THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

(Andy Synn highlights four album from April which may have flown under your radar)

Look, I don’t have time to talk about everything I/we missed last month, so once you’re done reading about the four bands featured here today I recommend you go check out the latest releases from Felgrave, Supreme Void, Tigerleech, and Zeicrydeus… all of whom I wanted to write about, but couldn’t find time/space for (I could easily have done a second article on them, and maybe even a third for everyone I still haven’t mentioned).

But before then… enjoy this collection of four devastatingly dark and hellishly heavy albums from last month. You might just discover your new favourite!

ATAUDES – TEMPUS EDAX RERUM

It’s been five long years since we last heard from Argentinian antagonists Ataudes, but on the evidence presented here those five years definitely weren’t in vain.

Clocking in at just under forty-five minutes in total, Tempus Edax Rerum is seven tracks (well, six and an intro) of meaty, morbid, moodily “blackened” Death Metal which undeniably pays tribute to the “Old School” originators, without falling into the same trite tricks and tropes of the OSDM revivalist scene, while also adding a hefty helping of ominous, oppressive doom ‘n’ gloom (as well as some eerily proggy technical twists) into the mix.

Significantly darker and danker than its predecessor, the band’s second album shares a fair bit of DNA with similarly grim and grimy groups as Krypts, Teitanblood, and Impetuous Ritual, with songs such as “Abandona Toda Esperanza”, “La Deidad Durmiente” and mid-album highlight “La Desgracia” combining thickly coiled tremolo riffs and scaldingly discordant solos with moments of lurching, off-kilter groove and grinding passages of dissonance-laced, doom-laden weight (albeit not always in that order).

But while all these songs share a core genetic make-up, that doesn’t necessarily make them all the same… indeed, some of them are noticeably more monstrous than others, with the sinister melodic undercurrent present throughout “Lo Que Mora En El Subconsciente” adding a more sinuous and venomous edge to the music, while the aura of vertigo-inducing dissonance perfusing “Ausencia Absoluta De Todo Ser” helps turn it into a nerve-scratching, skin-crawling assault on the senses whose impact lasts far longer than the song itself.

Culminating with the blistering, barely-controlled-chaos of “Maleficios, Conjuros Y Lamentaciones” – whose maddening malevolence more than lives up to its title (transl: “Curses, spells and lamentations”) – this is one record I think you’ll find gets more and more rewarding, due to its ugly, hidden depths, with every listen, so I strongly recommend you get started listening to it sooner rather than later!

FRAGDA – GLORIFICATION OF WITCHERY

It’s become a familiar refrain by this point, I know, but it really is a pleasure to watch bands we’ve covered before grow and evolve and improve as they go on.

Case in point, while I enjoyed Fragda‘s debut album, Damnation Is Inevitable, back in 2022 (here’s the proof) I knew that their extremist brand of “Blackened Deathcore” still had more unfulfilled potential left unmined.

Which is why Glorification of Witchery has proven to be such a delectable delight, as it takes the core elements of their sound – the face-melting ferocity, the bone-breaking low-end density, the claustrophobia-inducing atmospheric weight – and enhanced them, improved them, and injected them with an even heavier (and I do mean heavier) dose of brooding darkness.

As a result tracks like “Limbo” and “Skinwalker” (two of the album’s early highlights) sit closer to the massive, bone-crushing sound of Humanity’s Last Breath and the OTT extremity of pre-Satanist Behemoth, blended with the raw, hate-fuelled rage of The Acacia Strain.

It’s the simultaneous expansion and tightening of the band’s sound – the songs feeling both more cohesive and self-contained while also stretching the group’s ambitions to bigger, more bombastic highs and darker, doomier lows – that really showcases how much this album has stepped up when compared to its predecessor, with the anxiety-inducing melodic undercurrent of “Sthriga” and the haunting, horrifying synths underpinning back-to-back brutalisers “Realm of Chaos and Old Night” and “Phantom Flesh”, helping to lift Fragda to a whole new level.

