2023 is going to become another flawless year for extreme metal and music as a whole and this new Ashen Horde album Antimony is one of the most expansive and enjoyable albums I’ve heard in a good while. This band has been around for nearly a decade and in their existence they have released a handful of albums and gotten better musically over the years. Now signed to Transcending Obscurity Records, Antimony is the fourth studio offering by the band and is the continuation to 2019’s Fallen Cathedrals. To best describe Ashen Horde’s style of extreme music would be taking elements of black metal, melodic death metal, progressive metal and very little hints of technical metal in the mix.
What’s amazing about this record in particular compared to past Ashen Horde albums is not only they’ve experimented with their abilities creating a huge wall of beautifully crafted soundscapes and have tested different types of arrangements incorporating many genres into one album. They have detailed and designed to the point this album takes everything from Fallen Cathedrals and offers something new, organic and showcases the band’s finest achievement in their careers. My experience listening to this album has been an amazing odyssey all around and the amount of remarkable coherency as well as the instrumentation work and musicianship is just top notch.
There’s a lot of interpretation to be discussed for Antimony. Each song represents a multi-faceted style making it unpredictable and riveting giving the listener so much attitude and variation. It almost seems that the songs give it an artistic touch of expression and somehow, this album has gotten better with each listen the more I listened to it. Tracks such as The Disciple, The Throes Of Agony, The Neophyte and Summoning give a combination of both harsh and clean vocals as well as a production so incredibly sharp and crystal clear that there’s times where the band really decided to turn the volume up on max settings and unleash all hell to not give any single craps given.
Even on the secondary half of the album we can also detect the band’s heavy emphasis on creating a blackened death metal esque sounds. They really show all emotion throughout the album where we can see the band has listened to tons of Immortal, Death, Enslaved and Inferi. The tempo leads and signatures keeping it nice and steady without overstating its welcome.
I can’t really say much other than Antimony is a sensational album that showcased the band to demonstrate and deliver their proudest creation to date.
Overall score 9/10
Review by Jake Butler
