(Our contributor Chile (that’s his nickname, not his country of origin) has chosen to review the recently released debut album by the Chilean band Oraculum, recently released by Invictus Productions.)
If there is one truth about any given year when it comes to metal, it’s that we are constantly on the lookout for greatness. Sometimes it comes unexpectedly like a stranger in the night trying to pass us by in a dark alley, and other times it rams you head-on like a raging bull stomping over your mangled body.
You know already where we are going with this. Some bands are all about stomping and show us absolutely no mercy, which is also the reason why we appreciate them for that very feeling of might and strength. That is the story of Chile’s (the country) Oraculum.
This South American death metal force has been somewhat quiet for a number of years now since their previous release, the fantastic Always Higher EP from 2017 that already put them on the proverbial map, and which was incidentally also the year I joined the band’s legion of fans after reading about the EP on this very site.
Catching them at Brutal Assault festival in the Czech Republic a year later in 2018 (and buying a t-shirt which I wear regularly still) continues to burn in my memory brighter than a thousand suns (and in spite of all the Czech beer that went through my kidneys those days). Anyway, years later, time has come for Oraculum to put out the long-awaited debut album which was just released through the great Irish label Invictus Productions.
Now, we could try some kind of convoluted way of describing the band’s intentions and hide behind a wall of philosophical newspeak, but I am a simple man, so therefore the only two things you need to know before diving into it are that this album absolutely kills and it’s well worth the long wait.
“A Monument to Fallen Virtues” comes out of the gate less as an intro but more as a full-fledged invocation, a soaring call to arms that gets completely realized in the onrushing maelstrom of “The Great One”, which takes its name very seriously and floods us immediately with riffs greater than life, setting the scene for the remainder of the album.
Following this with barbarically rambunctious “Mendacious Heroism”, a pattern emerges where it becomes clear that Oraculum is not your run-of-the-mill, straightforward type of death metal band. This and every other song are lessons in adventurous songwriting, brimming with ideas, constantly altering the flow with the shrill, demented choirs of wailing guitars and thundering drums.
Observe the unadulterated savageness of that middle part in the ripping “Carnage”, with the band subjecting us to a torrential downpour of riffs, only to bring it about a slower, and even heavier, expunging of the seeds of corruption by any means necessary. Or the reversal of this formula in the unhinged “Dolos”, where we go from deceivingly slow to disbelievengly ravaging in a flash of the blade.
With all that said, I’m not going to lie — a great amount of the appeal to Hybris Divina also lies in the fact that it resides firmly in the same stylistical space occupied by the latest opus of The Ominous Circle, which was very high (and I mean, like really high) on my year-end list for 2025. Luckily, while maybe cut from the same cloth, Oraculum applies a whole other set of designs to their music.
“The Heritage of Our Brotherhood” marks another invocational interlude leading into the exuberant “Spiritual Virility”, and if you are looking for one song this year to which you shall set your standards for speed and devastation embodied in a guitar riff, this is it.
A fitting epic left for the end, the majestic eight minutes of “Posthumous Exultation” behave almost like a Primordial song, building slowly on those sentiments established throughout the album and finally exploding in a Promethean burst of fiery madness, thus proclaiming that the gates of future glory are opened.
In the end, we can safely say this year is off to a great start, as far as extreme music goes (the rest of the world’s affairs, less so). Whatever riches await us still in the coming months, Oraculum is sure to leave a mark with their tremendous debut album and I’ll be hoping to catch them somewhere on tour again (and most likely buying more of their t-shirts).
Hybris Divina is out now on Invictus Productions in all available formats. Orders for the record and all related merchandise are possible via label and Bandcamp stores.
https://invictusproductions666.bandcamp.com/album/hybris-divina
https://www.facebook.com/oraculum.chile
https://invictusproductions.net/