DAWN OF ASHES: “INFECTING THE SCARS”

(DGR finally surrendered to his impulses and wrote the following review of an album released in June by Metropolis Records, the newest nightmare from L.A.-based Dawn of Ashes.)

Many, many moons ago when the planet was young and the amino acids that would eventually become the building blocks of life were still bubbling within the primordial soup – such as, last year – in a fit of inspired pique and otherwise wholesale madness just to torpedo any crumb of legitimacy that might be granted to the name tag of yours truly, I reviewed Gothminister‘s eighth studio album Pandemonium II: The Battle of the Underworlds.

The costume-wearing kitsch and otherwise designed to be blatantly infectious goth-rock and metal rhythms charmed me, fully aware that a band this late in their career had mostly evolved into spectacle rather than musical artform. At the time they were a group I had a surprising amount of history with, having followed them since 2004’s Gothic Electronic Anthems, and the idea of having them drift through the hallowed halls of this site was – at the time – far too amusing to pass up.

I have also never heard the end of it to this day, and to hear it told, have also opened the gates to some of the more wild premieres we’ve hosted in the year since with the reasoning being that we had already covered a Gothminister album so why the hell not?

The idea behind covering the aggro-heavy industrial leanings of an electronic group like Dawn Of Ashes comes from a similar place of inspiration; the band contain both their fair share of adjacencies to the world of underground heavy metal as well as a taste for the corpse-painted makeup and death-obsession that are entry-level uniforms for our tastes at this point. Such theatrics are not exclusive to those prone to getting lost in decrepit medievil castles and frozen labyrinthian forests.

Dawn Of Ashes are also a project that I’ve had a surprising amount of history with, despite rarely uttering their name in our corner of the internet, having hovered on the periphery of their career since the days of the 2007 release The Crypt Injection and having watched their career as the artistic pursuits of project mainman Kristof Bathory took them through terrifying electronics to legitimate symphonic black metal – replete with guitarists and the various collectives that a full band requires – to industrial death, to an unholy amalgamation of the previously listed influences, and finally having gone full circle around again back to where the group are now with 2025’s Infecting The Scars.

Interestingly, though it is tempting to paint Infecting The Scars as a release that has somehow reached through time and clawed Dawn Of Ashes back to the early-2000s, the group’s long-running career hasn’t been completely shorn off. Instead, Infecting The Scars is a release that, yes, may be traveling backwards through time to pick up a baton that the Dawn Of Ashes crew haven’t carried since the mid-aughts, but it is doing so with a whole lot more experience in the darker and traditionally heavy realms to create something purposefully violent and just as intense as the group’s early output.

We can’t take too many steps without getting a little reductionist though, as the sort of pulse-pounding beats and blood-pumping rhythms of the music Dawn Of Ashes are currently trafficking in may be something of a foreign entity. We’d like to think not as much around here, given the proclivities of some of our finest towards industrialized genres and varying electronics turned into torture machines, but if you haven’t slavishly followed every word posted here, you just need to be aware that Infecting The Scars is not a metal album in the traditional sense.

On their newest release, Dawn Of Ashes return to a well-known form for them, an aggrotech, industrialized, and harsh hybrid that would otherwise be some of the scariest goddamned electronic dance music out there were that its initial purpose. It’s not really; Dawn Of Ashes may be producing earworm-loops and melodies that could carve their way into someone’s grey matter with the precision of a hacksaw but the group themselves are meant to – in a massive caricature sense sometimes – conventionally terrorize a person. The album hovers somewhere amidst the scariest haunted house music and abandoned factory raves. You could almost argue for it being in a horror movie… or six.

