After quickly turning out a pair of EPs in 2012 and 2014 (Transcendence and Ataxia), the Portuguese band Elitium fell silent… for a long time. We don’t know all the details about how the last 9 years were spent, but no doubt there were trials and tribulations of various kinds — as well as a lot of work on new music.
That work has borne extravagant fruit, because at last Elitium are returning with an explosive debut album named Wrong that will be released by Gruesome Records, and today we’re presenting an electrifying album track named “Tasteless” accompanied by an excellent music video.
Metal-Archives sums up the sounds of those early Elitium EPs as “Melodic Death Metal/Metalcore”, but they’ll have to amend those genre labels when they hear the new album, and you’ll understand why when you hear the song we’re presenting today. With respect to the song’s lyrical theme, Elitium explain:
Hollow people plague the world with their empty words and convictions, inhabiting precarious shells devoid of self-personality. Many poisons have no flavor or taste, just like mindless parroting can look harmless. Without light, shadows thrive in total darkness.
Elitium picked an excellent track as a preview the new album, because “Tasteless” powerfully shows off the different ways in which the band are capable of firing up a listener’s nerves. It’s part slug-fest and part chaos, part bone-breaking trauma and part convulsive violence, with enough twists to throw listeners off-balance. In keeping with the song’s lyrical themes, it also sounds disgusted, despairing, and enraged.
Those lyrics are expelled in a tag-team match of throat-ripping screams and beastly gutturals. The riffing comes in seething and swirling waves, and the guitars also frantically dart, blare, and slash, creating moods of delirium and cold bleakness. Coupled with an iron-hard bass, they also inflict explosive pile-driving body blows.
The drumming is just as exhilarating as everything else, and morphs with such speed and variability as to pop eyes wide open. It provides a thunderous double-kick rumble, bursts of obliterating blast-beats, snare strikes that feel like a chopping axe, dexterous fills that fly like the wind, and some off-kilter beats that are part of how the band shove you off steady ground.
All in all, in “Tasteless” the band find a sweet spot between impressive technicality and brute-force bludgeoning, while simultaneously morphing the moods among degrees of emotional intensity, from madness to gloom and fury.
And as icing on the cake, Elitium have presented the song through an attention-seizing video. Their faces and forms are mainly in shadow, but we still see enough to realize how intensely they’re throwing themselves into the performance.
For the new music, Elitium claim influences from such bands as Dyscarnate, Ingested, and Thy Art Is Murder, and we think fans of those bands will indeed find a lot to like in Wrong. About the album as a whole, Elitium disclose this:
“Wrong is about humans and humanity, the social brain driven through the architecture of society. All these songs evolved and changed through years of setbacks and tribulations, but we had no doubts when the time came to finally present and name this album. The overall feeling and the conclusion remained the same. There’s wrong in you and around me.”
Gruesome Records is releasing the album in a jewel-case CD edition with a 16-page booklet, and it is going up for pre-order today.
PRE-ORDER:
https://gruesomerecords.bandcamp.com/album/wrong-2023
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