It took us a little while, but we finally got this one out. The delay was a combination of my moving back to San Francisco and Steppenvvolf's workload as he completed his master's thesis in physics. Congrats, man! Not only is this Maelstrom's biggest issue yet, with 97 album reviews, eight interviews and three live reviews, but it also marks this magazine's first anniversary. Yep, more than a year ago our stalwart, little group put out our first issue, which contained 16 reviews and one interview. Since then we've made huge improvements in our presentation. There is still much more work to be done in this department. Soon we will be updating our old issues by splitting up the content on different pages in order to cut down on load time and make the page more navigable.

Our staff size has nearly tripled since our inception. We'd like to welcome Abhishek Chatterjee from India to the crew. Abhi is going to be handling mostly the gory, grindy side of death metal, which has been a little undercovered until now.

In this issue we are very excited to present to you a chat with Abbath of Immortal. It has always been one of my personal goals to one day interview this band, and now I've done it. Also interviewed is Bolt Thrower, one of my favorite death metal bands; Necrophagist, a cult, one-man German death metal project; Root, the underappreciated but totally essential heavy metal band from the Czech Republic; Lamb of God, an American metal band that is rapidly growing in popularity; Kalmah, a melodic death metal band from Finland; Arch Enemy, the super talented melodic metal band from Sweden featuring the guitar wizard Amott brothers; and Brodequin, a brutal death metal band from the U.S.

Please enjoy issue #8 of Maelstrom. We already have some very cool interviews lined up for next issue, which we hope to get out a little quicker than it took us this time. - Roberto Martinelli (with Flo Mounier of Cryptopsy (l) and Alex Camargo of Krisiun (r)).