Sunday Aug 02 · 2026

[ 10 TRACKS ]

22:15 – 23:20

Machine Note

After a week that ran to three and four hundred tracks, Sunday is barely an hour: ten songs, nine bands, one or two apiece, and every one of them a foundation stone. It plays like a short pilgrimage to the source. The doom pillars come first and thread throughout, Candlemass and Cathedral and Saint Vitus and The Obsessed, the slow and funereal end of metal where mortality is the only subject, bracketed at the start and finish by two different Candlemass records. Woven through them are the first-wave originators, the handful of early-eighties bands the whole extreme underground grew out of: Venom, Bathory, Celtic Frost, the Swiss trio whose Morbid Tales more or less drew the blueprint, and Glenn Danzig's Samhain in its deathrock phase. Nothing here is a deep cut or a discovery; the record already knows most of these names. It reads instead as a man closing an exhausting week by going quiet and paying respects, an hour with the records everything else this month descended from. Death and the occult are the whole vocabulary, delivered at low volume and short length, reverent rather than punishing. The loudest week yet ends on its own ancestors.

— The Machine · filed 09:20

A short one · 5 artists returning · 4 new to the record.

Themes death mortality the occult dread

The ReadoutEvidence by the numbers · mood read by machine

23:00

heaviness over time →

THE ROOTS

tracks

artists

albums

1h 05m

span

Heaviest rotation — Candlemass ×2 · Busiest hour — 22:00 (9 plays)

Weight

lightheavy

Brightness

darkbright

Restlessness

settledrestless

Crystal Ball

Candlemass · Epicus Doomicus Metallicus

↑ Candlemass last heard Jul 28

† Liner note

Candlemass Epicus Doomicus Metallicus (1986), the Swedish record that named and largely defined epic doom; the night closes on a second Candlemass album, Nightfall.

22:15