With fiendish pleasure we present a full stream of Novus Lux Dominus, the debut album by the Spanish band Orthodoxy, whose line-up includes members of Domains, Profundis Tenebrarum, and Whoredom. It’s a successor to the band’s 2015 demo, Shaarimoth, which we praised here., and is due for release on October 31st — to make your Halloween even more horrifying.
After the haunting atmosphere of “Evocative Darkness”, created by eerily gleaming guitar reverberations, Orthodoxy unleash “Key To Victory”, in which absolutely vicious low-tuned riffing creates a maniacal gouging and gnawing sensation while thunderous double-bass onslaughts rumble and blast, and ghastly roaring and near-gagging growls and snarls enhance the music’s aura of unchained cruelty.
All is not the mayhem of rampant savagery, however. The band make time to stomp and crush, and unspool poisonous melodies in tendrils of slithering and wailing sound. After they punch the accelerator again, a crazed guitar solo propels the music to a new zenith of paranormal violence.
The band regularly reprise the near-overpowering ferocity and firepower of “Key to Victory” throughout the album, with “Flame of Primordial Essence” and “Voluptuous Death” (the longest and most spectacularly dynamic track on the album) being prime examples, but hardly the only ones.
Yet these murderous, mauling, and bone-grinding attacks are always laced with otherworldly, moaning, groaning, and braying melodies that are variously perilous, plague-like, and putrid, or they are infiltrated by the spine-tingling sounds of feverish madness.
As the album proceeds, the band also repeatedly segue into gruesome lurching stomps, which almost always herald the arrival of guitar solos that sound sorcerous… and flat-out insane. The slow-motion opening sequence of “Novus Lux Dominus” is a particularly striking example of musical manifestations of sickening disease and decay interwoven with brutal pounding, and when the band ease back on the throttle in “Abyss of Aberration”, the impact of the decelerated, pile-driving momentum is spine-fracturing.
The album as an entire experience is persistently and monstrously preternatural, regardless of whether Orthodoxy are rampaging at speed or staggering like humongous golems. For music that is so punishing and such a pulse-pounding kick to hear, it also succeeds in powerfully creating an atmosphere that’s supernatural and sadistically sinister (the two interlude tracks, “Eerie Presence” and “Acausal Emanation” help ensure that).
By the time the end arrives, when bells toll and phantasms shriek in the midst of the massive and methodical slugger that is “Residues of an Obsolete Trance”, you may be left wondering whether you’ve been spirited away to ghastly nether realms where dwell the monstrosities that will be visiting us on All Hallows’ Eve.
Novus Lux Dominus will be released on October 31st, on CD, vinyl LP, and cassette tape, by The Sinister Flame (Finland). It will be distributed by Dark Descent Records in North America.
PRE-ORDER:
https://www.thesinisterflame.com/shop/
https://orthodoxy.bandcamp.com/album/novus-lux-dominus