With my busiest travel year finally starting to wind down, I’m finally starting to catch up on the new releases this year. Some of the higher profile albums that came out this calendar year have been a bit “meh” for me (sorry, Cannibal of the Corpse!).
But this one, the first from Marduk since 2018, hit the streets the same day as my 50-something birthday while I was on a work trip to Hawaii1. It was a constant companion in my piece of shit rent-a-car – and for good reason: this is a pretty killer release!
Each song has it’s own personality, as it were. Perhaps this due to the varying tonalities and pacing — aka this is not your typical brain-dead “200BPM tremelo-for-days Black metal blitzkrieg of pedal to the metal for 40+ minutes, dude!!”). There’s a lot going on here from a band that in the past has not exactly been subtle lol!
I like the decision to cram the songs together ala Slayer’s “Reign in Blood” – there’s no time to pause to catch your breath between one brutal beat-down and the next. The songs seamlessly flow and segue together very well. Not like a thematic or concept album of course – this is a smart album from Marduk, but it’s not one iota pretentious like that lol! – but the overall compressed track order and album atmosphere gels very well, start to finish.
It is also notable that the [un-credited?] producer did a stellar job here, with the highs high, the lows booming and omnipresent, and the mids not getting washed out in the avalanche of notes coming down the mountain. This is thankfully very far afield from the “Recording on a Sony WalkMan in the bathroom of your stepdad’s basement” that was the hallmark of so-called “trve Black Metal” last century.
Maybe it’s been my steady diet of Horus Heresy-era Warhammer:40,000 novels – yes, I know that is the sacrosanct thematic territory of the almighty Bolt Thrower, but hear me out! – but this very much has an “A Day In The Life of a Chaos Space Marine” vibe, through and through. The mud, the blood, the guts, the carnage of thousands upon thousands of battles fought on thousands of worlds across the galaxy, the fight of evil vs good, the here-and-now vs the afterlife – all is on display in the WH:40K novels – and in my mind, extended to this many of the musical themes and over all vibe I’m hearing here.
Marduk have pretty much never put out a bad album, and this is very much one of their strongest modern day releases. An album that hits hard, hits fast (runtime: only just shy of 42 minutes), and has a varied and very listenable and beautiful array of very ugly music haha!. Highly recommended.
1 Yes, I am aware of how perverse it is blasting butt-ugly music while in a tropical paradise lol