Having been first formed in 2012, the Spanish death metal band Devotion haven’t churned out their releases at a breathless pace. Their devotion to the old metal of death has been expressed more deliberately, and both the pacing of their releases and their stylistic evolutions have been influenced by lineup changes along the way.
What 2024 will bring us is the band’s third album in their dozen years of life, a record fittingly entitled Astral Catacombs that will be released by the Memento Mori label on April 22nd. To help introduce it, today we present a song whose title — and music — spawns thoughts of Lovecraftian terrors.
In the song’s opening moments, it feels like we’ve suddenly been teleported into a killing zone in which hideous alien forces are among the combatants. High-caliber percussive cannonades fire in the red zone; the guitars boil in dense, flesh-eating swarms; an echoing voice roars with dictatorial vehemence, a monstrosity un-tethered to sanity.
The drums also smash like big iron hammers; the bass booms like subterranean detonations; the guitars seethe and squirm in agony; and the music also begins to crawl, morbidly dragging itself (and us) through foul passageways, oozing pustulent slime.
Fevers begin to build in the riffing, and the drums grow more crazed in their ritualistic pounding, just in time for a beautifully weird and wailing guitar solo to slither and swirl — mesmerizing but ultra-chilling. And then, the music becomes perhaps even more hideous than before, the riffing animated by a ghastly pulse as it shivers, the vocals rearing up like a wounded beast with no way out, the drums hammering nails into our new coffin homes.
And so the music proves not only to be a mangling and mauling heavyweight assault but also an atmospheric piece of songwriting, creating sensations from a ghastly dimension that suit the song’s title.
As a further signpost of what Devotion‘s new album presents, we’ll share these words from Memento Mori‘s publicist:
Put another way, we can look to the band’s primary influences of Bolt Thrower, Grave, or Morgoth for precedents: Bolt Thrower‘s transition from The IVth Crusade to …For Victory, for example, or Grave‘s from You’ll Never See... to Soulless, or especially Morgoth‘s from Cursed to Odium. If none of that sounds palatable or enticing, then Astral Catacombs is NOT for you!
Memento Mori will provide the CD edition of Astral Catacombs, graced by the suitably macabre cover art of Naroa Etxebarria. For more info, check the links below as we approach the release date — and also partake of “To Dementia“, the first single from the album, which you can stream below.
MEMENTO MORI:
http://www.memento-mori.es/
https://www.facebook.com/memento.mori.label
DEVOTION:
https://www.facebook.com/deathmetaldevotion
https://devotiondeathmetal.bandcamp.com/