Radical Research Podcast

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…ambitious, weird and thrilling music was all arou...

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 to do. Note I: The Radical Research Patreon page...

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 consider to be Napalm Death's most radical mus...

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 hallucinatory waters of Tiamat's final masterpiece and resolv...

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 year for new music, metal and otherwise. Herein, we...

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., John Foxx, In Camera, and This Heat. This constitu...

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. Note I: Thanks to Tim Hammond for the Oscillation...

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 mangled death as fodder for its singular brand of k...

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, mystical rock hardly betrays those roots. E...

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 fear, every shameful ecstasy, is reflected and re...

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 tribute by offering our longest and most in-depth episo...

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 of almost two hours, this veritable Roman Senate...

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 aspects of Meads while Hunter listens, corroborates and...

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 you to join us as we dig into the cryptic horrors...

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 full-length album by Germany’s Disillusion, the forbi...

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 that link to “Study the Greats”: https://www.youtu...

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-handed of metal bands -- not a weak link in the psy...

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, our dissection will reveal traces of the weirdness...

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 recorded their second album at Eldorado Studios in...

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 matters. Pull up a chair and strap on your trustiest...

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 interested in the evolution of one of modern prog’s most se...

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 Misfortune have a new album out! Info on Overtake...

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,” we can rest easy knowing that will probably hold f...

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 arriving at the more stripped down and, in o...

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 is that Mr. Forrest Pitts -- writer, thinker, dre...