Nethermancy brandish their devotion to evil black metal right in the title of their new album Worship Evil Sacrifice, not to mention the cover image, and they do a damned effective job carrying their devotion into the hellish nightmare realms their music creates.
These Portuguese practitioners have not hurried their blasphemous work. Their discography shows a decade-long gap between their first and second albums, and six years have passed between this new full-length (their fourth album) and the last one before it (2017’s Magick Halls of Ascension). Not surprisingly, there have also been some line-up changes since the band’s birth in 1996. But Nethermancy‘s devotion to the oldest black metal roots hasn’t changed. They’ve only sharpened the cutting edge of their blades, re-fueled their torches so they blaze even brighter, and supercharged their venomous rage.
Photo by João Dourado
As the first example of this, you have the new album’s initial single, “Tyrants | Usurpers Of Light“. As we wrote when we first heard it, the music brings forth rolling waves of fiery yet freezing riffage and eerie yet grandiose keys (or maybe those are just more guitars) over a steady, skipping beat — which periodically erupts in booming flurries and ends in the pounding tones of a grand ritual.
The song does sound like the sanctified rise of some ancient evil, reveling in its hideous might, but the atmosphere is also as chilling as tombs. It sounds poisonous and imperious, and the shrieking and roaring vocals channel the unhinged fury of demons finally freed from their chains.
Now consider “The Fall of Man“, the song we’re presenting today through an official video.
Through a yowling and slithering riff that writhes in reverberating tones, coupled with the shrill screaming of a second guitar, riotous drumming, and pure vocal sulphur, the song quickly creates an atmosphere that’s both dismal and crazed, both menacing and hopeless, and altogether hellish.
The guitars sizzle in their madness, but elevated blasts of sound create sensations of diabolical majesty while the drums maniacally blast away and the words pour out in hair-raising shrieks. The drumming shifts, and the relentlessly vibratory riffing morphs into even more grim and grievous displays, before the musical cauldrons boil again and those high fanfares of hellish splendor rise up again.
There’s no mercy to be found here, only viciousness, fear, and downfall, but it’s damned exhilarating nonetheless.
The Portuguese label Helldprod Records will release Worship Evil Sacrifice an April 21st, in a Jewel-Case CD edition with an 8-page booklet on 170gsm paper, limited to 200 copies. Until April 21st, they will offer the CD at a discounted price, with free shipping worldwide.
The label sums up the band’s ethos as “honoring the genre roots from Bathory to Venom and Hellhammer but also blinking the eye of madness to the new wave icons such as Emperor, Immortal or Marduk.
PRE-ORDER:
https://helldprod.bandcamp.com/album/nethermancy-worship-evil-sacrifice
NETHERMANCY:
https://www.facebook.com/Nethermancy