Metal
Sentient Ruin · 31 July 2026
“Peso Muerto” (9:31) has no intro. It opens on an off-beat guitar attack and never lets up, and it is the first of seven tracks on Cogwheel: seventy-four minutes and twenty-six seconds, the longest record the Basque band Altarage have put out and their seventh full-length since they started in 2015 without ever making their line-up public.
The first two tracks alone run past twenty-three minutes, and the second, “Wielder” (13:51), opens and closes on extended drone passages that are not ornament: they set the speed at which everything after them has to be heard. That is the real change from Worst Case Scenario (2023), the album that opened the three-year gap this one closes. The other is a far cleaner mix than the band used to accept, with the bass audible under the guitar wall instead of dissolved into it.
“1988” (7:45) sits exactly in the middle and splits the record in two. It is instrumental and almost free of recognisable instruments, a low-frequency zone the band had hinted at on Sol Corrupto (2022) and here placed at the centre. “Not a Proper Burial” (10:33) picks things up again with the most varied riff writing on the album, and “Industrial Offering” (7:15) closes by running the opening recording backwards.
What ails a record built this way is what the formula makes inevitable: seven pieces between seven and fifteen minutes, all assembled the same way (frontal entry, doom section, exit into low rumble), end up interchangeable. One case makes the point. “Ichor” (14:45), the longest track, went out as the advance single on 16 July and is the only thing here with clean vocals, ragged and grandiose ones that never come back across the other sixty minutes. As a calling card it works; as a sample of what is on the album, it misleads.
Seven tracks, out on Sentient Ruin on 31 July, on double vinyl, CD and cassette.
Rating: 8.0/10
Text by Roger Estivill