But, this is also music where you could understand why Dawn Of Ashes deviated so hard from their initial path and became a full-blown symphonic death metal group, because in listening to the group’s earlier material The Crypt Injection, et al, you can hear how someone might easily transpose the many keyboards, laptops, electronic drumkits, and vocals distorted to a level of abject inhumanity onto metal’s more traditional guitars, bass, and drums combo. Likewise, in the other direction as well, because about half of Infecting The Scars – when it isn’t at its most club assassinating – could travel back through the wormhole and emerge on the other side as a metal song again.

Infecting The Scars reveals its format early on; horror-movie samples abound at particular moments to catch people unawares along with a seemingly rotating slow-song, fast-song format and with a handful that easily imprint themselves on the wider world of rock music. Lead-off single “Hypertensive Crisis” and the Alien Vampires featuring “Bone Saw” – yes, real band, no do not look up their album art at work –  are the most traditionally electronics-heavy in the mix. They’re songs that both cite and throwback specifically to earlier works in the Dawn Of Ashes catalogue.

These are the songs that are the most heralded among the Infecting The Scars track listing as the return-to-aggrotech era for the crew. Both songs are designed around a straightforward constant punch-to-the-head backing beat and a synth line providing most of the melody work. Yet even in this do you notice parts that could just as easily have been a china-cymbal-punctuated breakdown vs the effects-abused vocals drowning in the swirling mass of percussion.

“Visceral Rage” in particular blurs the lines between the many disparate eras of Dawn Of Ashes’ career. It’s not the quickest number and slots itself neatly into the slow-song, fast-song pattern that doesn’t quite break until “Masochism”, which dares to be a mid-tempo and symphonic epic sounding song following an equally crawling “Coma Maker” prior to it. The difference between the two – though the album purposefully blends many of its intros and outros together to make one grander nightmare masquerade – is fairly stark. The core is about the same, but it’s the outer frames of the songs, one favoring an artificial and computerized keyboard line and the other dipping its feet in the ominous backing symphonic track world, that marks their particular scars as being on different parts of the body.

When the worm does turn on the Infecting The Scars formula in the back half of the album, there is one stealthy highlight in the form of “Faith Desecration”. “Faith Desecration” takes much of the earlier part of the album and exponentially amplifies the sinister nature of it. Granted, part of that is it laying stepping stones for the equally snarling “Throne Of Misanthropy” but it’s the former’s thundering drums which punctuate the song like bullets through the side of a car that makes it stick out. It splits the difference across much of the album and even false-ends itself, which may make it one of the more cinematic tracks in this particular ode to heresy’s collective songs.

“Throne Of Misanthopy”, then, plays out like someone grabbing the album by its neck and pulling it backwards as it shares similar melodic lines with “Bone Saw”. In some ways, we as metal fans and by extension musicians will never escape the note-jumping of Iron Maiden’s “Wasted Years” intro, and those two songs dancing so closely around it is amusing. And again, it can make one see how the Dawn Of Ashes team early on in their career figured out that they could transcribe their music into metal just as well as they can with their electronics abuse, and likewise, feed it back through the opposite way.

Infecting The Scars has a monstrous highwire act to perform, being not only the latest transformation in a fluid career for Dawn Of Ashes. After years hovering between outright symphonic black and death metal hybrid, industrial, and blurring the two into an unholy mess all its own, and cycling back around into where they had started, you have to sense that the moment there was any sense of a bass drum as pulse and keyboard line weaving its way into the mix it was going to have all the burdens placed upon it of being the “return to form” disc.

Though thematically it continues its bodily abuse obsession among the more recent Dawn Of Ashes releases, musically it does put in a lot of the labor to try and modernize and metamorphose the earlier Dawn Of Ashes sound into something more befitting the band’s current form. The way it all blends together after the initial high-tempo, low-tempo volley turns Infecting The Scars into an enjoyably nightmarish experience. With the marks of both past and present upon it, Infecting The Scars succeeds in breathing a sort-of rotted lift into the lungs of Dawn Of Ashes and gives them a place to launch from into what may be their second (second and a half? third?) arc with their blend of electronics, industrial, and outright horror show.

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