Italian death-doom titans Assumption return with Hadean Tides, their colossal full-length album of majestic liquefying death and doom hallucinations and first new work of new material in four long long years.
“Hadean Tides” sees the Italian quartet take their dismal experimental slow moving death metal formula into a realm of absolutely soul-disintegrating majesty, unfolding nearly an our of abysmal, down-tuned, crawling carnage immersed in contemplative dirges and mesmerizing ambience.
The massive album displays an unseen plethora of chromatics and manifestations of self, adding keys, strings, choral chants, and flutes to the absolute crush-depth to mutate effortlessly between the dismal bleakness of bands like Evoken or Esoteric, the comatose encrusted cavernous rot of death-doom legends like Winter or Disembowelment, and the enigmatic ambience abstractions of ethereal experimental bands like Dead Can Dance and Trial of the Bow.
The band’s masterful melding of styles and transformative approach to the death-doom style incarnates as an absolute colossus of enveloping atmospherics enshrouding a magma of monumental death metal riffs, facing the listener with a deeply spiritual and cinematic listening experience with an immense apocalyptic aura.
Few underground extreme metal bands are capable of evoking such grandiose visions of aphotic dimensions and of shifted states of consciousness as Assumption can harness through the sheer force of godly, death metal riffs juxtaposed to immersive and masterful ambient soundscaping. Yet, their tectonic and otherworldly death-doom rises from the depths once again with imposing majesty as an undisputed beacon of transformation and fearless experimentalism within the darkest ritualism of today’s contemporary death metal.
