Riastrad – Riastrad

 

 

Riastrad – Riastrad
Self-released – 2026
Rock, Doom, Stoner, Metal, Grunge
Rated: ***

Of course… Riastrad has already been on the Rich And Turbo Show… Cause Rich never sleeps and ropes everyone into joining him on Rich And Turbo’s Heavy Half Hour. Which usually lasts well over a half hour, but that’s okay, cause time flies by as you listen and watch them talk music. Cause we all love to talk about music. This time though, the Riastrad interview only passes the time mark with some five minutes. Go watch it HERE… 

But luckily lasting forty-five minutes is the debut self-titled album Riastrad. Straight out of Portland, comes this four-piece that opt to go for the classic toned metal. Doom to the touch and with a definite motoring vibe. Ten furious metal tracks, topped by searing vocals delivered by Paige Parker. Vocals that can turn more honey toned and lure you deeper into the Riastrad sound on the drop of a dime. 

Traditional in tone and classic in its approach to doom metal, it is by no means just doom. The fat riffs are there, and so are the operatic vocals and the gothic grandeur. But not everything is slowed to a crawl, often in fact it speeds up and mirrors a more thrashy approach or the heavy metal of yore. But in atmosphere, the monumental melodies, approaching that medieval quality and seismic feel all at once, has Riastrad delivering nothing but class. 

Class, but the kind that owns plaid shirts and loves their grunge, for as the album continues, definite influences of the nineties and stonerrock do pop up. It’s what gives the album that touch or originality needed to make this a special debut. Why yes! This is the kind of ruckus every metal head will adore. Older heads because it will remind them of their youth. And the youth because it will wild them out or shoot them down a rabbit hole discovering how deep it all really goes… 

(Written by JK)

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Florist – Adrift

 

 

Florist – Adrift
Threat Collection Records – 2025
Rock, Metal, Stoner, Doom, Prog, Psych
Rated: *****

When the honorable Rich Piva from Musipedia of Metal, FuzzDoomRip, Rich & Turbo’s Heavy Half Hour and of course the Doom Charts keeps raving about the new Florist album, you know you are going to need to revisit that album and come to grips with the fact that you might have missed something elemental there! And after having Adrift on repeat for the better part of the past week we can safely state we get where Rich is coming from! And where the Florist four are coming from! 

The first thing that hits me is the low-end rumble, the universal hum, the 432Hz, the frequency of cosmic truth. The Tampa four open Adrift by tuning the room, my brain and maybe the solar system itself. And just like that, I’m gone! Blasting through the stratosphere on riffs thick enough to bend gravity itself, a rhythm section pounding like war drums in zero-G and a madman behind a synth and theremin rig flicking switches like he’s trying to signal for contact on a distant planet! 

Man, this is serious! They know exactly what they are doing. Pushing familiar doom, psych, stoner, space rocking tropes through a wormhole and pulling out something so alive, so incredibly fun, it feels a little dangerous! Another Moon hits like a second track should, firing on all cylinders and making my neurons shift gear and lose grip on reality! The sound of four lunatics in perfect synch, bashing their way through a black hole with nothing but their smiles to keep them from losing their collective minds. 

Adrift is only six songs and only a half hour long, but who cares about numbers and who cares about time, when the walls seem to be melting all around you? We’re nearly in the fourth dimension. And feel like a brightly burning ball of light! Cause the entire release, despite the crazy grins, the incredible amount of enjoyment, moves with surprising grace. Final track Adrift (Part B) floats into orbit, with a majestic groove, shimmering, weightless, free. Like colliding galaxies the different layers wrap around each other, as the bassline’s gravitational field pulls it all together. Impacted by the meteor drums. Only a swallowing sun could become large enough to engulf these tracks and return them to the stardust form whence they came… 

Made from stardust, this star chasing space ship has every note soaked to the maximum with some  yet to be invented kind of rocket fuel. High, space rocking, psych trucking energy that benefits from volume levels that might cause another big bang somewhere beyond our own existence. In the end, the sheer exuberance and euphoria felt while listening to Adrift is the only way to know for sure that I wasn’t hallucinating. Florist have cracked open the frequency of cosmic truth and found some golden interstellar vein of groove. I’m hooked. 

(Written by JK)

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Somnus Throne – Nemesis Lately

 

Somnus Throne – Nemesis Lately
Heavy Psych Sounds – 2022
Rock, Stoner, Metal, Doom, Grunge, Sludge
Rated: ****

It’s been out since early June and it’s been rocking house, car and neighborhood since that time! We’re talking about the new album Nemesis Lately by LA trio Somnus Throne. Which obviously made the June Doom Charts where the honorable Rich Piva already stated: “Serious Melvins vibes come across with Nemesis Lately and you hit a lot of the key demographics here, including some heavy grunge (Snake Eyes), doomy goodness (Lacquer Bones), trippy stoner jams (Rubber Trap), and some serious heavy psych (L-Dopatryptamine) all coming together to create a memorable and exciting tripped out release for Heavy Psych Sounds.” And we could not agree more. And since the good man already mentioned quite a few tracks in passing, let’s take a look at one he did not yet mention. But before we do, we should just state the obvious, that opener Snake Eyes, with its hard trucking, its heavy motoring and sludge grunge has the most brilliant of universal nods at its ending. And even though it yells about quaaludes and sedatives, it will surely get your blood pumping and your energy level through the roof. Okay man, let’s let the dice decide… And by chance, Dice And Scarecrow it is, slow doom, steady marching, grungy and spacy vocals, riding on top of that grating and slow pattern of heavy distorted riffs and chance was made sound, and we beheld its glory, and it lay among us, full of chaos and full of whim. After which the kool-aid definitely got even more spiked, and thus the following three tracks are even more heady, full of kaleidoscopic undercurrents, reshaping all of your perspectives, to get you high and get you off. And judging, from those final three tracks, Somnus Throne could just as easily turn into a doom version of The Grateful Dead, touring the world and getting everybody’s freak on. It’s all doom happening man…

(Written by JK)

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O’ and the band lovingly provided a few codes a while ago, and some might still be alive:

by7g-xgwx
w25n-e3hp
sm6v-7sq2
pby7-v4gc
rd2a-garx