September 10, 2025 | Written By Lucien Drake
You know the thrill of crate-digging, the smell of old cardboard album sleeves. Sometimes you find a gem out in the open, leaning against the rack under a “Used Vinyl” sign. But the real treasures? They’re never that easy.
Picture this: a mom-and-pop shop, barely hanging on, fluorescent bulbs flickering overhead. The owner sees the hunger in your eyes and motions you past the counter, through a tattered curtain that looks like it hasn’t been touched since the ’70s. Back there, the air is heavier with dust, mildew, and time itself. Stacks of forgotten boxes sit shoved behind broken furniture, cobwebs clinging to the corners. You pry one open, and suddenly you’re staring at history, records no one’s spun in years. Old demos whispered about but never truly heard.
That’s what Deep Cuts: Metal’s Hidden Gems is about. Not the obvious albums in the front bins. We’re going into the back room, pulling back the curtain, and digging into the forgotten corners of metal’s past. These are the riffs that smell of dust and devotion, the songs that shaped everything but slipped through the cracks.
Deep Cuts: Green Carnation: My Dark Reflections of Life and Death – Journey to the End of the Night (2000)
The Forgotten Epic
Every band has that one song that quietly defines them, and for Green Carnation it’s My Dark Reflections of Life and Death. It never had the shine of a single, nor the bombast of their infamous one-hour opus Light of Day, Day of Darkness. Instead, it lingered in the shadows long, sprawling and almost unapproachable if you didn’t have the patience. And yet… it’s the track that tells you everything about who this band really is.
Why It Matters
I’ll be blunt, I’ve lost hours of my life to this song, and I’d gladly lose more. It’s haunting, awkward, and painfully human, sometimes even too much so. When they re-recorded it for Leaves of Yesteryear in 2020, it wasn’t some nostalgic filler. It was a reminder that Green Carnation had unfinished business, a melody still whispering in the corners of their career.
The Prophecy
And now, with A Dark Poem arriving as a full trilogy, this deep cut feels like prophecy. You can hear the seeds of their grand ambitions buried right there in its bones. If you want to understand how Green Carnation are still relevant and why fans like me believe in them, in addition to the obvious tracks go sit in the dark with this one. You’ll get it.
Green Carnation release first part of album trilogy. A Dark Poem, Part I: The Shores of Melancholia via Season of Mist.
And don’t miss our full Green Carnation A Dark Poem Part 1 album review.
Deep Cuts: Danheim: Skapanir – Title Track (2020)
The Sound-World
Danheim is the sound-world of Copenhagen’s Reidar Schæfer Olsen, a one-man conjurer of Nordic folk that feels less like music and more like time travel.
Most people stumbled across him through Vikings-era streaming juggernauts like Berserkir or Ivar’s Revenge. Songs that turned his pounding ritual drums into a billion stream soundtrack for binge-watchers.But peel back the layers of his catalog and you find pieces that aren’t meant to storm the gates of Valhalla.
Why It’s Overlooked
Our Deep Cuts pick, Skapanir, whispers instead of roars. It’s a shadowed ritual poem, a hypnotic drone of drum and chant that feels like stumbling into a firelit circle far from the battlefield. Less battle anthem, more bardic invocation.
Why It Matters
What makes Skapanir so special isn’t just its atmosphere, it’s its place in Danheim’s arc. Released before the world put his name on Viking playlists, this track sits overlooked in the backwaters of his discography. It’s a track with numbers, but still a ghost in the bigger conversation. It doesn’t chase glory, it carves out mood. It proves that Danheim wasn’t built for algorithms, he was born to channel something older, deeper, and far more haunting.
It’s elevated enough to feel profound, but buried beneath his bigger singles. That makes this track perfect for spotlighting what Metal Lair does best finding the mystical corners of the genre.
Danheim released new single, the title track for their new album Heimferd via Season of Mist. Pre- order and save.
Deep Cuts: Akercocke: Words That Go Unspoken, Deeds That Go Undone – Title Track (2005)
The Dangerous Blend
Some bands are built to shock for a season. Akercocke? They are built to seduce the devil and then out-preach the priests about it. London’s finest purveyors of blackened death metal under the label of Peaceville Records don’t just play riffs, they strut on stage in sharp suits, like Beelzebub’s own board of directors, and preach philosophy with the same conviction most bands reserve for blast beats.
Words That Go Unspoken, Deeds That Go Undone is their most dangerous album, not because it’s extreme, but because it’s irresistible. The riffs crawl under your skin, the clean vocals drip with sacrilegious charm, and the prog flourishes remind you that these men aren’t cavemen with corpse paint, they are artists, articulate and feral at the same time. It’s the kind of record that makes you sweat a little, like you’ve just been caught doing something you shouldn’t… and wanting more.
