Week of Aug 10 – Aug 16 · 2026
One hundred and sixty-seven tracks across six days and a silence, and no week has gone deeper into death metal: a run of immersions, each day burrowing into one band or one narrow scene, carrying the record from the cosmos and the mosh pit down into the genre's brutal, occult heart and back up into Opeth's melancholy.
The same week as numbers
| Day | Tracks | First play | Last play | Mean heaviness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | 20 | 14:21 | 23:53 | 7.2 |
| Tuesday | 15 | 21:56 | 23:04 | 6.6 |
| Wednesday | 7 | 22:01 | 23:12 | 7.6 |
| Thursday | 55 | 13:36 | 00:29 | 8.5 |
| Friday | 19 | 14:23 | 23:34 | 8.4 |
| Saturday | 51 | 15:32 | 00:40 | 6.7 |
| Sunday | 0 | silence | ||
The Arc
The week is built as a plunge and a slow climb back. It opens split and restless, Monday half in Blood Incantation's cosmic death metal and half in a mosh pit of post-hardcore, Tuesday all melodic punk. Then it goes down into the ground: a spare black metal Wednesday, and on Thursday the heaviest day of the week by some distance, fifty-five tracks touring death metal across its entire lifespan, followed by a Friday given whole to Morbid Angel. Saturday is the climb out, starting in the ugliest dissonant death and rising through doom and prog to the melancholy of Opeth. Then Sunday files silent, and the week simply ends.
The Map
The week's geography narrows to death metal's two capitals. The United States carries most of it: Blood Incantation's cosmic death out of Denver, the brutal canon of Cannibal Corpse and Morbid Angel, and the labyrinthine dissonant-death school on Saturday. Sweden carries the rest, its melodic black-and-death in Dissection, its old Stockholm brutality inside the Thursday tour, and above all its progressive wing, the long Opeth immersion and Dan Swanö's near-solo prog. Around those two poles a lighter scatter: two days of North American melodic punk to open, most of it Canadian, and a single midweek night touring black metal from Norway outward. Two countries, one genre, taken about as deep as it goes.
The Subjects
No week has committed to death metal like this one, and the subject follows the sound: this is a week about death, examined through nearly every dialect metal has for it. The brutal, bodily version fills Thursday and Friday, gore and rot and the body's ruin worked over by the founders and their descendants. The cold, occult version runs through Wednesday's black metal and Friday's Morbid Angel. The melancholy, mortal version closes it on Saturday, Opeth turning death into something mournful and grand. Only the first two days look away, into the living world of punk, its politics and its catharsis, before the week commits to the grave and stays there.
The Turn
The turn is Saturday, and it points upward. After five days that burrow further into death metal, from the cosmic to the brutal to the whole of Morbid Angel, Saturday reverses the motion: it starts in the most abstract, dissonant death the genre has and climbs, hour by hour, through doom and prog into the melancholy grandeur of Opeth, the one day that reaches for beauty. Then Sunday answers with nothing at all, a blank that closes the quietest week the record has filed in a while. As if, having finally climbed out of the pit, it had run out of things to say.
Of the 78 artists heard this week, 30 had never appeared on the record before. The longest he stayed with one name: Morbid Angel, 18 tracks unbroken.
Who spanned the week
What followed what
| Hushed | Low | Mid | Heavy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hushed | ||||
| Low | 1 | |||
| Mid | 37 | 5 | ||
| Heavy | 6 | 112 |