There’s something uniquely beautiful and almost spiritual about the best metal. Whether it’s technical, melodic, progressive, or just plain fun, heavy metal’s legends exist in this liminal place where magic, danger, and community collide. East coast wunderkinds Horrendous channel the ancient gods (fictional and those famously clad in leather) on their best record to date. Ontological Mysterium, out August 18th via Season of Mist, fulfills and multiplies the promise and potential that the progressive death metal quartet have shown since blasting out of the underground a decade ago.
The record feels not only like a spiritual offshoot to their past works, but it also reminds me of the first time I heard Judas Priest or early Metallica. There’s a love of music you shouldn’t be listening to, but it inspires your soul, and reveals things you didn’t know about yourself. There’s a real sense that Horrendous want to just have a blast now, instead of trying to impress each other that just oozes from the speakers. That results from going inward to reveal the best of each individual, as well as tapping into a second, more ineffable drive.
“When you’re a music nerd, you have two drives,” bassist Alex Kulick says. “Your first drive is to be as intensely involved in your practice as you can. You want to try new things; you want to see that your playing is going somewhere new or is getting better. You want to stretch the limits of your ideas, but you also want to get to this thing that you are sort of nodding to, which is there’s something beyond that sort of veil, that’s kind of the material or the approachable realm. That’s an incredibly difficult thing to do. And a lot of the time, we fail. There’s always moments, almost tiny windows into that core, beyond the material. And sometimes you glimpsed it. And I think with Idol, we were in a world of working as a unit pushing these limits and maybe finding things that we didn’t know how to deal with fully – these more ambitious musical ideas but always striving towards that second thing.
“Remembering what we love about metal and having that be as much a part of the driver’s seat as it is our brains and our ability to think what we want to do musically.”
“There’s this renewed energy afterwards,” guitarist/vocalist Matt Knox adds, “being able to come back to this after the break, just reawakened our own interpersonal, usable relationships with one another. And anyone who’s seen us live, it’s very clear when you see us play that we are all very close. To my ears for the first time on this record where that [connectivity] translated. This record is like there’s no hiding behind any kind of veil that metal offers. And I think metal offers a lot of veils to hide behind. It’s certain ways of seeing and playing. And I think this record, we kind of just threw that out the window. It’s like the love that we have playing with one another is center stage. And with that, I just feel like our personalities in general are kind of more in front on this record.
And I think all of that is wrapped together because it’s just this awakening of we are going to be brash and loud and ourselves. We’re not going anywhere. And if anything, I almost feel like this record is a stepping stone into something crazy.”
If Idol developed a world where people became their beliefs, Ontological Mysterium is represents a version where those beliefs are nebulous yet affirming and joyful, rather than negative.
Whatever the séance of sonic springs forth, let it be.
“There’s a reason that the word mystery is the is a root word in the record title,” Kulick says. “There is something about this that the four of us don’t fully understand, and that we are constantly trying to be in touch with in some way. And we are spinning our own paths through explaining what that thing is. Our hope is that there is a listener and a thinker like yourself who seems to just be on it and has accepted the full invite to the kind of world that we feel like we’re already in as a band and as people, which I see the music as just part and parcel of.”
While so much of this record is a love letter to the great 80s and 90s metal acts, Horrendous capture the spirit of – and breathe new life into – the classics, instead of merely aping for nostalgia. The danger that exists in old Judas Priest, Metallica, and Death records, that’s here, in fucking spades. Even the way the record sounds – thanks due in-house engineer extraordinaire Damian Herring – is both inviting and frightening, like the call of the void. Except that Horrendous’ void is affirming and loving. It’s not a happy story, but there’s room for hope and defiance of whatever holds you back.
You can pre-order Ontological Mysterium from Season of Mist. Follow Horrendous on Facebook for future updates.
Image courtesy of Scott Kinkade.
