When it comes to a difficult-to-define concept like psychedelia in music, it's subjective. It’s not all hippies with sitars and lava lamps and bongs…but that’s not wrong either. With a little help from author Michael Hicks and his parameters for what makes music psychedelic, we pose the question: “What is Psychedelic Music?” and offer the Radical R…

Our second in the Permeable Lines series, and our first point-5 episode since 83.5 nearly two years ago! That enough numbers for you? Join us for a brief dust-up between inspiration and rip-off. You decide. (More numbers: “18 is actually 9…it stuck in his mind….”) Note I: The Radical Research Patreon page is now set up and ready for your patronage.…

We celebrate musicians and bands that rapidly evolve and challenge their audience with newness each endeavor. But the abrupt left-turn San Francisco metal band Hexx took between 1986 and 1987 is beyond fascinating, and beyond the norm. It culminates in one of our favorite albums of the early ‘90s, the mighty, seething, adrenaline-injected Morbid Re…

Radical Research can’t stay away from Scandinavia for more than a brief spell. To that end, your hosts find themselves in Sweden, digging through the short but robust initial run by Mourning Sign. Over the course of a demo, an EP, and two full-lengths, Mourning Sign twisted and bent metal into a wide variety of shapes. Neither exclusively brutal, p…

For our 113th episode, we dispense with the usual exhalations of the past in favor of the thrills of the tense present-future. Thief, the Los Angeles-based brainchild of visionary producer, Dylan Neal, has released one of 2024’s most extraordinary albums, Bleed, Memory, a harrowing journey through the late stages of the human mind and spirit. Witho…

For its 112th episode, Radical Research travels to balmy Greece to investigate the cryptic evildoing of Hail Spirit Noir, whose hellbroth of black metal, prog, psychedelia, and witchery strikes a special chord with your hosts. We take a deep look at the band’s first four albums and find ourselves more spellbound than ever before. There is no wardin…

For episode 111, Radical Research returns to its spiritual homeland of Norway. But on this trip, RR steers clear of the usual avant suspects and instead climbs the Mountains of Might to take a closer look at Immortal’s twisted and divisive fourth album, 1997’s Blizzard Beasts. Though optically outside of RR’s usual territory, the hosts make a compe…

We continue our wander through the 4CD Intrigue compilation. This installment features 15 UK bands, several which we’d never heard of before (Art Nouveau, New Musik, Section 25). We hope this episode helps prove curator Steven Wilson’s note that Intrigue operates on the “idea that conceptual thinking and ambition didn’t suddenly evaporate after ’77…

Sigh is unquestionably one of the weirdest bands in the metal realm. And since Radical Research skews weird, and since we are both fans of Sigh since the mid ‘90s, it seemed obvious that we would eventually do an episode featuring some of the very weirdest of Sigh’s weird moments. So…if you are down with our motto of Keep Metal Weird, you know what…

The body of critical study - and fan adoration - around the music of Napalm Death has concerned itself principally with the band's pioneering grindcore and its transition into the death metal of Harmony Corruption. But what of the band's wilderness years, the mid- to late-1990s? The 108th episode of Radical Research digs into what its hosts conside…

For a podcast that traffics in all things wild and mind-expanding, the subject of our 107th episode makes everything else feel stone-cold sober by comparison. The fifth album by Sweden's Tiamat, A Deeper Kind of Slumber, luxuriates in the wan, reclined possibilities of Leary biscuits and Psilocybin dreams. This episode paddles along the hallucinato…

We tend to skew toward the past in our explorations with Radical Research, uncovering sounds we feel are overlooked and/or underrated. We’re breaking our usual time travel approach and focusing solely on some new metal music that thrilled us in 2023 and one very fresh entry for 2024. It’s not 1986 or 1991 anymore, obviously, but 2023 was a great ye…

