THŪN – II
Release Date: 1st July 2022
Label: Eat Lead & Die
Bandcamp
Genre: Death Metal, Doom, Sludge.
FFO: Inter Arma, My Dying Bride, Morbid Angel, Thou.
Review By: Rory Bentley
At a time of year where I should be listening to nothing but summer bangers and every Punk band that’s ever been on a Tony Hawks soundtrack, I am once again faced with ingesting and evaluating another work of bleak abject misery and blood-chilling extremity. The barbecues and the beach trips can wait for a while because THŪN have just dropped their sophomore album, and they’re here to smash our collective faces in.
The band have a sound that is often both nauseatingly experimental, yet comfortingly familiar (if your idea of comfort is being engulfed by a reservoir of sludge). Disorienting and ambitious opener Where All Truths Lie is a perfect example of this. There are elements of Doom, Sludge, Death and Progressive Metal that weave in and out of this monolithic composition. After crushing Doom chords and guttural vocals kick things off, we are taken through mournful arpeggios, pounding double kick drums, screeching Black Metal sections and some good old Southern Sludge grooves. It’s a real seat of your pants experience and one that hurt my little brain the first few listens. Transitions come thick and fast, and it’s hard to grab a foothold in the song until you’ve sat with it for a while. The rewards are worth the pain, but casual listeners beware!
Look To The Sea is a slightly more palatable follow up in the way that being punched in the gut is marginally easier to endure than having your nose broken, with a more arcane feel like the more evil elements of Morbid Angel. The drums are often jazzy in their freedom as they dance over modal scales that evoke an ancient demon rising from the depths, and the overall structure settles into a more Death Doom vibe. There’s still a wealth of ideas on display, and you’ll need a decent pair of headphones or a good speaker to pick up on every intricacy, but nonetheless there is more cohesion here.
Having survived the early onslaught of the record, Kiss The Ground offers the ‘catchiest’ moments yet. Driven by a chugging Heavy Metal riff, there is an admirable compositional restraint to proceedings that gives the song a momentum that offers the perfect change of pace to the flow of the album. The leadwork over the austere soundscape has an elegance that recalls the Southern panache of Inter Arma’s last two releases, where a more human soulfulness interacts with savage darkness and the melodic bass outro is just plain gorgeous.
I Have Failed You and Completely are a welcome dose of brevity to the running order, the former a pedal-down savage attack with an utterly vile bass tone and warp-speed drumming that dispenses with cerebral atmospherics and goes straight for the throat; while the latter offers a soothing acoustic interlude to let you patch up a few of the battle wounds the album has inflicted up to this point.
Zero Growth’s title belies the band’s progressive tendency, providing a more disciplined but no less barbaric contribution that has eerie arpeggios and a hypnotic almost Post-Metal sway that adds yet another wrinkle to the album while keeping a tight lid on the more chaotic elements of earlier songs, perhaps wisely considering the finale is another epic pilgrimage to the void.
Final Cut was never going to be a four-minute banger, this album had to conclude with something that smashed my tiny mind to pieces, but I could not have predicted the result. Despite its extremity and mammoth length, this is in many ways the most euphoric and rousing moment of the entire work. Of course there are multiple transitions and changes of pace and of course the drums and scything tremolo guitars are front and centre, but who would have predicted the uplifting melodies and abundance of hooks. There are psychedelic licks and vocal melodies that reminded me of Jane’s Addiction here, as the song builds from its serene, purposeful intro into the climactic explosion of joy at the end. Soaring high range vocals and celestial lead-work give this crescendo the feeling of being pulled from the mire and breathing in the clean air of a new life. I don’t know how we got here, but I’m so glad we did.
This is not an easy album to digest, as you will have already gathered. The production is raw and ragged in a way that recalls the early 90s work of My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost, the vocals are nihilistically harrowing, and the earlier songs make no effort to ease you into the world being built here. Yet persevere, and you will find an exhilarating journey through sorrow into joy that you’ll hear on very few (if any) records this year. This is hard work, but hard work pays off in the end!
(4 / 5)
