(written by Islander)
“Darkness enthroned through the death of purity.” With that legend, the Peruvian band Hell Trepanner announce the inspiration for their new album, which will be released on March 20th by the respected Chinese label Awakening Records. The label provides a more extensive but no less daunting description:
The Consecration of Eternal Impurity is a ritual descent into the profane, where each track serves as a hymn to spiritual corruption and transcendence through chaos. This release explores the paradox between the sacred and the impure, narrating a process of inverted consecration in which purity is sacrificed to give way to a higher form of darkness. With abrasive riffs, relentless drums, and dense atmospheres, the work constructs an oppressive sonic landscape that invokes ancient deities, forgotten ruins, and forbidden ceremonies. It is a manifesto of blasphemous power that redefines the essence of ritualistic and obscure death metal.
As you’re about to discover through our full streaming premiere of this tremendous new album, Hell Trepanner powerfully carry forward the pentagram-strewn banner of South American extreme metal, and we’re proud to help flood the world with its horrid wonders.
Photography by Vomiting Blood Prod
Hell Trepanner welcome you to their ritual descent with “Profane Sacramentum”, a frightening amalgam of rumbling thunder, utterly monstrous distorted words, eerily wailing keys, and miserably tolling bells — a truly chilling way to begin. And then they use “Supremacy of Obscurity” to lay out their main line through Hell.
That song discharges maniacally writhing guitars over sounds of towering and heaving darkness. As abyssal growls add to the music’s malign atmosphere, the riffing spasms in searing and slaughtering contortions around furiously hammering beats and a lustfully throbbing bass. The wildly darting and squirming fretwork generates sheer madness, and the drumming continually shifts tempos and patterns, accented by smashing cymbal crashes. A fret-burning guitar solo freakishly spirals and screams, even more over-the-top insane than everything else (which is saying something).
It’s an eye-popping introduction to Hell Trepanner’s diabolical talents. It’s obvious that they are technically very talented, very fleet of finger and limb, but they deploy those skills to create music that’s viciously deranged — and the vocals are absolutely foul and convincingly demonic
In the songs that follow that electrifying track Hell Trepanner continue leaning into riffing that maniacally swirls and swarms, squirms and screams, lunges and lashes, and they continue backing them with gruesomely heavy bass undulations and riotously veering drumwork, while also bringing forward more of that spitfire soloing and more of that horrific vocal roaring and gnashing (and some screaming). They also throw in jolting grooves, sudden stops and starts, swift tempo-shifts, and other mechanisms designed to keep listeners on their toes.
But they also don’t let us forget that the album is a ritual descent. In the midst of “Blaspheming in Primordial Tongues”, for example, they slow the pace and transform the music into a stretch of groaning menace, nightmarish hopelessness, and spectral eeriness, capped by another spectacular whammy-bar guitar solo, but one that this time sounds distinctly unsettling.
They also use another chilling solo to make the crypt-born opening of “From Perpetual Catacombs” even more miserable and doomed — and the next few minutes of that song sink listeners even deeper into soul-sucking desolation before the band crank up the mayhem once more.
“From Perpetual Catacombs” is the album’s longest song, and its most varied (though the album closer is a close second). It’s the best demonstration of Hell Trepanner’s songwriting dynamism, and proof that they’re just as capable of creating atmospherics of gothic horror as they are flying like horned bats straight out of Hell.
As the album proceeds from there you’ll have plenty more chances to get your adrenaline pumping and your head spinning with other tracks that are more in the hell-for-leather vein of “Supremacy of Obscurity”, all of them produced in a way that delivers vital separation, evenness of mix, and ravishing clarity but without sacrificing the music’s savage and slaughtering power.
Nevertheless, Hell Trepanner also continue their descent with a slower and hellishly grand yet chillingly oppressive penultimate segment in “Rain of Impaled Skulls”, and at the very end, in the closing song “Descend to the Eternal Funeral”, they again inflict phases of musical oppression, agony, and supernatural horror in the midst of eye-popping spectacles of madness and mutilation — with a final hideous minute that loops back around to the way the album began.
And with that, we’ll leave you to an explosive display of South American death metal, an album that really is all killer, no filler:
HELL TREPANNER:
Max Necromanza: Vomits & Bass
Neil Destructor: Guitars
Manolo Agressor: Drums
The album was recorded at Dragon Verde Studios and mixed and mastered at Sounds of Perseverance Studios. “For this full-length, we demanded a pro-tier sound that matched the weight of the production,” Necromanza explains. “We chose Dragon Verde because it’s arguably the best studio in Lima; high-end gear, total focus, and constant guidance. This allowed us to lock in and execute our instruments with total precision, ensuring the result was potent, natural, and possessed a bestial, overwhelming heaviness.”
The album’s cover artwork is the creation of Artem Astaroth, with design and layout by Arioch, and the band’s logo was made by Jorge BW (Arts of Perversion).
Awakening Records will release The Consecration of Eternal Impurity on CD and digital formats, and pre-orders are available now (see the links below). On what lies ahead for Hell Trepanner, Necromanza states: “The next move is to spread this plague across all media and lock in editions on vinyl and cassette. We’re also planning to tour — first within Peru, then hitting every country we can. And why the hell not? A tour in China, a land of ancient, ancestral culture. Bringing our sonic power to the stage in the country where the debut album was unleashed would be an incredible experience.”
PRE-ORDER:
https://awakeningrecordscn.bandcamp.com/album/the-consecration-of-eternal-impurity
https://awakeningrecordscn.bigcartel.com/product/hell-trepanner-the-consecration-of-eternal-impurity-cd
HELL TREPANNER:
https://www.facebook.com/helltrepannerdeath
https://www.instagram.com/helltrepanner.death
