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Review: 'Risen Dread, The'
'Night Hag'   


-  Genre: 'Heavy Metal' -  Release Date: '28th January 2022'

Our Rating:
Since forming in 2018, the band have been invited to support Malevolent Creation, embarked on their own headline European tour, and, during the pandemic, allocated time to finish their debut album ‘Night Hag’ which is set for release on January 28th 2022. I suppose you might call it something of a concept album, centred around the night hag of the title. The accompanying notes clarify that the album’s central theme is mental illness, ‘with all the tracks focusing on a particular illness or a historical figure that had multiple disorders’.

It's a fine line to tread between sensationalism and sympathetic exploration, and metal acts aren’t always the most subtle or sensitive of their subject matter – but then, industrial artists have long revelled in gore and perversion and celebrated serial killers, so this is nothing unique to metal.

The album opens with dark, swirling drones at the start of ‘Psychoses’ before blasting into full-throttle thrash ‘n’ chug, and it’s all the power and all the dirt. The guttural vocals flip for growl to roar on the thud of a blastbeat, and there are some searing solos to top it all off. It’s fast and furious. As the title suggests, ‘Obsession’ delivers a punishing, repetitive riff, and pretty much relentless for the duration of the album’s 11 tracks:

‘White Night’, released as the album’s first single, features Sepultura guitarist Andreas Kisser, while the title track, which draws the curtain on the set features Brazilian composer Renato Zanuto. While deciphering the lyrical content is nigh on impossible, they’re clearly not averse to shocking images to convey the theme, and sonically, it’s more than suitably tortured-sounding, the soundtrack to psychopathy.

  author: Christopher Nosnibor

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