(written by Islander)
In this feature we share with you a powerful new discovery, the Belarusian band Victim of Reality, and an excerpt from their forthcoming debut album The Dump of Human Hopes.
You can anticipate from the name of the band, the name of the album, and the record’s cover art that they don’t make happy music. Instead, they devote themselves to old school atmospheric doom/death, drawing influence from the likes of My Dying Bride, Swallow the Sun, Saturnus, Evoken, and Funeral.
Here is how the labels that will release the album portray the impact of the band’s music:
Each song leaves a gray depressive residue in the soul, a touch of hopelessness in the minds and bitterness in the hearts, causing agony of feelings mixed with total desolation. Atmospheric guitar melodism and melancholy are tightly intertwined with death metal aggression, the pressure of black metal riffs and extreme vocals that tear the soul to pieces…
“Desperation” is the name of the song we’re premiering today, and in different ways that is exactly what the music manifests — despair born of futility and hopelessness, at times despondent and desolate, and at other times a storm of agony verging on madness.
To create the experience, and at the core of the song’s emotional power, the band have created moving melodies (first expressed through a piano overture that becomes increasingly distressed as it evolves), and then vary them, but without losing the track’s powerful melodic coherence.
They have also masterfully dialed in contrasting frequencies across a significant range, something that becomes apparent even in the track’s instrumental overture. The tones are massively heavy and gritty in the low end, groaning and moaning (and sometimes slugging). Higher in the range, the lead guitar weaves the melody of misery. And sometimes its piercing wail ascends even higher (along with the towering of the rhythm guitar) and becomes even more stricken.
The vocals are commanding, and also contrasting — a combination of gritty, engulfing roars of abyssal depth that explode into shattering screams which at times seem to go on past the limits of human endurance. And the contrasts don’t stop there.
Although the song’s pacing for more than half its length displays the band’s kinship with funeral doom, the music shockingly erupts near the six-minute mark, exploding in a savage surge of blasting drums, sizzling and swarming riffage, feverish bass convulsions, and rabid screams. It channels a different kind of despair, a kind of frenzied hopelessness, although above that black-metal madness and violence the lead guitar continues to carry the song’s agonized melody.
Just as suddenly, the mayhem vanishes, briefly replaced by a mournful acoustic guitar melody, and with yet another protracted scream the tremolo’d riffing picks up the melody again and distressingly intensifies it around the drumming’s steady snap and scalding shrieks of deranged intensity.
VICTIM OF REALITY Lineup:
Roman Trakhimchyk — bass, vocals
Evgeny Kapitanov — rhythm guitar
Anatoly Samoilo — solo guitars
Arthur Horsky — drums
Vadim Krivonosov — guest clean vocals (track 1)
The Dump Of Human Hopes was recorded by Artyom Malyshko, and it was mixed and mastered by Roman Grinberg. It will be released on CD and digital format on November 28th by Satanath Records and The End of Time Records (see the links below). After the links, also check out the album’s first single, “Buried“.
PRE-ORDER:
https://satanath.bandcamp.com/album/sat411-victim-of-reality-the-dump-of-human-hopes-2025
theendoftimerecords@gmail.com
VICTIM OF REALITY:
https://www.instagram.com/_victim.of.reality_