Week of Jul 13 – Jul 19 · 2026
Seven days, 139 tracks, 60 artists, and a single direction: down. The week opens eclectic and psychedelic and narrows, night after night, into black metal and the excavation of where it came from.
The same week as numbers
| Day | Tracks | First play | Last play | Mean heaviness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | 14 | 21:08 | 23:47 | 5.9 |
| Tuesday | 14 | 17:34 | 19:44 | 4.9 |
| Wednesday | 17 | 06:23 | 21:10 | 5.1 |
| Thursday | 30 | 17:55 | 19:47 | 7.4 |
| Friday | 29 | 18:13 | 23:03 | 8.1 |
| Saturday | 7 | 20:30 | 22:54 | 7.6 |
| Sunday | 28 | 19:49 | 22:02 | 7.3 |
The Arc
The week begins wide and ends narrow. Monday is given whole to The Mars Volta, three hours of De-Loused in the Comatorium and its sequel, a submersion in one feverish prog mind. Tuesday drifts through cosmic Pink Floyd and English prog before dropping into retro-doom; Wednesday splits clean down the middle, British acid folk at dawn and the entire Blut Aus Nord album Odinist at night. From Thursday the range closes and does not reopen. The music turns wholly to metal and keeps getting heavier, cresting Friday in ninety minutes of war metal, the heaviest day on the record at a mean of eight, before the weekend settles into black metal and nothing else. Read as a line the week only descends: weight climbs and holds, brightness falls to the floor by midweek and stays there, a man who started the seven days exploring and ended them burrowing.
The Map
Geographically the week starts scattered and pulls, steadily, toward Scandinavia. The early days are English above all, the progressive rock of Pink Floyd, Genesis and Gong and a whole dawn of British acid folk, with the American sprawl of The Mars Volta laid over the top. But as the week hardens the map contracts onto a Swedish spine: Dissection at the centre, Sacramentum and Vinterland and, by proxy, Germany's Thulcandra all built from the same melodic black-metal blueprint, and Bathory underneath all of it as the source. Norway sends its second wave in Immortal and Nekromantheon's blackened thrash; France sends the dissonant avant-garde black metal of Blut Aus Nord. The one scene that refuses a home is war metal, pulled in a single Friday night from New Zealand, Spain and Canada at once, an underground that belongs to no country and sounds like it.
The Subjects
On the surface the week's subject is the occult, and it recurs almost daily: the retro-occult rock of Tuesday, the heathen concept of Blut Aus Nord’s Odinist, the Luciferian scripture of Dissection's Reinkaos, Bathory's raw first-wave Satanism, the occult melodrama Thulcandra wears without a wink. Death runs alongside it, the body and its ruin catalogued across Thursday's death-metal hour. But the deeper preoccupation is not any single theme so much as origins. Again and again the week walks a genre backward to its founders: Thursday's death-metal survey ends on Black Sabbath and the question of whether a soul can be saved, and the whole weekend is an open genealogy, Saturday's lone disciple giving way on Sunday to the masters and finally to Bathory, the dirt the whole thing grew from. It reads less as a week about the devil than a week about where the devil's music was born.
The Turn
The hinge is midweek, the moment the sampling stops. Through Wednesday the man ranges, a scene surveyed here, a mood tried on there, days that swing from folk to black metal inside a single afternoon. Thursday is the last of that restlessness, two dozen death-metal bands taken one track apiece, the busiest and most scattered day of the seven. Then Friday he stops moving: three whole war-metal records end to end, a Saturday handed to a single band, a Sunday spent inside two more full albums. The week turns from breadth to depth, from hearing everything a genre offers to vanishing into single works, and once it turns it never turns back.
Of the 60 artists heard this week, 35 had never appeared on the record before. The longest he stayed with one name: The Mars Volta, 14 tracks unbroken.
Who spanned the week
What followed what
| Hushed | Low | Mid | Heavy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hushed | 2 | 1 | 1 | |
| Low | 1 | 4 | 7 | 7 |
| Mid | 9 | 10 | 7 | |
| Heavy | 5 | 8 | 70 |