Let’s get to the bad news first: Prolific Canadian metal YouTuber Nik Nocturnal has announced he’s going on a hiatus and pausing all content creation for the immediate future. But as a parting gift, he’s also just dropped an early Aughts-style metalcore EP featuring guest vocals from All That Remains’ Phil Labonte, Darkest Hour’s John Henry and more.
Nocturnal revealed all of this today (May 21st) on his YouTube Channel, as well as on Instagram. He explained that, a decade into his YouTube career, he’s stepping away from guitar breakdowns and incredulous reaction vids to focus on himself.
“I’ve been doing content for 11 years now. And the reason I started making content all the way back then was because I wanted to share music with people. I wanted to share metal, talk about it. I didn’t really have that growing up,” he said in his YouTube video, as transcribed by Loudwire, discussing the way his channel helped develop a sense of community. Uploading content and connecting with others, he added, had been “an insane journey and it has been the most incredible thing I have been a part of in my entire life.”
That said, he also confessed that content grinding and chasing the almighty algorithm has also had negative effects on how he’s viewed and interacted with the world over the past decade.
“I have a very unhealthy relationship with content where I will go through shit and instead of necessarily dealing with in in that moment, two hours later I’m like, ‘All right, someone that’s close to me passed away. I guess let’s go do the stream or get the YouTube video finished.’ I have the most blessed job in the world and I’ll never take that for granted, but I’ve never taken that proper time to just absorb things like that — like a normal human basically would.”
He added on IG that his indefinite break from uploading resets his priorities, and this will let him “refocus on some important real-life stuff and figure out what’s next for me.”
Nocturnal thanked folks that stuck with him over the years, and then revealed that he was a “parting gift” for us all: a five-song EP titled The Lost Chapters that taps into the spirite of early 2000s metalcore (albeit with “some modern spice”).
Accordingly, Nocturnal tapped a murderer’s row of era-appropriate vocalists to help him see the project through: All That Remains’ Phil Labonte, Darkest Hour’s John Henry, Caliban’s Andreas Doerner, Bury Tomorrow’s Daniel Winter-Bates and the Ghost Inside’s Jonathan Vigil.
You can sample Nocturnal and Co.’s anthemic, throwback chug-a-thon up above, while his farewell video and Instagram post are down below.