(In this article DGR vividly reviews the two EPs released this year (so far) by the New Jersey extremists Lunar Blood.)
The initial plan for tackling New Jersey-based Lunar Blood’s newest EP Anor was to do so soon after I had returned from the May festival run. Anor was released on May 2nd, 2025 and was swept up in the great content maw that is my dragnet, but the opportunity to tackle its three songs wouldn’t present itself until after I returned home closer to the end of the month.
However, like many reviews, best laid plans are often laid to waste instead, and so Anor – alongside a few other victims that I keep swearing up and down that I’ll get to goddamnit – found itself backburnered up until Thursday, September 11th, when I finally found the time post-work – as nothing else important had happened that day other than me taking my team out for breakfast for clearing 1,000 days safe at work – to dive headfirst into its three songs and really come to grips with what the Lunar Blood crew were attempting to create here… only to discover that they had released a follow-up four song EP that same day entitled Ithil.
Once again, the best laid plans aren’t so much laid to waste here as they are taking a lead pipe to the skull. Thus, does a review intended to be for one EP become a writeup for two. Unless Lunar Blood have other plans up their sleeves between the time of this writing until it is posted, in which case we will be having words.
I wonder sometimes if a group like Lunar Blood is done a disservice by our attempts to affix genre-descriptors to a particular sound. Lunar Blood have so many different extreme elements running their swords through their bodies that merely describing them as a black metal group doesn’t fully describe the eventual gore-soaked pincushion that the band actually are.
What Lunar Blood are is the sound of auditory terror; this is music written to be as abrasive and as ugly as the band could possibly muster. There’s black metal here, noise, grind, death metal, a healthy wash of dissonance, and you don’t need to have a predatory bird’s vision to see what pathway we are going to be walking down when it comes to their Anor and Ithil releases.
This is extremity cranked up beyond any particular scale. The grind elements are used to force each song forward through hair-whitening cacophony, the black metal is often stitched on to the shrieking emanating from the microphone. This is all in service of abject auditory violence and would likely melt speakers at high-volume.
As it stands right now, the two EPs combined run for about twenty-five minutes of music and none of it comes from a world that could be described as pleasant. This is not music you settle into. You let it wash over you and hope by the end of it that you haven’t been sandblasted down to a skeleton. Even more impressive is that the Lunar Blood crew have had this in their back pocket since late 2023. The urgency emanating from the music would suggest that it needed to be released here and now lest it melt whatever container it is being held in.
Of the two EPs, Anor gives the sense that it is a little more single-minded. All of the song titles are single words — “Terrorist”, “Survivalist”, and “Recividist” — and musically they lay the foundation for about ten minutes of anguished howling and instruments being thrown across the room. There are moments in “Terrorist” that are a bit on the technical side, in the style that Discordance Axis often did by sudden tempo change and committing acts of destruction on their guitars.
“Terrorist” alone is an angry as can be song and they follow it up with two more in “Survivalist” and “Recidivist”. “Survivalist” is crushingly slow by comparison; it is the music of suffocating in its first minute before Lunar Blood tear down the walls of the song around them and the roof caves in. From there it follows a similar tack of being as noisy and chaotic as “Terrorist” before it.
The two together are a tag-team of destruction, which could provide proof as to why Lunar Blood stopped this EP at “Recidivist” because it allowed for Anor to still shock without its extremity becoming mundane. “Recidivist” is another four-minute nuclear launch of a song that is equally as bile-spewing. It shifts among a sludgier-hardcore opening segment to the expected hellfire as music throughline into a devolution of sheer noise for its bridge.
Anor alone is enough to blindside someone as a first experience with the band but its follower Ithil, by being equally as ugly and just as expansive, hammers the point down to the core of the Earth.
Ithil is a workout of a release. It drags the listening experience out just long enough that it begins to overwhelm. The semi-post-black metal and drone hybridization that ran through the metal scene in the mid-2010s is strong on Ithil, wielded as a weapon to bludgeon people to death at first opportunity. The dissonant death metal influence that was part of what made Anor so intense returns here three-fold. If the goal was to create something so unrelentingly fiery and bleak at the same time, Lunar Blood have more than accomplished it on Ithil.
“Do Not Fear, For I Have Redeemed You” and “No Weapon Fashioned Against You Shall Succeed” make for an immense one-two punch on an EP that seems to consist of nothing but boxing combinations to begin with. The ugly and scarred nature of the music is meant to draw you in, but if the goal was to evoke a feeling of abhorrent hopelessness across multiple songs then Lunar Blood can check that one off the list.
As mentioned before, both of the EPs here are extremity wielded as weapon, and while it is tempting to describe Ithil as the more meditative followup to Anor before it, it’s only a slight deviation from the overall formula. It is equally as ugly if not a little more sludgy in its back-half. Anor took no prisoners front-to-back; Ithil is for the bodies that have been left in its wake.
Lunar Blood are likely to stealthily catch a lot of headlines soon if the group are able to hold together. Material like what is present on Anor and Ithil simply cannot be discounted. They’ve got abrasive misery down to an exact science and it is one that will likely serve them well in the future.
Given that so far the band have a demo, one full-length, and two-EPs to their name since their foundation in the misery-years of 2020, this would be an excellent time to get in on the ground floor with them. Lunar Blood could make serious waves in the uglier side of extreme metal in the future and the double-EP that they’ve put out this year is fantastic proof of that.
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