(written by Islander)
We are helping spread the word about a powerful new album-length split that Transcending Obscurity Records will release on November 18th. Aptly titled Indomitable Hostility, the split joins together new songs from two death metal ravagers whose forward-thinking music you should already know — Replicant from New Jersey and Elitist from Denmark. And if somehow you haven’t yet discovered these bands, this album-length split provides a great jumping-on point for both of them.
We began our word-spreading last week by premiering one of the songs contributed by Elitist, and we continue today by premiering a song off the split from Replicant, a band whose music we have featured and reviewed on five previous occasions, most recently on the ocacasion of our Andy Synn writing here about their 2024 album Infinite Mortality — an album he called “as much a head-banger as it is a mind-bender… and one of the best releases of the year so far”.
That summary of Replicant’s music as both a head-banger and a mind-bender applies to this new song from the split, but even more so.
“Menacing Void” does indeed create a menacing emotional aura, thanks to a lead riff that generates an unsettling sonic pulse intersected by musical bursts of wailing anxiety. Replicant amplify the menacing tension generated by their dissonant opening with ferociously rumbling and maniacally clattering drums and by injecting hard-slugging grooves and miserably squirming arpeggios.
Ravaging growls, rabid howls, and maddened screams vent the words, and a fluidly flickering and eerily swirling guitar solo enhance the song’s strangeness — and the music is indeed as alien and unnerving as it is brutish. Replicant double-down on the music’s unearthly oddity by segueing into a hallucinatory collage of notes that weirdly peal, woozily warble, and nervously skitter.
The dynamism of the drumming is a signal feature of the song from beginning to end, and worth paying attention to even as the fretted instruments continue to embark on their frighteningly bizarre maneuvers in the song’s often-discordant final phase.
With this song, Replicant reinforce the idea of a band who resist settling into any specific mold or formula, but instead continue to bend their sound into different directions and to experiment. The music is elaborate and unexpected in its permutations, still groovesome but definitely a mind-bender too, and as catchy as it is head-spinning.
REPLICANT is:
Michael Gonçalves – Vocals, Bass, Guitars
Peter Lloyd – Guitars, Synths, High-Frequency Transmissions
Itay Keren – Guitars, Vocals, Void Channels
Justin Spaeth – Drums, Cigars
Replicant’s side of the split includes four songs in total, including a surprising cover of the 1982 Cocteau Twins song “Shallow Then Halo” which features lead vocals by Lisa Voisard (she also contributes a additional vocals on another Replicant track on the split, “Breathe The Trepid Hole“).
Transcending Obscurity will release Indomitable Hostility on multiple formats and with lots of related merch, and you can peruse the offerings via the links below; at Bandcamp you can also hear one more song from each band on the split. T.O. recommends it for fans of: Gorguts, Ulcerate, Morbid Angel, Dysgnostic, Carbon Tomb, and Xenosis.
PRE-ORDER:
https://replicantband.bandcamp.com/album/indomitable-hostility
http://us.tometal.com/
http://transcendingobscurity.aisamerch.com/
http://eu.tometal.com/
REPLICANT:
https://www.facebook.com/replicantnj
https://www.instagram.com/replicantnj