It’s also worth mentioning the way the vocals have also stepped up their game, plumbing the depths and scraping themselves bloody while also expressing more real, raw emotion (including some well placed and excellently executed clean and choral vocals dripping with malice and menace) than many of the band’s peers who seem more obsessed with showing off their range and technique than connecting with their audience.

Sure, it might be a little too long (sometimes when bands are this heavy less really is more) but it’s definitely one of the most powerful and punishing albums, Deathcore, Death Metal, or otherwise, that I’ve heard this year.

FROZEN WINDS – KEYS TO ESCHATON

I have the vaguest recollection of hearing the debut album from Frozen Winds way back when it was first released… but, to be brutally honest, it didn’t leave much of an impression (in fact, I don’t think any of us here even ended up writing about it).

That’s not to say it was bad by any means (in fact I went back to listen to it again while writing about their new one, and came away with a slightly more positive impression than I remember having at the time… though I still wasn’t entirely blown away) it’s just that even now the strongest impression I get from it is of a band who are capable of so much better.

And, wouldn’t you know it, that turned out to be exactly right, because Keys to Eschaton takes the alchemical formula first established on Necromantic Arts and – with the help of a renewed/refreshed line-up – finally allows it to achieve its full potential.

Whether that’s in the form of titanic, tumultuous tracks such as opener “Theosphorous” and early highlight “Spirit of the Womb” – which meld torrents of seething Black Metal power with moments of soaring, grandiose melody and passages of moody, avant-garde introspection as they shift seamlessly back and forth from pensive to punishing to progressive – or something more purely and unrelentingly pulverising like the riff-driven, Rotting Christ-esque “Io Agia Pantokratora”, it’s obvious (to me at least) that album #2 is an altogether fiercer and more focussed beast than its promising, albeit flawed, predecessor.

That’s not to say that it’s not without its own flaws – the overall length of the record remains an issue, as it does make the whole thing feel a tad unwieldy (though slightly less than on their first album), and there are definitely a few transitional shifts between parts, here and there, which jar a little (which, if memory serves, was my primary issue with their debut) – but chances are that by the time you reach the end of artistically ambitious (but not 100% coherent) closer “From the Caverns” you’re going to want to spin the whole thing all over again, if only to try and properly take in everything the band are going for.

SERPENTES – DESERT PSALMS

While Black Metal has traditionally been associated with icy northern wastelands and bleak, frozen battlefields I’ve always felt it could just as easily channel the spirit of windswept deserts and sun-cracked plains.

And while a few bands have clearly felt the same over the years, the genre still largely remains bound to the misty mountains more than the scalded valleys… but thankfully Portuguese project Serpentes have elected to dedicate their debut album to the scorching horror and searing heat of the arid wilderness and desolate badlands instead, resulting in an album which feels like it takes the bleached bones of the Icelandic scene (not entirely surprisingly, as members of Misþyrming and others helped contribute to the record) and transplants them closer to the equator.

Just as ferocious, but arguably more fiery, as anything the band’s northern cousins have produced, these seven songs blast and burn and blister the listener’s ears in a whirling storm of distortion and dissonance, propelled by gale-force percussive patterns and wrapped in an overarching atmosphere of such unrelenting intensity that it threatens to leave your skin charred and your fingers burnt down to the bone.

That’s not to say, however, that there aren’t moments which deviate from this visceral, venomous assault on the senses, with the piercing melodies of “Psalm III”, the slow-burning doom ‘n’ gloom of “Psalm V” (whose explosive second half hits all the harder due to the way the song has patiently built up the tension to a fever pitch over the preceding minutes), and the strange mix of pensive piano and mesmerising malevolence which makes up closer “Psalm VII”, all adding to the ever-present ambience of the album as it flows over you from track to track.

Not just one of the best debuts of the year, but also one of the best Black Metal albums in general… Desert Psalms is no mirage, it’s very much the real deal, and one well worth getting lost in (just make sure you carry enough water with you when you do).