AN NCS PREMIERE: URANIUM — “AN EXACTING PUNISHMENT”

Almost two years ago, still in the depths of the pandemic, I stumbled across a single named “Trinity” by a one-man weapon named Uranium. It made a startling impression, and left me both eager and frightened to discover the entire album that it was allegedly a part of, a record named An Exacting Punishment. Now I, and all of you, will get that chance, because Sentient Ruin will release the album on January 27th. The label describes the mission statement:

“As the band’s name aptly hints at, Uranium was conceived as an aural vessel to explore the outer limits and the most irreversible states of complete human disintegration, and the incineration of its most defining and triumphant achievements; namely society, progress, technology, and civilization, with nuclear power being the conduit and ultimate engine of the greatest and most horrific forms of total annihilation mankind could ever face.”

To accomplish this horrifyingly bleak and ruinous goal, Uranium have chained together and weaponized power electronics, industrial noise, and black metal, and shrouded it in a hellish atmosphere of awe, terror, and degradation.

To recall my impressions of that early single, which is the album opener: “Trinity” had its ice-cold and punishing features, hammering and smashing like a giant machine, but the twisted fretwork was also more than a little berserk. The intricate and ever-changing drumming nearly stole the show, but the buzzing and cavorting strings had their own way of stealing back a listener’s attention — and there’s no way you could ignore the nightmarish screams (though it took a while for them to make their revenant-like appearance). When the drumming became less of a scene-stealer, the glimmering ambient textures that eventually surfaced gave the music a “cosmic” aspect that I didn’t see coming, and it was a captivating surprise.

More recently, Everything Is Noise premiered another single named “Prison of Flesh”, and today we bring forth the album’s title track.

At first, this newest song skitters and buzzes like a horde of winged ants, or perhaps like the sizzle of flesh being boiled by radiation, and then the sounds howl, scorch, bludgeon, and scream. Dragged by an immense undertow, the song creates a vision of skies on fire and massed humanity screaming in delirious agony. Eerie echoing overtones shine and writhe while the bass undulates and the drums smash — but there’s much more to come in this 10 1/2 minute world-ender.

The industrial drums begin maniacally thundering in the midst of swirling and glittering electronics and hideous gags, snarls, and wails. It gets the blood pumping and the head spinning. Mangling destruction continues to rain and reign, and yet there’s a kind of eye-wide near-celestial splendor in the music as well, as if a god of apocalypse is reveling in its terrifying accomplishments.

 

 

To return to the words of Sentient Ruin about the album as a whole, they describe it as “a five-track, forty-minute radioactive nightmare of complete sonic ruin channelling the darkness of black metal with the scathing immensity of defining post-industrial acts like Brighter Death Now, Godflesh, Wolf Eyes, Swans, MZ. 412, Controlled Bleeding, and Genocide Organ” — and as “an authentic weapon of mass annihilation engineered to face human life with absolute death”.

Sentient Ruin will release the album in an extremely limited “Die-Hard Test Pressing Package”, and in both crystal-clear and standard black vinyl editions, plus a deluxe cassette tape format. You can check out the pre-order options via the link below, and also become consumed by that previously mentioned track “Prison of Flesh“.

PRE-ORDER:
http://sentientruin.com/releases/uranium-an-exacting-punishment
https://sentientruin.bandcamp.com/album/an-exacting-punishment

URANIUM:
https://uraniumvoid.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/URANIUMVOID/