Metal
Profound Lore Records · 18 September 2026
«Agonal Shining» runs eight minutes and spends every one of them. It opens on high guitar harmonics, a bass growling underneath and drums that are almost tribal in their hits; around the five-minute mark an instrumental stretch of constant time-signature changes opens up, and the track closes with a guitar solo that stops it dead instead of letting it fade.
Eight pieces, sixty-three minutes, and the New York quartet haven’t made any effort to trim them down. Colin Marston is back on guitar and at the desk, and the production is what holds a record this dense together.
«Indecipherable Divinities» brings in science-fiction synths for its final third without the track losing its grit, and on «Living Useless Ritual» the guitars drop register into ground that’s no longer black metal’s own. «Grievous Corrector», the shortest at five and a half minutes, carries a snare pattern from Lev Weinstein that runs free of everything around it, as if it had wandered in from another record.
The reservation is the one the band has carried for ten years now. Sixty-three straight minutes of this material ask for a listen almost nobody will actually give it in one sitting, and the record grants no pause: no interlude, no short track, nothing that works as a breath. The closer, «Scour Order», spends the first three of its thirteen minutes building a fog of distant drums before the production comes into focus, and whoever reaches it after the other seven arrives with little left.
It’s the band’s first full-length since «Inorganic Rites» (2024), out on Profound Lore Records. The two advance singles were «Living Useless Ritual» on 27 July and «Kill the Guardian» on 24 August.
Rating: 8.4/10
Text by Roger Estivill