrate 30 years of existence this year and both are still dabbling in the dark arts; Tom G Warrior with TRIPTYKON and Mayhem with their new album ‘Esoteric Warfare’.

In our cover story, Thomas Gabriel Fischer talks to Jim Martin about what drove him to create Hellhammer and the early Frost demos and how those same inspirations are channelled into his current work, while Kim Kelly talks to Necrobutcher and Attila Csihar about the formation, and dogged survival, of one of the most important bands still playing and creating heavy metal music today.

Talking of dogged survival, we also talk to maidens of metal, DORO and Ann Boleyn of HELLION about how they started their respective bands, Warlock and Hellion, and how nothing will get in their way as they continue to make music three decades after they begun. Elsewhere in the magazine we talk to AT THE GATES about their forthcoming album and reveal details of new works by 40 WATT SUN, GEHENNAH, Gaz Jennings (ex-Cathedral) and Phil Swanson (ex-Hour … Read More

Raise hell, get seduced by the dark and shun the light – three things WITCHGRAVE make us want to do in 2013. The young Swedes have just vomited forth their first full-length and it’s not been off the Iron Fist stereo since it landed. Hearing everything from Venom to the blues in there we had to find out more and sent DAVE SHERWOOD to the cabin in the woods to infiltrate the coven.

“Vomit on the fucking priest!” That’s probably the best greeting we’ve had from a band this issue. And it’s no surprise that it comes in email form from Swedish youth gone wild, Witchgrave. Their self-titled full-length arrived in our postboxes like an early “fukk you” from Santa just before Christmas. Fitting since we’ve not exactly been the best-behaved children this year. The album, which contains juvenile blasts of thrashing fury such as ‘Seduced By The Dark’, ‘Raise Hell’ and ‘The Virgin Must Die’, is just the dose of merciless, Venom-ous, old metal brilliance we needed to end the old year, and ring in the new. Witchgrave are inhuman, they’re forged from the molten wax of someone’s complete Neat Records collection which has been burned (and died). A little bit of … Read More