For Episode 105, Radical Research follows the lead of musical polyglot and overachiever, Steven Wilson. Inspired by Wilson's recently-curated, Intrigue: Progressive Sounds in UK Alternative Music 1979-1989, this episode traces out the music found on the first disc of this four-volume edition, digging into such varied artists as Public Image Ltd., J…

As is so often the case, Radical Research, for its 104th episode, finds itself in Norway, only this time to investigate the psycho-necrotic brutality of Oslo’s Diskord. At once garage-y, asymmetric, and morbid, Diskord hawks death-wares that invite listeners to stroll through the hallways of the weird metal madhouse. Only death and Norway are real.…

Death, humor, society? Who doesn't love these things? Radical Research certainly does! So, it should come as no surprise that we chose the second album by Houston, Texas' Dead Horse as the subject of our 103rd episode. Peaceful Death and Pretty Flowers, released by Big Chief Records in 1991, plunders the remotest corners of thrash, hardcore, and ma…

Forged in the crucible of the Tri-State hardcore and thrash scenes, New York City's Into Another released three genre-defying albums that blend together -- seemlessly -- the disparate sensibilities of its members. The band's membership boasts a heritage that includes such stalwart acts as Whiplash and Youth of Today, though Into Another's rich, mys…

After several years of perdition, silence, and melancholy, Oslo’s Ulver, a totem of the Radical Research faith, released, in 2005, its sixth full-length album, the manic and panicked Blood Inside. The album has inspired divisive opinions and obsessive worship. Its nine songs come together like a house of mirrors, where every lunatic fantasy, every …

2023 marks the 40th anniversary of Voivod, a band that are at the very heart of everything we do at Radical Research and everything we listen to as incorrigible music obsessives. In celebration, Voivod released Morgoth Tales, which finds the Mark V lineup (Snake, Away, Chewy, Rocky) covering songs from various past eras. For ourselves, we pay tribu…

For 98 episodes, the pilots of Radical Research have gone it together. Mind you, the hosts have had some curatorial help along the way (Jason William Walton and Forrest Pitts, please take a bow). But on the eve of episode 100, Radical Research has called on two of its most stalwart allies, the estimable Thomas Nul and Brian Grebenz. Over the course…

Formed in 1998 in the Hertfordshire region of England, The Meads of Asphodel are a special, experimental heavy metal band with many distinctive and beguiling qualities. So why did it take one of the Radical Research hosts 24 years to acquire a taste for the Meads? We don’t have the answer, but in this episode, Jeff runs down all his favorite aspect…

Is heaviness a quantifiable aspect of music? Can a piece of music display such weight, such heft, that the listener can only accept its heaviness as fact? Radical Research says “Yes,” and we are here to offer evidence. For our 97th episode, we take our second trip down under to survey the concise but mighty discography of Disembowelment. We invite …

The Southeastern United States, from whence Radical Research is broadcast, has long prided itself on its sundry wrestling traditions. From the bare-chested hectoring of the SoCon to the gator-tangling of Central Florida, southerners approach wrestling with a sense of birthright authority. But today we face a new challenger: taxonomy. The second ful…

Herein we present the third and likely final installment of our Bad-Ass Fusion Decapitations series. We repeat two bands previously featured on other episodes (Kraan, King Crimson) and bring you eight more missives from the deepest cosmos. Watch that noggin of yours -- the headhunters are abound tonight!Note I: As noted within the episode, here’s t…

Over the course of its previous 93 episodes, Radical Research has banged, thrashed, and decapitated but never before has it waltzed. That ends now. Formed as Aslan in 1985, San Diego's Psychotic Waltz released four full-length albums in the ‘90s, each of which challenges all received notions of "progressive metal." Despite being one the most even-h…

When a member of a fringe Swedish death metal band makes a request, Radical Research heeds the call. To that end, RR episode 93 is a response to Philip Von Segebaden’s (Afflicted) appeal for a song-by-song analysis of Swallowed in Black by California’s preeminent thrash metal assassins, Sadus. Though apparently a bit outside of the RR wheelhouse, o…