Why It’s a Deep Cut
Why is it a Deep Cut? Because while Behemoth and Dimmu Borgir held the spotlight in 2005, Akercocke were doing something riskier and sexier. They were marrying brutality with seduction, intellect with filth. It’s a record that refuses to pick a side. It’s philosophy in a suit, it’s lust on a pulpit, it’s heavy metal made to make you squirm.
If you’ve never let Akercocke in, this is your invitation. Light a candle, pour something dark, and let this album unbutton your defenses track by track. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when you fall in love with the devil in a tie.
Deep Cuts: Amorphis: Disment of Soul – Demo (1991)
The Origins
Before Tales from the Thousand Lakes turned Finland into holy ground for melodic death metal, Amorphis were just kids with riffs, hunger, and a demo cassette called Disment of Soul. Released in January 1991, this wasn’t a polished debut, it was Xeroxed, hand traded, and destined only for those deep in the tape-trading trenches.
The Raw Sound
The music? Primitive, jagged death-doom. Cavernous growls, riffs that grind like frozen gears, and atmosphere so raw it feels like it could crackle out of a blown-out speaker. It’s Amorphis not yet as storytellers, but as prophets screaming into the void, trying to carve out a space in an unforgiving scene.
Even the artwork tells the story. A grotesque black-and-white sketch, photocopied within an inch of its life, showing a figure being torn apart by its own guts, ugly, visceral, and perfect. It mirrors the demo itself: crude, uncomfortable, but unforgettable once it’s under your skin.
The Relic
Yes, you can find it on YouTube now, tucked away in collector uploads. But that doesn’t make it any less of a hidden gem. Disment of Soul is the kind of relic most fans never bother chasing, which is exactly why it belongs here.
You can hear Disment of Soul via a fan-upload on YouTube. (uploaded by ScumInfested) The full demo is available here Since this 1991 demo was never given an official digital release, this fan preservation is the only way most listeners can experience it today. For historical details on the original cassette, see the entries on Metal Archives or Discogs.
Amorphis is releasing their 15th studio album Borderland Arriving on September 26, 2025 via Reigning Phoenix Music now available for pre-order.
And if you want to hear how the story keeps unfolding, Amorphis are back in the spotlight this week in Seven Deadly Songs with “Dancing Shadow” from their upcoming album Borderland.
Deep Cuts: Paradise Lost: Frozen Illusion – Demo (1989)
The Birth Chamber of Doom-Death
Before Paradise Lost carved their name into the cathedral walls of doom with Gothic and Icon, they were kids in Halifax, churning riffs into a four-track recorder and spitting them back out onto cassette tape. That cassette? Frozen Illusion, a title that sounds almost poetic until you hit play and realize you’re about to be dragged face-first across the stone floor of doom-death’s birth chamber.
This demo isn’t clean, it isn’t polished, and it sure as hell isn’t forgiving. It’s murky, thick, suffocating with riffs like frostbitten knuckles, vocals like dirt in your lungs. And yet, you can feel what’s coming. Buried under the hiss and tape grime is the DNA of every cathedral-sized lament they’d one day unleash.
Why It Matters
Why is it Deep Cuts gold? Because most fans of Paradise Lost only know the gothic grandeur, the polished sorrow of later years. They forget or never even knew that it all started here, with a tape passed hand-to-hand in 1989. Frozen Illusion is the sound of a band clawing its way out of the underground, not yet kings but already hungry for a throne.
This isn’t just a demo. It’s a relic. A frozen shard of history that proves doom-death didn’t just appear one day fully formed, it was built in basements, forged in hiss, traded in whispers.
So light no candles for this one. Let it play in the dark, the way it was meant to be heard: as a secret.
New album by Paradise Lost, ‘Ascension‘ out on September 19th via Nuclear Blast Records. Pre-order and save.
Deep Cuts: Tiamat: A Winter Shadow – Demo (1990)
The Early Years
Tiamat back then weren’t mystical or gothic yet they were kids in Stockholm slinging riffs that reeked of damp rehearsal rooms and cheap beer. A Winter Shadow wasn’t some polished statement; it was a cassette that sounded like frostbite. That track? You’ll never find it on an album, never hear it with studio gloss. It’s a ghost locked in magnetic tape, passed hand-to-hand in the underground, whispered about more than heard.
