(This is DGR‘s lavish review of a new EP released earlier this month by Minneapolis-based Synestia.)
Symphonic deathcore group Synestia have had an interesting arc to their career. Existing by pure force of technology with members initially spread far and wide around the world, the group have been generally consistent with their release timeframes.
However, despite being something of an undercurrent on their own in the particular branch of the immensely spastic, adhd-inflected branch of the deathcore tree, the band themselves are just as known for multiple collaborations with musician/producer Blake Mullens who performs under the name Disembodied Tyrant.
This in itself means the band are part of a much larger orbit of surgical and synthetic-feeling and symphonics-reliant deathcore groups that all seem to both appear, contribute, and feature on one another’s works. It has to be difficult to break out on your own in such a way, when your logos all seem to be blurring together into one old script and sharpened stylized mass of words, and so a new EP from the group with a now more localized lineup and mostly them on their own is an interesting proposition.
A more localized lineup with three of the four members of the band having been added in 2025 alone suggests much larger plays being made, seeking to establish Synestia as a force all on their own. The question, then, is whether or not the group’s newest release Premonitions provides them a strong enough launching point to do so.
Premonitions is Synestia‘s second EP in a fairly young career. Initially the band existed as an aforementioned international collaboration before this year, and in that time the band produced a smattering of singles, an ambitious and collaborative EP with the aforementioned Disembodied Tyrant called The Poetic Edda – which kind of broke both bands into the spotlight – and an album entitled Maleficium.
Synestia play a brutal style of the deathcore tree, replete with breakdowns that could piledrive bridge pylons into the bay, and often the melodic work is done more by a backing symphonic orchestration than whoever might be cast with the difficult job of keeping the guitars moving. This is to say, it is all impressively technically proficient, and the sense of scale for many of this style of group is gargantuan.
Synestia in that sense have done well keeping pace with the movements of the current genre sphere, and where they’re likely to be more noticed is that their style tends to switch at the drop of a hat. Songs will be barreling in one direction only to have someone sneak up behind it, snap its neck, and drag it in a different way. Tempo changes are sudden and violent, as is the sense of immediacy with which these songs move.
This was of course going to be something of an inevitability. It makes sense after many years of the low-and-slow approach to -core ala Black Tongue and the like that you’d have a newer generation with immediate upturned noses seeking to swing the musical pendulum hard back in the other direction.
On top of this, once you had groups that realized you could have a backing track and laptop do just as much heavy lifting – because let’s be honest, there isn’t a tour bus out there that’s gonna fit a seven person string chamber alongside the beef jerky and beer farts of your average traveling band – and the groups themselves, with this ambition and scale, found themselves subject to an exponential growth.
All it took was one band breaking big and many others were going to follow. The growth itself was generational – and credit where credit is due, Dimmu Borgir, Fleshgod Apocalypse‘s, and SepticFlesh‘s chuggier guitar moments probably served as the Rosetta stone by which many of these bands have unlocked their sound after a decade-plus of groups like Bleeding Through, Carnifex, and Winds Of Plague laying the groundwork – but the breaking point owes just as much to the internet and “looks good in a short video” approach.
This is a genre that has largely been getting by on the moment-to-moment “holy shit did you see that?” sort of pyrotechnics. Whether a group is able to make anything coherent of it from there or if it just sounds like they’re armed with roofing nailers just stitching parts together is a different matter.
Premonitions consists of four songs, steadily dripped out over the course of 2025’s seemingly forever running year, for a hair under nineteen minutes worth of music. You’d never guess it had only been nineteen minutes given the sheer amount of bombast Synestia put forth in their music, but that speaks more to just how densely packed and equally scattered these songs can be.
With their aforementioned insanely difficult dance among many genre-lines and tempo shifts, Synestia face a hard act of letting the constant flamethrowing and musical missile-launching become a new “normal”. Turning extremity into mundanity is an unfortunate side effect of so many projects, and part of the difficult and equally interesting exploration of an EP like Premonitions lies in the group’s ability to not let the breakdown that happens at the sixteen minute and forty second mark be less dynamic or interesting than the one the first song opened up with.
When you are playing with sounds this gargantuan it helps to keep in mind that constantly reducing the listening to being the small creatures that live inside a larger creature’s footsteps will mean we eventually lose touch with what the outside world ever was and those high walls become our new musical boundaries to begin with. The sense of perspective gets lost and even brutality can become monotonous.
Synestia do find themselves in competition with themselves over the course of Premonitions’ near nineteen minute run time, seeking to top themselves over and over again. Songs seem to lengthen gradually as the EP moves along too, as the band seek to create more space which they then immediately fill with more stuff.
Describing these songs as being merely densely packed feels like a fool’s errand. The material of groups on The Artisan Era label – Inferi, Enfold Darkness, and their ilk – was densely packed music delivered at hyperspeed. This is densely packed to the point of folding in on itself at times. “The Wretched King And His Hollow Throne” mutates into three diffirent creatures over four minutes, and if you adore the sort of typewriter by way of hyperspeed morse-code double bass drumming that can crack someone’s spine from two states over then that is the song for you.
The expectant and slavish breakdowns sound like halon charges being dropped on engine fires and they disappear just as quickly. You never fully know which segment or part is going to come in screaming from a different corner of the run.
Synestia‘s style is equally as epic as it is kinetic. “Dies Irae” and “The Mourning Star” both show a desire for something grander, lifting their own distortion at times and using it as a weapon, as well as unleashing wave upon wave of symphonics with the sort of unhinged madness with which a commander might send a cavalry charge into a wall of machine guns.
The titular “Premonitions” on the other hand is the more ominous member. A shadow slowly forming out of the destruction the band leave behind. With heavy intro and equally heavy outro, “Premonitions” is not only a good example of a title track defining the EP but also one that it seems Synestia have been forging their way toward with the previous thirteen-some-odd minutes.
Premonitions proves Synestia to be immensely capable of throwing fists in the increasingly violent fray that is the current energy bouncing around the deathcore scene. Vocal olympics being just one subset of what the “whoa, sick” crowd may be asking of their bands these days, Synestia are equally pressured and deliver across their four songs the requisite explosive rhythm sections and soaring melodic highs.
There are definitely moments – like mentioned before – in which there is too much “stuff” and not enough substance holding these songs together, but this is a style that throws itself through songs with reckless abandon. Ideas are just as quickly immolated as they are brought to life, and it is those tropes by which Synestia‘s newest EP lives and dies. It skirts around the edges of the extremity/monotony divide and its frenetic nature means that the constant energetic release from each song can keep the first few listens exciting.
Digging around in the guts of the songs later after the initial impression wears off unveils some intricate inner-workings, ideas more ambitious than the initial eye-rending explosiveness of the group’s sound might lend itself to. Yes, this is still heart on its sleeve and core as all hell at times, using brutality as bludgeoning weapon to get from place to place within a song, but there’s enough tie-wire together here to keep these songs from exploding outwards in a mass of gore and keep Synestia‘s promise of grander ambition afloat.
Premonitions is not a world-shaker in terms of genre-faire but it is certainly a world-ender in terms of overall sound. It will be something to watch to see where this full lineup chooses to break next direction-wise.
https://synestia.bandcamp.com/album/premonitions
https://www.facebook.com/p/Synestia-100068127064729/
https://www.instagram.com/synestia_band/