Rarely can a rock or metal band be described in terms of open-heartedness, nostalgia, or compassion. But the subject of Radical Research’s 92nd episode defies convention in nearly every way. Madison, Wisconsin’s Last Crack was a band that seemed on the brink of breakout success but, ultimately, condemned to wander the corridors of obscurity. They r…

Occasionally, Radical Research dares to tackle the big questions: what is time, and can we have a piece of it? Can a psychic saw perform brain surgery? Can a metal album have a samba track and several bars of Miami bass hip-grind? On episode 91, a look into the works of Florida’s seminal tech titans, Atheist, we take on these and other pressing mat…

This installment finds Radical Research in familiar territory, in the wilds of Scandinavia, this time in pursuit of progressive rock luminaries, Anekdoten. Our study covers not only the group’s six full-length albums but also their inspired, ghostly collaboration with fellow Swedes, Landberk, under the Morte Macabre moniker. Should you be intereste…

It’s the gutsier, uglier, unwieldier alternative to the heavy metal guitar solo: The goddamn heavy metal BASS guitar solo! We have collected 20 beautifully behemoth examples, laid bare for you to ponder. Sightings are rare, but they’re out there…and we love the hell out of them. Note I: As noted in the intro of this episode, RR favorites Hammers of…

We admit that, in all our geographic music spelunking, we haven’t scaled many of the mountains offered by Russian noisemakers. So, if we say that “Hieronymus Bosch is our favorite Russian band,” it’s true, but it’s also based on a slight bit of ignorance. If we say that “Hieronymus Bosch is our favorite Dutch artist of the late 1400s/early 1500s,” …

When onetime Acid Bath and Agents of Oblivion vocalist Dax Riggs took himself to the outermost reaches of his imagination with Deadboy & the Elephantmen, he reached the highest of creative and emotional heights. After the first Deadboy album (If This Is Hell Then I’m Lucky, self-released, 2002), Dax and band went through a number of changes before …

We know many Radical Research listeners partake in music we’re not totally familiar with. As much weird/left-field/inventive rock/metal as we digest or are aware of, there’s so much more that we have no experience with. Thus, we invited listeners to submit samples of an artist, or multiple artists, they’re certain we have no familiarity with. So it…

Miles away from the torchlight of Norway, Austria’s mysterious Abigor spent their time in the ‘90s not generating headlines but rather plying their heretical craft in virtual secrecy. The band’s album-to-album evolutionary leaps bear the mark of restless and visionary minds. This notion is confirmed by the group’s radical reinvention of itself in t…

Radical Research spends much of its time plundering the most mind-bending sounds in rock and metal. On our 84th episode, we go several light years farther in our quest for psychic devastation as we survey and discuss the improbable body of work amassed by Chicago’s Gigan. As forbidding and violent as the character from which it derives its name, Gi…

Metal is serious business. So why so much laughter? We don’t really have the answer, but here’s the first installment of some of our favorite metal laughs. There are more and we’ll revisit this silly topic at some future point in time. Note I: As promised in the episode, here’s a link to a wealth of laughs by Mr. King Diamond. Praise be to the pers…

The soils of Seattle rock have been tilled to ruin, the same seeds planted season after season. Radical Research has come to rotate the crops. Of the artists to emerge from the primordial welter of 1980s Seattle, few have been neglected so criminally as Skin Yard. The band's membership forms a constellation the likes of which can hardly be rivaled …

In anticipation of Destination Onward – The Story of Fates Warning and its publication in July, 2022, the author, Jeff Wagner, and Radical Research co-host, Hunter Ginn, sit down and talk about Fates Warning. It’s far from the first time we’ve discussed Fates Warning together, but it’s the first time we’ve gone into an episode of Radical Research w…

How California-based drummer, Dave Murray, has escaped the notice of several more tens of thousands of people worldwide, we cannot say. We recognize an extraordinary talent in Murray, not only as a musician, but as a composer and crucial cog in a small but rarefied selection of projects. In our 81st episode, we try our best to give Murray his due. …

