The perfect Halloween album is...

[Mendalla]

Never Ending Night of Terror by Heads for the Dead. HFTD is classic style death metal (mostly, they experiment) and their new studio LP is themed around horror. Each song is introduced by a short audio clip from the trailer for the movie that inspired the song. So "Give Me Life" opens with the 40 year-old horror classic Re-Animator. Dawn of the Dead opens "To The Very Last". And it's solid death metal. Heavy riffs, guttural growls, and, fittingly given the theme, quite brutal (that's a compliment in death metal, by the way).

A couple samples of their work:

Inspired by Stuart Gordon's Re-animator, a loose adaptation of an H. P. Lovecraft riff on Frankenstein about a student obsessed with reanimating the dead

Inspired by City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel) a 1960 film about witchcraft and terror from the past that starred the great Christopher Lee

Anyone got Halloween or Halloween-adjacent favourites to share?

 

[Mendalla]

I would remiss if I did not mention German power metal greats Helloween. After all, their name is a quite explicit reference to the festival. The band is now 41 years old and has to be one of the largest metal band lineups going at the moment. They field 7 musicians, including 3 guitars and 3 vocalists (one of whom is also one of the guitarists). "Dr. Stein" is a classic of theirs inspired by, of course, Frankenstein. Song dates to 1988 but it has been on their set lists pretty much ever since and this performance is from 2017.

 

[Mendalla]

And from 1987, "Halloween". The singer here with the long, lovely locks is actually the same person as the bald guy in the previous video, longtime lead vocalist Michael Kiske, recognized as one of the best male voices in metal.

 

[Luce NDs]

Dead Heads as parts of hoar Cis?

 

[Mendalla]

More Halloween-y death metal. Scorched Tomb is a fairly new band out of Montreal doing some dark, brutal old school death metal. Their demo apparently came out in 2019 but they only just dropped their debut LP titled Ossuary (a container or room for burying the bones of the deceased) on the aptly named Time To Kill Records. While not specifically horror-themed like the one in my opening post, the album goes some pretty dark places.

A couple samples of their wares.