Metal
I, Voidhanger Records · 7 August 2026
The album runs through six numbered movements, “Epoché I” to “Epoché VI”, with an instrumental wedged between the fourth and the fifth: “151 – The Eternal Present and the Endless Dream”, two minutes and twenty-three seconds of feedback and drumming that holds no pattern at all. Seven tracks, thirty-three minutes and fifty-eight seconds, no movement shorter than four or longer than six. It is a debut and it is short on purpose.
Labor of the Negative is a project spread across Portugal, the UK, Norway and Egypt, and it presents itself in initials: M. on vocals, S. on guitars, J.H. on bass, T.Z. on drums and a guest, S.L., on horn. The name comes from a passage in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” of 1807, and the album title from Handel’s oratorio “Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno”. It is out on I, Voidhanger, the Italian label that has been releasing Spectral Lore, Esoctrilihum and Mare Cognitum since 2008.
The foundation is black metal of tremolo riffs and blast beats, and what passes over the top of it is not. J.H.’s bass does not sink under the mix and it is what carries the change of register whenever a piece opens up; the horn always enters in the calm sections, to open “Epoché II”, to bridge “Epoché III” and to close “Epoché IV”. M.’s voice is what separates the record furthest from a black metal record: he screams, howls, grunts and coughs, and uses all of it as one more instrument.
By the third time round, the mechanism is plain. The six movements all last about the same and all alternate the same pair, metal onslaught and jazz reprieve, which keeps the album dynamic and predictable at once, and none of the seven tracks stands on its own away from the sequence. The mix does its bit: in the densest passages the guitars end up buried and the snare cracks over the top of everything, which is the opposite of what music built on audible layers needs.
I, Voidhanger Records, 7 August 2026. Seven tracks, 33:58. The band does not say which horn plays on the record: the label copy mentions trumpet and the reviews, saxophone.
Rating: 7.2/10
Text by Roger Estivill