Black Void – Antithesis
Release Date: 27th May 2022
Label: Nuclear Blast Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Punk, Black Metal.
FFO: Midnight, Kvelertak, Carpathian Forest, Motorhead, Venom.
Review By: Rick Farley
If you’re in the camp of thinking that black metal and punk has nothing new to say or that either genre, can’t progress any further, than you clearly haven’t listened to Black Void. I’m not the biggest fan of name-dropping other bands in reviews, but here it’s necessary to paint the picture. If you were to have Venom, Discharge, Carpathian Forest, Ramones, Motorhead, and Midnight all fight to the death and then the remaining musicians left, wrote and released an album, that’s what this sounds like. Crusty punk rock energy and black metal’s raw fury mixed with doomy pop savvy style choruses, catchy hooks that call to several forms of classic rock and whatever genre splicing wizardry you can think of. The absolute bonkers thing about this is that it works remarkably well. It’s a very progressive record in the idea that it incorporates many other musical ideas while focusing the sound on a punky, blackened high energy filthiness. Memorable, intense, tuneful, raucous, grim, volatile, and menacing are all adjectives that could be used to describe parts of nearly every song. A cornucopia of delightfully furious black metal and punky attitude.
Black Void is spearheaded by vocalist/bassist Lars Are Nedland, long time member of Borknagar and the driving force behind melodic hard rock band White Void, which happens to be the polarizing but very opposite entity of this band. Antithesis is everything the White Void album is not: monochrome, nihilistic, crusty, violent and raw. Rounded out by guitarist Jostein Thomassen (Borknagar) and drummer Tobias Solbakk (Ihsahn) Black Void has the sensitivity of a buzzsaw and the light heartedness of a funeral director.
Tenebrism of Life opens with a mid-paced Maiden-esque melody and ringing out chords overtop in the most classic rock way. The full band comes in bringing energy to the melody with tremolo strummed guitars emphasizing those three chords. Harsh raspy higher pitched screams lead to slithery and grating spoken words over the now sweeping clean guitars, creating an uneasiness between the two. The song takes a more black metal approach around the two-minute mark, having an almost militaristic quality about it. The riffs pull yet another unexpected turn into a hammer on, pull off, groove that’s bound to get you banging your head. Stomping thick low end, double bass and background synths take this riff to fist pumping heights. It careens into a doom-laden poppy vocal just for a couple bars, kicks up the blast beats and ends with the melody that started the song with a hooky sing along worthy part overtop.
My favourite and embedded video Dadaist Disgust is a serious high point. It features guest vocals from Sakis Tolis of Rotting Christ and just crushes the bad ass factor. The song starts out with an almost bluesy metal swagger. Pumping bass and basic groovy rock beat, slightly reminiscent of Motorhead. With the nasty pure black vocals overtop, this is black metal meets classic rock. A few clean vocal melodies, airy proggy guitars, ferocious blast beats and damn fine heavy metal chugging riffs unite everything into a one hell of a track.
Antithesis lyrically builds on the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche, becoming a nihilistic musical outburst equivalent to flipping off morality. The record pays homage to fifty years of punk and forty years of black metal, sounding like a delinquent kid with a mohawk fighting a dude with corpse paint. In the words of Black Void, Reject Everything. 
(3.5 / 5)
