HELLRIPPER, the one-man blackened thrash metal project of Scottish musician James McBain, has released his fourth studio album Coronach through Century Media Records. The eight-track, 44-minute record was written, performed, produced, and mixed entirely by McBain at his own Coronach Studios in Scotland.
The album's title refers to a traditional Scottish Highland funeral lament — a "coronach" being a song or cry of mourning. This cultural grounding is reflected throughout the record, which sees McBain incorporating classical instrumentation, bagpipe elements, and chord structures drawn from Scottish folk tradition into his already raw and violent blackened thrash framework.
Previous HELLRIPPER albums — Complete and Total Fucking Mayhem (2018) and The Affair of the Poisons (2020) — established McBain as one of the most exciting one-man operations in extreme metal. Coronach represents a step forward in ambition, binding his love for VENOM, MOTÖRHEAD, and early BATHORY to a distinctly Scottish identity that few acts in the extreme metal world can claim.
Century Media's signing of HELLRIPPER in 2023 brought the project to a significantly wider audience, and Coronach arrives with substantial anticipation. Early reviews praise the album's ability to balance ferocity with atmosphere and cultural specificity.
Physical formats including LP and cassette are available from the Century Media webstore.