(In this post TheMadIsraeli reviews the new second album by the Portuguese band Primal Attack.)
Primal Attack are an instance where the name absolutely tells you everything you need to know about the music. This is the first album this year that I can call an absolute balls-to-the-wall, no frills, uncompromisingly brutal metal album in its sheer intensity. Heartless Oppressor is exactly the sound of all the world’s major powers nuking the fuck out of each other. It’s a pretty fitting post-inauguration “I need to vent my rage at ignorance, white supremacy, and anti-intellectualism” album.
Primal Attack started out as a thrash band with their debut album, but Heartless Oppressor is a mean obsidian slab of thrash, death metal, and metallic hardcore. Think Marco Aro-era The Haunted, Gojira, Merauder/Hatebreed, and I’d say that’s a pretty fair encapsulation.
Whether or not the album meets your preferences in heaviness, it is the most angry record of 2017 thus far that I’ve heard. It’s so unrelentingly chest-beating, knuckle-breaking, curb-stomping, and savage in what it does, and the passion is so on fire, that I really don’t think any sensible metalhead will be able to find a reason not to love it on some level.
It employs the swaggering groove of a lot of NY hardcore combined with thrash metal’s energetic technical riffing and the gargantuan comet-sized grinding grooves of death metal. I mean, this album is like throwing a Molotov cocktail into a room filled with oil barrels.
It helps that the riffs are great. It has reminded me that there actually is such a thing as good riffs with chug to them; in other bands, they just aren’t done much with the proper force and balls behind them. Combine this with a drummer employing metalized dance beats, and the grooves on this album hit like a ton of bricks that stick to you. The combination on the riff front of meaty chunk and catchy melodies really sells what they are doing here.
Definitely a fantastic album if you want something that’s just plain balls to the wall piss and vinegar pissed the fuck off.
Heartless Oppressor is set for release on February 10th via Rastilho Records, but it’s streaming and available for order now, at this location:
https://rastilho.bandcamp.com/album/heartless-oppressor
Primal Attack on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/primalattack/