(Below is a review by a former NCS writer who now goes by the moniker Obsolete Mystic. His subject is the debut album from a Nevada-based duo who call themselves Fog Wall, an album they are independently releasing today.)
I love FromSoftware. In the realm of video games that studio have always been visionaries and avant-garde pushers of the artform. The cultural impact they’ve had ever since a little game called Demons Souls (OG Japanese importer right here) came out has permanently changed gaming and dark fantasy imagery and thematic elements in a huge way. FromSoftware games also happen to be metal as fuck and could easily inspire metal, especially in the death and black metal categories. As a result, there is in fact a whole grouping of bands that are FromSoftware worshippers.
Today’s focus is on one such band, Fog Wall, who named themselves after the signature walls of fog you traverse in FromSoftware games to begin boss battles. Like a lot of these bands, Fog Wall is a blackened death metal outfit, and they are offering up a very impressive debut in Gloomweaver.
I don’t entirely agree with the press emails’ FFO section for Gloomweaver. It lists Morbid Angel, Type O Negative, Deicide, Black Dahlia Murder, and The Acacia Strain. While I do think some of these comparisons are valid, especially the Morbid Angel and Black Dahlia Murder nods, there is also a lot of Immolation and Man Must Die, and a little bit of Cryptopsy and Exocrine.
It doesn’t actually matter how completely accurate the “For Fans Of” references may be, I suppose, because it’s all reminiscent of appealing music, and Fog Wall really know how to leverage what they’re working with. These guys have a real talent for hitting a perfect intersection of groove and atmosphere that is just overpoweringly ugly and putrid, combined with a lot of guitar harmonies during palm-muted machine-gun-picked sections that throw in a lot of alien sounding passages.
I don’t know if I’d be doing this album proper justice in trying to review it song by song or even trying to identify highlights. Some albums I think are written with the intention of washing over you and consuming you in it rather than going for highlight after highlight, and that is certainly the approach Gloomweaver takes. It’s more getting hit by and drowning in a tidal wave than being hit by a flying boulder.
Fog Wall’s sense of dense melodic, melancholic and liminal black-metal-like sections are where they really shine on numbers like “Strangling Gloom”, but I also really love the Cryptopsy-esque atonal grooves of songs like “Knife, Sting, Tooth” (seriously, the main riff on this one is so filthy) or the song right after, “The Accursed”. On the other hand, they can pulverize you with machine-precision technical sledgehammers like “Fleshpot Ritual” or “Belching Black Vapors”.
One thing about this album I do want to point out as a highlight is that the combined guitar and bass tone just feels so otherworldly and unfairly punishing. It’s raw and thick and dripping with black tar and rotten intestinal fluid. As far as album mixes go, this is definitely a top one for me for 2026.
This is a very impressive debut by a locked-in duo with a vision. I hope you find Fog Wall’s Gloomweaver to be as refreshing and engrossing as I do.
https://linktr.ee/fogwall
https://fogwallnv.bandcamp.com/album/gloomweaver
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61591108006858