(We present a review by Professor D. Grover the XIIIth of a new album the French metal band Gorod which was released last Friday.)

Greetings and salutations, friends. As you may have picked up on in recent years, I’m a big fan of modern technical death metal (not that I mind the classic old-school stylings of Death, Cynic, Pestilence, and Atheist). In recent times over on Bluesky I ranked my top twenty modern tech-death albums (read: post-Necrophagist), one album per artist, and my number one with a number belonged to Gorod’s Process Of A New Decline. It was probably the album that truly made me love tech-death and it’s an incredibly influential album for me even to this day. I’ve loved everything Gorod have released, both before and since, but there’s been a definite evolution in their style over the years, a creeping prog influence that has culminated in The Ember Gone. Continue reading »

(Professor D. Grover the XIIIth returns to NCS with the following review of Gorod’s new album, which is set for release on March 7th.)

Greetings and salutations, friends. If you’re reading this, I can only hope that you are familiar with French tech-death masters Gorod, whose career now spans two and a half decades (counting their early years as Gorgasm). The Orb is only their seventh full-length release, with a pair of EPs (and a couple early demos) sprinkled in, but at this point in their career their work has reached legend status in certain corners of the metal world. In my humble esteem, Gorod have for me represented the gold standard of modern tech-death ever since Process Of A New Decline, the album that truly got me interested in tech-death in the first place, and while that release remains my favorite to this day their output has been consistently high.

Gorod‘s style has evolved incrementally with each release, with the biggest shifts generally following a change in the band’s lineup. While the band have been spearheaded from the beginning by guitarist Mathieu Pascal and bassist Benoit Claus, the additions of guitarist Nicolas Alberny and, later, drummer Karol Diers have contributed to the band’s growth. The most notable change came with the additional of current vocalist Julien “Nutz” Deyres after the release of Process, and he made his presence and expanded vocal range felt immediately on the Transcendence EP, especially on that release’s 15 minute title track. ‘Transcendence’ brought with it an expanded focus on progression that paired exceptionally well with the band’s technical prowess and knack for writing catchy hooks and grooves, and the band has further explored that progression on subsequent releases. Continue reading »