News : Chthe'ilist featured in Kerrang Magazine

Via Kerrang Magazine : "Here are the 20 bands from Canada who are causing avalanches in the Great White North. Canada has two identities: one accepted as a widespread stereotype and one that’s well known, though slightly below the surface. The mainstream one is of a country full of fuddy-duddies, who are all polite to a fault and enjoy a standard of living that makes them seem like Americans on Xanax. Properties like South Park have played on this perception, painting Canada as a delightful if slightly backwards nation with funny accents. The other identity, which any fan of heavy music knows all too well, is that Canada goes fucking hard. As long as punk and metal have existed, Canada has played a vital part in their development, and has produced some of each genre’s best acts. This is also reflected in their fans: Canadians can drink more beer, shout louder at full-contact sports, and melt the eardrums of listeners harder than citizens of most other countries.

In honor of Canada Day, our North American correspondents put together a list of the country’s most awesome bands. But rather than celebrate Canada’s classic heavy artists — make no mistake, we love Anvil, Voivod, Kataklysm, Cryptopsy, and Strapping Young Lad — we decided to focus on lesser-known acts who are just as deserving of the spotlight. We also took an electoral college approach to adding bands from each Canadian province by population, to make sure the entire country is represented, rather than just listing a dozen bands from Toronto and Montreal. Here are the 20 heavy Canadian bands you need to know right now…

