The song you’re about to hear, “Invocation of Archaic Deities“, is a stupendous death-doom monstrosity, and it’s also stupendously good — a multifaceted, richly dynamic, electrifying, hook-heavy, and otherworldly piece of musical nightmare.
The track comes from The Chthonic Rituals, the eagerly awaited debut album by the French quartet Atavisma, which follows a debut single in 2014, a four-song demo that same year, a split 7″ with Maur in 2015, and a two-song 7″ last year released by Blood Harvest. The album will be released by Memento Mori on July 23rd.
This new song is the second single from the album. The first of those, “Sacrifice Unto Babalon”, seized our attention early last month, delivering an absolutely riveting death metal firestorm. When the music in that song isn’t raging, roaring, and rocketing skyward with near-overpowering intensity, it emits grievous aromas of disease and decay.
“Invocation of Archaic Deities” is at least equally transfixing. In its changing dynamics, it’s both murderously cold and deliriously savage. Armed with a thick, toxic guitar tone, the band launch the song with dismal, turgid riffing and punishing drum frenzies, following that with head-hammering beats and vivid cymbal snaps, and with long, doomed chord reverberations accompanied by heartless vocal roars. The first half of the song is also marked by a massively head-moving segment of huge, bone-mangling blows combined with rapid, cutting tremolo violence.
A bridge of pulsing bass tones and freakish guitar swirling leads to a cacophonous instrumental feeding frenzy and increasingly unhinged vocal tyranny, which together inject megawatts of electric power into the listener’s brainstem, capped by an incendiary, otherworldly solo. The band return to a neck-snapping rhythm before dropping into a horrific, groaning, plague-spreading crawl-and-lurch, yet at the same time the music soars on the bat-wings of a vibrant but crazed guitar lead.
And that might seem like a lot of spoilers… but trust us, the words don’t really capture the full experience. For that, hit the play button below, and hit it hard.
The album’s evocative cover art was created by E. Muskie; the music was mixed by Johan Bijaoui at Mannaz Records, and mastered by the Javier Felez at Moontower Studios. Memento Mori recommends the album to fans of Incantation, Cianide, Grave, Disma, Winter, Funebre, Encoffination, and classic Convulse. For further release info, check these spaces:
Atavisma:
https://www.facebook.com/atavisma.band
Memento Mori:
http://www.memento-mori.es/