Diabolic Oath

***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. Remnants and dogmas of tradition, flattened and pulverized under the weight of inevitability to create a new ground zero, scorched and sterilized of orthodoxy, and reseeded with the germs of innovation and expressive rebirth through the convergence of human struggle and musical destruction.