Why It’s a Gem
That’s why it’s a hidden gem. It’s not the band people think of when they hear Wildhoney or Clouds. It’s the Tiamat before the transformation, before they shed their death metal skin. That song is a relic. A secret. The kind of thing you’d only know if you were one of the few people who are the type who dig deep enough to unearth it.
Deep Cuts: Abhorrence: Vulgar Necrolatry – Demo (1990)
Roots of Amorphis
This is a true underground Finnish death metal relic. Here’s the deeper cut: Tomi Koivusaari’s Roots: Before he was a founding member of Amorphis, Tomi fronted Abhorrence on vocals and guitar. This demo shows him before the shift into melodic, progressive territory back when it was all caveman riffs, cavernous growls, and rotten atmosphere.
The Lost Bridge
Why It’s a “Lost Bridge”: You can hear the DNA of early Amorphis in this tape, the slower, doom-laden passages, the sense of weight and atmosphere. But it’s still firmly rooted in primitive death metal. It’s like peeking into the cocoon before the butterfly crawls out. Cult Status: Only a handful of copies circulated in 1990.
Cult Relic
The band broke up shortly after, leaving Vulgar Necrolatry as their entire legacy. Amorphis later re-recorded the track for The Karelian Isthmus, but this demo version is nastier, murkier, more feral — the kind of thing tape traders whispered about for decades.
Reissues and Legacy
Finally reissued in the 2010s on the Completely Vulgar compilation, Vulgar Necrolatry now stands as a cult relic: the missing link between Finland’s festering underground and the internationally acclaimed Amorphis sound that came later.
Deep Cuts: Slaughter Lord: Taste of Blood (1986 demo)
Australia’s Buried Underground
Slaughter Lord were ghosts from the other side of the world. The kind of band you only knew about if you had a pen pal in Sydney or a buddy shipping you tapes wrapped in newspaper. Australia’s scene in the mid-80s wasn’t just underground, it was buried alive. And out of that dirt crawled Slaughter Lord, coughing up one demo that sounded like it was recorded inside a rusted slaughterhouse freezer.
The Sound
Taste of Blood (1986) is pure chaos. Not polished, not clean, just raw thrash/death with jagged riffs that cut like early Kreator or Possessed, but nastier, uglier, and more desperate. You don’t put this demo on for comfort, you put it on to feel the walls close in, to taste iron in your teeth.
Why It Belongs Here
They didn’t last long. No albums, no big tours. Just one demo and then gone. Members scattering into the abyss, some landing in Sadistik Exekution, the Australian cult band so feral they made most “extreme” acts look like Sunday school. That connection alone turned Taste of Blood into a relic, the kind of cassette collectors guarded like holy scripture.
Yeah, it’s been reissued since, cleaned up for people who want a slice of history. But the real thing, the battered tape passed around like contraband in the 80s, that was proof you weren’t just a fan. You were inside. You were breathing the same foul air as the maniacs shaping the future.
Slaughter Lord never reached the spotlight. They were a flash, a cut, a wound in the earth and that’s why Taste of Blood belongs here in Deep Cuts.
(Collector’s Note: This upload comes via Dave Rotten — founder of Avulsed and Xtreem Music, one of the underground’s most respected archivist labels. With roots in the tape-trading era and a history of reissuing rare demos, his uploads are widely considered reliable sources for classics that would otherwise be lost to time.)
Deep Cuts: Necrovore: Divus de Mortuus (1987 demo)
Texas, 1987
Texas, 1987. The churches were fat with fire-and-brimstone sermons, but somewhere in San Antonio four kids were dragging riffs straight from the abyss. While the rest of the world was busy arguing whether Metallica had sold out or not, Necrovore were carving their names into the tombstone of metal with a single demo: Divus de Mortuus.
The Sound
Forget polish. Forget melody. This was bile on tape, raw black/death filth that made Slayer sound like choir practice. The guitars sounded like barbed wire dragged across bone, the drums like hammers pounding nails into a coffin lid, and the vocals? Pure Satanic rot, as if the mic itself was possessed.
Why It Belongs Here
They never made it past this demo. No albums, no glossy reissues in the spotlight years. Just one release, passed from sweaty hand to sweaty hand, copied and recopied until the hiss of the tape was as much a part of the music as the riffs. But in that one flash of existence, Necrovore nailed down a template that other bands would spend decades trying to mimic.
If Possessed gave us the shape of death metal and Mayhem iced over black metal in Norway, Necrovore were the bridge—a Southern American gateway straight to hell, years before most people even knew the path existed. That’s why collectors treat Divus de Mortuus like a sacred wound: it’s not just a demo, it’s a prophecy whispered through blown-out speakers.
