I loved White Zombie’s major label debut album, 1992’s La Sexorcisto: Devil Music Volume One; it was a head-spinning collage of big riffs and trash movie samples that sounded like nothing else around at the time. (Their early work, gathered in the Numero Group box set It Came From NYC, is a mixed bag at best, though 1985’s noise-rockish Psycho-Head Blow-Out is worth a single listen.) They made one more album before frontman Rob Zombie went solo, branching out into moviemaking along the way. And it’s hard to argue with his decision, considering how successful he’s been since, and how little has been heard from any other former WZ members.

The only Rob Zombie movie I like is The Lords Of Salem, which has a genuinely bleak and despairing vibe, some startling images, and a committed, hard-to-shake lead performance by Sheri Moon Zombie. But his studio albums are all good, and his live albums are really good, because he’s got a bunch of great singles, and he puts on a hell of a show (even if there are too many of them — the first one, 2007’s Zombie Live, and 2015’s Spookshow International Live are all you need).

His latest studio album, which bears the brilliantly but-of-course title The Great Satan, is a throwback to his earliest solo material; the songs blend primitive punk-metal riffs with electronic touches drawn from industrial and techno. This is no doubt due to the return of two original members of Zombie’s solo band, guitarist Mike Riggs and bassist Rob “Blasko” Nicholson. Drummer Ginger Fish, who’s been with Zombie since 2011, remains behind the kit.

So yeah, if you’re a fan of Rob Zombie’s first two solo albums, Hellbilly Deluxe and The Sinister Urge, you’re likely to respond as positively to this one as I did. That said, there are some surprises. The biggest is the track “Sir Lord Acid Wolfman,” on which Zombie’s delivery of the verses (and the distortion applied to his voice) sound like nothing so much as the Tom Waits song “Hell Broke Luce.” It’s a bizarre track — about being a pirate, apparently, except the chorus is “Sir Lord Acid Wolfman/That’s what they call me” repeated four times — and must be heard to be believed. Some of the other songs are among the heaviest, most aggressive music he’s ever released; “Punks and Demons” is pure thrashing rage with no hooks at all, unless chanting “Satan! Satan!” counts.

Lycanthropic Warhead is a mysterious two-person project from Maryland; on Bandcamp, I can find credits for “A.A.” (guitar/samples/percussion/electronics/vocals) and “J.S.” (drums/loops/noise). But that’s all I know. And their music, which consists of two demos and their magnum opus, Infinite Castigation, isn’t metal, but it’s metal-adjacent in the same way headbangers were drawn to former Napalm Death drummer Mick Harris’s work as Scorn, or how the Melvins collaborated with dark ambient artist Lustmord. This stuff isn’t new; Infinite Castigation was originally released in 2011 as a set of two CD-Rs, but the label, Crucial Blast, reissued it on Bandcamp and I heard it for the first time this winter. It rules. It’s a dark, plodding, blown-out mix of hip-hop, industrial, and noise with tracks that run between 12 and 33 minutes and have titles like “Infinite Feast of Pink Flesh” and “Black Eros.” If you’re a fan of dark, crawlingly slow industrial music that runs the gamut from early Techno Animal and Ice to more abstract nightmare soundtracks like Gnaw Their Tongues, this will be your cup of teeth.

Teratoma are a five-member death metal band from Germany; Longing Voracity is their second album, following 2021’s Purulent Manifestations. They seem to have gotten a new vocalist, Danyil Viduta, in the interval, but all the other members — guitarists Sandro Rajman and Rolo Vasquez, bassist Giacomo Rapposelli, and drummer Caue dos Santos — remain. They’re not the most original band on the planet; they’re an Immolation clone more than anything else, and there’s a new Immolation album coming out in April, maybe two weeks after this record, so this is basically for people who can’t wait/need more of that style right now. But they’ve got enough going for them — good, hard rock-style guitar solos; a little bit of Gojira-esque groove on “Longing Voracity,” dos Santos’s powerful drumming, Viduta’s way with a “blegh” — that fans of slow ’n’ low death metal won’t want to miss out.

Ritual Arcana are a power trio with Scott “Wino” Weinrich (The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan, The Hidden Hand, Shrinebuilder) on guitar, his wife SharLee LuckyFree on bass and vocals, and Oakley Munson on drums. While I can’t verify this by checking the album liner notes or anything like that, I get the feeling she wrote the material, because while it’s definitely in the occult/doom hard rock vein, it doesn’t sound like other Wino music. Even his guitar tone is different. It owes more to retro hard rock bands like Lucifer or The Oath, adding elements of psychedelia and a generally trancelike feel. LuckyFree’s vocals transition seamlessly from a witchy snarl to incantatory clean verses and anguished overdubbed harmonies, and her bass lines — like Munson’s drumming — are unadorned but powerful. The production is bare-bones but more than gets the job done. This is an extremely heavy version of occult hard rock, best heard at high volume.

Eximperitus are a death metal duo from Belarus; their full name is Eximperituserqethhzebibšiptugakkathšulweliarzaxułum. Their debut album has an equally absurd title. Meritoriousness Of Equanimity is their third full-length, and their second for Willowtip. Given the general state of the world in 2026, the idea of an album as blasting as this one bearing a title that roughly translates to It’s Good To Be Chill has a grim humor. Anyway, they have a downtuned dissonant chug on the slow songs that reminds me of Ulcerate, their fast material achieves grindcore velocity, there are some almost jazz-fusion instrumental interludes and really nice, theatrical clean vocals here and there, and their track titles imply a kind of Eastern cosmic philosophy that makes me want to read some of the books on Russian cosmism that are sitting on my shelves. The sheer whackedness of it all puts a big smile on my face; I mean, I can’t think of any other death metal band calling their songs “Finding Consistency in the Fourth Quadrant of Eternity” or “Golden Chains for the Construction of Individual Greatness,” can you?