Altarage

Altarage

Nihil

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

Suffocate in the void that Altarage brings forth. Reality will suffer. Nothing can crawl away from the open mouth of "Nihl". In 2016 Spain's Altarage changed the face of death metal with a watershed moment that marked an inexorable point of no return, and Sentient Ruin was there to tell this story through release of the band's debut demo the year prior and of this beast on cassette tape format the following year. With its sheer tonnage and immensity, "Nihl" appeared instantly as a masterpiece that would pave the way to a new era of death metal and to a new way of conceiving and interpreting the notion of absolute heaviness. While the game-changing repercussions and influence this monster has had on extreme metal may still require some years to be fully assessed and understood, still nothing in the present can challenge what Altarage have accomplished and constructed within the omnipotency of "Nihl". Before "Nihl" dissonant, abstract, atmospheric extreme metal, and traditional riff-heavy death metal still lived two clearly defined, separated existences traveling on parallel trajectories which rarely touched. "Nihl" created a visionary and daring perturbation in this balance. A foreboding disturbance which sent the course of events on an entire new path, causing the two styles to inexorably converge unto another creating a new lineage of hyper-evolved death metal that conjoined the best of both worlds and triggered the birth of a new death metal world entirely its own. A world in which the notions of immensity, surrealism, and...

Altarage

Cogwheel

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Basque experimental death metal behemoths Altarage return to crush the earth under their gargantuan hooves of dissonance. Packing in a staggering one hour and fourteen minutes of tectonic extreme metal upheaval, their seventh full length album "Cogwheel" not only represents the longest, and most imposing work in their career, but also their most defiant and visionary. Since 2015, and across six genre-defining full length releases and the spawning of countless imitators, Altarage have brilliantly and mercilessly ploughed through the barriers of convention and tradition, setting in motion one of the most revolutionary ruptures in recent death metal history, and redefining the very architecture of heaviness and of their long standing dual mandate of destruction through transformation, and transformation through destruction. "Cogwheel" reinvents this dismal trajectory once again, representing yet another rift in Altarage's enigmatic and oppressive conquest for innovation. Tempos slow down, forms sprawl, deconstruct and convulse. Abstraction and morphing compositional frameworks expand. Echoes of Swans, Sunn O))), Scott Walker and Godflesh accrete into structural elements while lyrical themes and concepts mirror this process of rehumanization, shifting from the supernatural and the imaginary, to real, blood-pumping societal struggle that embodies the very notion of suffering and anger inside the cogwheel of transactional industry slavery. And at the center of all of this, always them: the riffs. The eternal centerpiece and engine to Altarage's tyrannical decade-long conquest. Colossal, implacable, inescapable uranium-depleted hammers of creation and destruction, demolishing and flattening everything in their wake. Conventions and their vestiges, wiped off the earth....