ONTARIO Tomb Mold In 2019, Tomb Mold’s upcoming new album, Planetary Clairvoyance, might be the death metal record to beat. The first two singles from the Toronto quartet’s third full-length have seethed with vile misanthropy while simultaneously showing off plenty of technical chops, amounting to death metal that’s both interesting and delicious. That the band blew our socks off opening for Horrendous shows that they’ve also got a solid live game, so keep an eye out for them on tour in the coming year. Monster Truck At a listen, Monster Truck have so much bluster, swagger, and speeding-ticket riffs that you’d be forgiven for thinking they were American. But no — the ultimate example of a band earning its name hails from Hamilton, Ontario, which might explain the flourishes of Rush-esque keyboards throughout their music. While their songs aren’t the most complicated or intellectual, the total earnestness behind Monster Truck’s mammoth-sized road ragers make them impossible to dislike, and easy to get obliterated to. VHS Some bands write about the plots of horror movies, but VHS seem to be writing about the experience of watching them. Their brand of grody, grinding garage-death has a tangible quality to it that leaves the listening smelling the ozone from the tube TV set playing Jason Takes Manhattan. The Thunder Bay trio’s new album, We’re Going To Need Some Bigger Riffs, drops later this month, so pause Halloween III and give it a blast. BRITISH COLUMBIA Black Wizard The beauty of Vancouver’s Black Wizard is the middle ground they ride between doom and thrash. At times, the tracks on the band’s 2018 barn burner Livin’ Oblivion are slow, thoughtful, and ecclesiastical with their vocals. But at any given moment, the Wizard will ramp up those tasty NWOBHM riffs to a speed metal pace and create an evil gallop that sounds deeply old-school and at the same time totally modern. As such, the band don’t fall into the trap of trad-metal, giving contemporary fans a taste of classic riffage without coming off like a tribute band. Baptists When Dave Grohl announces to the world that other drummers should beware your skinsman, you know you’re doing something right. That’s exactly what the Foo Fighters frontman did for Nick Yacyshyn, drummer for Vancouver hardcore punk act Baptists. The praise is warranted — the band’s music is relentlessly punishing, and that raw power is heavily aided by Nick’s tireless drumming. Their latest, 2018’s Beacon Of Faith, is the kind of vicious album that brings together fans of metal, hardcore, and punk in a psychological barrage of sonic violence. Archspire The full weight of technical death metal’s evolution over the past decade can be felt in the work of Vancouver’s Archspire. The instrumental work behind the quintet’s songs is alien enough to at times be an acquired taste, with the inclusion of vocals so speedy they can sound like rapping and the occasional breakdown that adheres to only the most unusual of time signatures. Meanwhile, the quintet’s tendencies towards melodic riffs and evolving alongside tech-death as a whole has gotten them tons of underground acclaim and won them spots on some impressive tours. A band whose ascendancy is perpetual and deserved. MANITOBA KEN mode Yikes. Channeling all the doubt and menace of being human, Winnipeg noise artists KEN mode have staked out a claim for themselves as one of Canada’s coolest — and scariest — heavy bands. Their music’s frenetic, panicked profile makes one feel irritated and anxious to the point of physical aggression. Meanwhile, their aesthetic shifts cover all the bases of artistic horror — 2016’s Nerve is all oranges and purples, while last year’s Loved features a shadowy embodiment of perversity grinning hungrily at the viewer. A rare example of band who are as vital and important as they are straight-up killer to listen to. Endless Chaos On the other end of Winnipeg’s metallic spectrum are Endless Chaos, whose tight, merciless death metal is, simply put, tasty as fuck. With healthy doses of technical skill and bounding groove, their 2018 album Paths To Contentment provides listeners with a polished slab of fist-pumping modern metal. There’s also a faint European edge in their sound — a mixture of black, death, and thrash without abandon that smacks of Wacken — but one can also easily hear the influence of countrymen Kataklysm in the mix. QUEBEC Fuck the Facts For going on twenty years, Fuck The Facts have been making exciting grindcore without a single break. The Gatineau quintet’s discography branches out over ten full length studio records. While they play their fair share of traditionally shorter tracks, the band is better known for adventuring into more sprawling song lengths while introducing elements of mathcore and sludge into the mix. This, coupled with their DIY-at-all-costs ethos and aesthetic, make them a perpetual favorite of extreme music fans north of the border. Csejthe While Quebec is known for its frosty black metal, Csejthe — pronounced ‘tche-TAY’ — stand out from their peers. The Quebec City four-piece create sprawling, emotional black metal that will stir the hearts of listeners, but they do so without sacrificing the cold steeliness and dark horror of their early Scandinavian peers. That they’re named after the castle in which Elizabeth Bathory tortured and bathed in the blood of dozens of young women is the cherry on top of this gory sundae. Enjoy getting lost in this band. Chthe’ilist Bearing a name not meant to be understood by mere mortals, Chthe’ilist’s technical death metal is deeply rooted in the lore crafted by famed horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. The Longueuil-based band’s sound is so dense, atmospheric, and heavy, it feels as though it comes from an aeons-old cavern with an interdimensional portal at its core. There’s nothing flashy about the band at all: they crash through the listener’s ears with haunting tales presented as skin-crawling death metal. Even with their young age, Chthe’ilist are proving to be one of the talents to look out for in the future to come. Sutrah Maybe it’s the speedy technicality of Sutrah’s music that caused the band to take so long before dropping their debut, Dunes. Though they’ve been around since 2011, the Montreal three-piece only released their first studio album in 2017. That said, the wait was worth it: Dunes’ use of both brilliant technical death metal and yearning spiritual melodies make it a powerful listen from start to finish. Fans who love Gorguts and Obscura but have always wanted a little more heart from the get-go need to get into these guys. ALBERTA Revenge Few bands are as starkly terrifying as Edmonton’s Revenge. For most metal acts, writing about warfare and humanity’s flaws involves some level of indulgent poetry; for this bristling two-piece, it’s all casualty numbers and scorched earth. 2015’s Behold.Total.Rejection — just one of their many three-words-separated-by-periods titles — is a nonstop assault of war metal that sounds like the harsh realities of a roof collapsing in and killing everyone in the house below. Definitely fun to listen to on your commute as you wish death upon everyone. Chron Goblin How can you not love a band named Chron Goblin? Thankfully, this Calgary quartet’s sound lives up to their name, full of hip-swinging stoner rock riffs that sound made for a concert in a desert on a hot summer night. What the band have in spades that sets them apart from the usual weed-worshipping crew is energy, giving even their stonier material enough oomph to keep them from lethargically ripping off Sabbath. A must-hear for fans of Soundgarden, Clutch, and biker rock’s wilier tones. Striker Canada has a long history of neon-lined, sword-wielding, head-hoisting classic metal, and Edmonton’s Striker continues that tradition. The band’s earnest, charging shred tracks, mixed with its totally unironic celebration of classic heavy metal imagery, make them as endearing as they are killer. Add to that the fact that the video for their Lemmy tribute song involves them playing a game of Wizard Staff, and you get the kind of band you’ll want to catch at every festival they play. Arrival Of Autumn It only makes sense that, given its proximity to the country that spawned the genre, Canada would have some killer metalcore. But Grand Prairie’s Arrival Of Autumn double down on that promise by making their incarnation of the genre solidly less sentimental or melodic than many of American metalcore’s heavyweights. There are clean choruses, sure, but they’re wedged between incredibly brutal flurries of double bass drum and finger-tapped lightning solos. Love Trivium, but wish they sounded more like Darkest Hour? Welcome to Canada. SASKATCHEWAN Altars Of Grief Interestingly enough, Regina’s Altars Of Grief have a sound that’s not only cross-genre, but sort of cross-provincial. There’s something about the melancholy agony at the heart of the band’s doom-death that smacks specifically of the emotional black metal rampant in Quebec. At the same time, the focus on ire over atmosphere plants this quintet firmly outside Quebec’s flavor, instead aligning them more towards the kind of sludge-death made by Arkansas acts like Rwake. An engrossing listen, if not a very positive or uplifting one. Shooting Guns Let’s say Saskatoon’s Shooting Guns weren’t the musicians behind the score of WolfCop, everyone’s favorite cult police-werewolf movie (Liquor Donuts!). That would leave them being an extremely cool van metal act, whose driving riffs and psychedelic interludes exude a believable sense of dirtbag pride. But the fact that they also did provide a score to WolfCop — and its sequel Another WolfCop, and an original live score to Nosferatu — elevate them to new heights of radness. Music made for crushing a beer shortly before putting the pedal to the floor. Black Thunder Never forget, there are plenty of highways in Canada. Leading the charge for sweaty, psychedelia-tinged stoner rock is Regina’s Black Thunder, whose 2016 album III is a frantic blast of road rash rock’n’roll. That said, it might be the two songs on their 2014 EP Coffee And Bronuts that really take the cake for this band, brimming with sardonic stoner culture while delivering on some good, filthy heavy psych. Not to be confused with the Italian crossover band OR the reggae act — hey, it’s a pretty great name! Phrozen It’s safe to say Phrozen are the youngest band on this list — their only demo just came out this February. But the low-fi rage-thrash on the Regina band’s four-song tape sounds so fierce and nasty that it easily earns them their place in our round-up. Tracks like Thunder Claps and Cast Into The Night And Fed To The Hounds channel the cold, crashing tones of classic Bathory, even as the band’s riffs bring the burliness of acts like Exhorder and Power Trip. A promising start for a killer new band.

WORDS: Chris Krovatin and Alex Brown BAND LIST: Ethan Fixell, Chris Krovatin, Cat Jones, Alex Brown, Bradley Zorgdrager