(written by Islander)
Though Italian in location, the black metal band Blutsauger chose a name for themselves that means “bloodsuckers”, drawing inspiration from Transylvanian and Austro-Hungarian folklore and evoking the undead monstrosity of Nosferatu. They named their 2021 demo Path of the Bleeding Dead, and their forthcoming debut album is emblazoned with the title Nocturnal Blood Tyrants.
All of that, and their signing with the label De Tenebrarum Principio (a division of ATMF), signals music of “nocturnal terror and eternal darkness”, of “sanguine delirium” and “feverish ultraviolence”, and of a “trance-like state” that might be induced by their blood-lusting and blood-letting assaults against victimized listeners.
Those are among the preview words offered on behalf of the label. We have some of our own, impelled by the Blutsauger album track we’re premiering today: “Blood Shroud Ritual“.
Blutsauger‘s riffing is caustic and consuming, rendered through high whining miasmas of sound threaded with crazed fretwork flashes, a combination of churning sandstorm grit and lightning. They power the song with furious blast-beat hammering, segmenting those assaults with sudden drum-fill bursts that sound like the bubbling of something foul in a red-hot cauldron.
The music is designed to sear the senses and pump the blood, and the vocals are equally raw and searing, completely unhinged in the ravenous and scarring violence of their screaming. Conflagration is the order of the day, and so the bass is a more muted presence than in much of modern-day black metal; when it surfaces it clangs rather than rumbles.
And yet as crazed and exsanguinating as the music and the vocals are, the riffing has an otherworldly quality, and its emotional quotient changes. Initially, before the drums erupt, the mood is tremendously bleak and cold, a channel of dread and degradation. When everything ignites, the music becomes both wild and wretched, violent but seemingly in agony as well. When the drums subside again, the bass dismally rings. When the drums come back, it’s with a rocking cadence. At the end, the drums vanish and the notes eerily reverberate.
“Black Shroud Ritual” is thus a manifestation of terrors and traumas, inhuman in its excesses and mind-rending in the fear and hopelessness that it spawns, all of it shrouded in a chilling atmosphere of the supernatural.
De Tenebrarum Principio will released Nocturnal Blood Tyrants on August 29th, on CD and digital formats. Make pre-orders via the links below, and then also become further immersed in the dreadful and devouring works of this blood cult through the stream below of the album’s first advance track, “The Black Hunters“.
PRE-ORDER:
Digital: https://atmfsssdtp.bandcamp.com/album/nocturnal-blood-tyrants
Physical: https://metalodyssey.8merch.com/product/blutsauger-nocturnal-blood-tyrants-cd/
BLUTSAUGER:
https://www.facebook.com/blutsaugerkult