Necrovore never got their due. Maybe that’s fitting. Some demons aren’t meant for stages or fame. Some are only meant to be found in the darkest corners of the crate exactly where Divus de Mortuus still waits.
(Collector’s Note: Divus de Mortuus was originally circulated as a raw demo tape in 1987. Over the years it has been preserved through fan trading and unofficial copies, but the most recognized official reissue came via Xtreem Music. Today, most listeners encounter the demo through archival uploads that keep the original spirit, tape hiss and all fully intact.)
Deep Cuts: Sarcófago: Christ’s Death (1987 demo)
Brazil, 1987
Brazil, 1987. The air stank of dictatorship’s aftermath, poverty, and sweat, but in the underground, something even filthier was being born. Sarcófago weren’t just playing metal, they were desecrating every sacred symbol they could get their hands on. If Venom and Bathory hinted at blasphemy, Sarcófago lit it on fire and danced in the ashes.
The Sound
Christ’s Death isn’t a demo you play for pleasure. It’s ugly, chaotic, almost unlistenable by mainstream standards and that’s exactly the point. The riffs sound like barbed wire being chewed, the drums a drunken avalanche, and Wagner Antichrist’s vocals? Pure contempt, spit-drenched and venomous. It wasn’t performance, it was war on good taste, war on religion, war on restraint.
Why It Belongs Here
What makes this tape legendary is context. In Norway, black metal kids would make headlines years later for church burnings. Sarcófago were already there in 1987 corpse paint caked on their faces, bullet belts strapped to their waists, blasting music that made conservative Brazil clutch its rosary harder. They weren’t imitating anyone. They were inventing the aesthetic by sheer force of hatred and chaos.
This video preserves the complete Christ’s Death demo from the original cassette but with polish to make it listenable. The raw 1987 tape-trading energy is intact, echoing how underground fans first discovered Sarcófago’s ferocity.
Closing Deep Cuts here feels right. Because this is the essence of Deep Cuts: Metal’s Hidden Gems, not polished albums, not safe classics, but the dangerous relics buried deep in the crate. Christ’s Death wasn’t meant for the spotlight, it was meant to decay in shadows, waiting for maniacs like us to dig it back up.
(Collector’s Note: The original Christ’s Death demo circulated only on tape in 1987, usually with xeroxed inserts in various versions. The image shown here reflects that DIY tape-trading era. Today, Sarcófago’s legacy lives on through official reissues and merch via Osmose Productions, while collectors continue to preserve the raw demo through uploads and archives.)
Closing the Crate
From Norway to Brazil, Texas to Sydney, these demos and forgotten tracks remind us that metal’s heart doesn’t just beat in polished albums, it throbs in hiss, dust, and raw tape traded hand-to-hand. They’re not museum pieces; they’re living scars, proof that the underground has always been as vital as the spotlight.
Deep Cuts exists to drag these ghosts into the light again, to remind us that history isn’t just written by the bands who made it big. it’s carried by the maniacs who never quit digging.
That’s this week’s edition of Deep Cuts: Metal’s Hidden Gems, a series devoted to unearthing underground metal demos and rare metal tracks that shaped heavy music.
If you want more discovery, dive into our latest Seven Deadly Songs for the week’s freshest riffs, or head over to our album reviews for deep dives into today’s releases. And don’t miss our promo spotlights where we track the bands breaking out right now.
Because metal doesn’t just live in the past or present, it howls through both.
FAQ – Deep Cuts: Metals Hidden Gems
Q: What is Metal Lair’s Deep Cuts: Metal’s Hidden Gems series?
A: It’s a weekly feature uncovering forgotten demos, overlooked tracks, and underground metal relics. We highlight songs and bands that shaped heavy music but slipped through the cracks.
Q: Which bands are featured in this week’s Deep Cuts?
A: This edition includes Green Carnation, Danheim, Akercocke, Amorphis, Paradise Lost, Tiamat, Abhorrence, Slaughter Lord, Necrovore, and Sarcófago.
Q: Why focus on demos and obscure tracks instead of albums?
A: Demos and deep cuts often capture raw energy and pivotal moments in a band’s evolution. They offer insight into how metal scenes grew outside the mainstream spotlight.
Q: Where can I listen to these hidden gems?
A: Many of the featured tracks are preserved on YouTube, Discogs, Metal Archives, or official reissues through labels like Season of Mist, Osmose Productions, and Xtreem Music.
About The Author
Lucien Drake is the voice behind Deep Cuts: Metal’s Hidden Gems at Metal Lair digging up the rare riffs, lost demos, and overlooked tracks that prove the underground always runs deeper.