For our 80th episode, Radical Research detaches itself from the icy grips of Norway and takes a sojourn southward to France, a country whose history with death metal gives priority to quality over quantity. From 1990-1994, the chronically-underrated Supuration were busy at work creating their own, private death metal universe, in which brutal churn…

For the final installment of our 6-episode Norwegian tour across this most creatively-fertile country, Radical Research surveys the career of Simen Hestnaes. Working both under his given name, as well as his better-known nom de l'acier, ICS Vortex, Simen has assembled a large and exceptional body of work that stakes claim in the metallic regions of…

We love Enslaved. They are a rare long-running band that, in our estimation, have not released a bad album. Of their 15 full-lengths to date, your Radical Research hosts highly rank their sixth album, 2001’s Monumension: it’s Ginn’s #2 (just behind Eld, 1997) and Wagner’s #1 (in front of Isa, 2004). Curiously, it was perhaps the most lambasted, mis…

To date, Radical Research has made more trips to Norway than any other country. But, typically, we spend our time in the shadowy realms of post-black metal. For our 77th episode, we travel to the green pastures of Honefoss, in search of Wobbler, Norway’s preeminent progressive rock export. Having made five albums since forming in 1999, which at onc…

We know and love him as Garm, the frontman in Ulver since that pioneering band’s very beginnings. He has also fronted Norwegian luminaries Arcturus and Borknagar. All this alone would be enough to place him in our hall of infamy, yet he has given so much more. Through a variety of cameos and side projects, Garm, or Kristoffer Rygg, or Trickster G, …

At the dawn of the 21st century, strange sounds brewed in the Southeastern corner of Norway -- musical paths cobbled together with the tortured echoes of second wave black metal, the ambitious, borderless miscellanea of progressive rock and metal, and the hostile liberalism that is indigenous to Norway’s pioneer enclave. Operating outside the radar…

In our 39th episode, we explored the family tree of Kristiansand, Norway collective In the Woods... Here, in our 74th episode, we go straight to the source to explore and exalt the work of In the Woods…, proper, between 1993 and 2000. Over the span of three full-length albums and a series of 7" singles, In the Woods... set about documenting the buc…

12 ripping snippets from 11 fusion ragers spanning 1972 to 1982. We did the first one in 2018, episode 5, and it was high time we returned to the madness! We herewith present a variety of displays from various American, Danish, German, Japanese and Spanish artists. Rip it apart!!! Note I:Here’s the first installment of this occasional series: http:…

Formed in the Czech Republic in 1987, Master’s Hammer summoned a singular, constantly mutating approach to black metal over two distinct lifetimes (1987-1995, 2009-2020). The band’s debut album, Ritual (1991), is described by Darkthrone’s Fenriz as “the first Norwegian black metal album, because it sounded incredibly Norwegian to many of us.” We ce…

Paul Chain’s Illogical Slow Evolution Radical Research interrogates, with few exceptions, the work of artists who operate in the darkest, most cryptic corners of the rock and metal multiverse. The music of Italy's Paul Chain, however, puts to test the inquiry even of the most rigorous and probing minds. For our 71st episode, we engage in a mystery …

Extant since the mid 1990s, Solefald may have been the first Norwegian black metal band to entirely bypass the necro stages of development and arrive fully formed as a "post"/"avant" type mischief-maker on their debut album, The Linear Scaffold (1997). We have watched and listened from our perches as Cornelius Jakhelln and Lazare Nedland have evolv…

Often overlooked relative to Gothenburg luminaries such as At the Gates, In Flames, and Dark Tranquility, Eucharist, whose entire legacy hinges upon two full-length albums and a clutch of compilation tracks, recorded some of the most vibrant, imaginative melodic death metal of the era. It’s that second album that we zoom in on with episode 69 of Ra…