Doombringer

***For over a decade, Poland’s Doombringer has consistently produced a hybrid strain of extreme sound: the stalwart machinery of death metal adorned in the opaque cloth of black metal. With only two demos and a few EP tracks foreshadowing its debut album, the band’s sparse discography is a testament to the meticulous curation of its body of work. It has now been nearly five years since Doombringer released its first full-length, The Grand Sabbath, and the band’s second album, Walpurgis Fires, demonstrates its substantial progress while retaining the band’s notable traits. Perhaps the most exceptional element of Doombringer’s sound is its sheer unpredictability—the failure to adhere to a particular formula. Tempos shift suddenly, melodies dissolve and coalesce, and the vocals vary wildly across a broad spectrum of styles. Notwithstanding the diversity of tools in Doombringer’s arsenal, the end result is integrated and unified. As is customary for the band, Doombringer wrote Walpurgis Fires over an extended period of time between the fall of 2017 and the spring of 2018. The dedication to composition is obvious; the songs are complex, unique, and all flow seamlessly together as an album. The lyrics, laden with occult inspiration and influence, were written in tandem with the music in correlation with the atmosphere evoked by the instrumentation.