AN NCS PREMIERE: BRÜKA — “ENVY THE LIFELESS”

(written by Islander)

Last September the Central Texas black metal band Brüka released their debut album Death’s Promise in cooperation with Khaoszophy Records and Pest Productions. Usually powered by viscerally propulsive rhythms and fronted by scalding vocal ferocity, it provides a twisting and turning experience.

At times the album provides sweeping melodic ice-storms in the vein of Dissection and Emperor, bleak and daunting but expansive, creating keyboard-enhanced soundscapes that engulf listeners, albeit with attention-grabbing bass nuances and vivid drum variations. At other times, the music attacks with barbaric savagery and monstrous death-metal roars, with maniacally boiling fretwork and earth-shaking cannonades.

At still other times, Brüka let the music extravagantly ring (and warp) like hellish and hallucinatory chimes or to become soft, mysterious, and elegantly haunting before exploding in feral and fierce attacks.

And then there’s the song “Envy the Lifeless“, which is the subject of the video we’re premiering today and a vivid sign of just how varied Death’s Promise is.

This well-shot and well-edited black-and-white video captures the blood-rushing intensity of the band’s live performances (they have shared stages with such notable bands as Rotting Christ, Profanatica, Borknagar, and Hate) but it also takes a horrifying turn.

“Envy the Lifeless” is a ripping and raging genre-hybrid, shorn of the icy atmospheres that characterize many of the album’s other songs, but it goes places you may not expect — just like the video does. It whips together d-beat punk, furious black metal, and doomed death metal, fronted by scorching screams that are a combination of napalm and pure fury.

The band waste no time punching the listener’s pulse with jumping d-beats, furious drum-fills, gut-rumbling bass-lines, stop-start bursts of grim and scathing riffage, and blistering vocal tirades. The music also includes eruptions of rapidly writhing tremolo-picked madness — a foretelling of even greater chaos to come.

But things take a very dark turn, just as they do in the video (you think the band are just filling their tanks with alcohol fuel, but those fluids must have been something much, much worse). The music slows, and continues slowing, as if something is expiring. The sensations become oppressive and hopeless; the vocals transform into gritty cavernous roars; the hard-slugging bass begins to sound like the dismal clang of a funeral bell made of lead.

But as forecast earlier, that soul-sucking slowdown gives way to mayhem — drums going off like weaponry, the riffing creating a vicious warzone, the vocals screaming and screeching in blood-spraying display of insanity.

Death’s Promise really is an impressive debut album, and one that flew under too many radars when it came out (including our own). It’s well worth discovering, and to make that easy we’re including a full stream below. Brüka has the last word:

“We are the tenebrous outlaws of American black metal. For the final offering from our debut album Death’s Promise, we make an irrevocable covenant with the beasts whom we serve; ourselves.”

BRÜKA is:
Misery – vocals
Valrøzar – guitars
Oko – bass, keys
Hammerbłast – drums

ORDER:
https://khaoszophy.com/bruka-death-promise-digicd/
https://website.pest666.com/store/p559/Br%C3%BCka_%28US%29_-_Death%27s_Promise.html
https://pestproductions.bandcamp.com/album/deaths-promise
https://bruka.bandcamp.com/album/deaths-promise

BRUKA:
https://linktr.ee/thetrvebruka
https://facebook.com/thetrvebruka