ORYX – PRIMORDIAL SKY

(Andy Synn follows the migratory patterns of the majestic Oryx as they prepare to release their new album)

To witness a band go from “good” to “great” – as Oryx did with 2021’s Lamenting a Dead World – is one of the great pleasures for a music writer/reviewer.

But being there to see them go from not just “great” to truly “world-class” is an even rarer phenomenon.

Which is why you should all keep an ear out for the band’s newest – and best – album next week.

Now, to clarify, it’s not so much that Primordial Sky represents some sort of paradigm-shifting quantum leap for the group – they’ve been on this path, and on the cusp, for quite a few years, if you’ve been paying attention – and more that the band’s fourth (or fifth, depending on how you count things) album just takes that next natural step which serves to put them over the top.

Make no mistake, these four tracks are in many ways just as heavy, just as ugly, and just as soul-crushingly bleak as the band have ever been, but by upping the dosage of melody injected into the music, and sharpening up their songwriting skills ever so slightly – with nary a wasted note or misplaced moment to be found here – Oryx have also crafted something that is even more haunting, and even more hypnotic, than ever before.

Take the titanic, thirteen minute title-track which opens the album… yes, it’s humongously heavy riffs and lumbering low-end quickly mark it out as one of the heaviest, weightiest songs of the band’s career, to the extent that every sludge-ridden, doom-laden note possesses an almost physical, palpable presence, but it’s the eerie melodic undercurrent teased throughout the song – which begins to ascend to prominence (and dominance) around about the half-way mark, building to an unexpectedly majestic (perhaps even subtly psychedelic) and utterly mesmerising crescendo – that makes it far more than just the sum of its parts.

Similarly, there’s a sense of melancholy beauty which gives “Myopic” an almost Black Metal-esque sheen, flickering auroras of cold, captivating melody shimmering and shivering amidst all the groaning riffs and guttural growls – with the moody acoustic bars and shrieking vocals which crown the song’s second half pushing the band’s sound that little bit closer to Panopticon than, say, Primitive Man – while the sombre slow-burn of “Ephemeral” then takes this a step further, every crashing chord tinged with shades of haunted harmony in a way that only reaffirms the band’s shift towards more of an overtly “Blackened Doom” sound.

It’s a subtle shift, yes, but sometimes that’s all it takes to change everything, and in the brooding, sorrowful strains of “Look Upon the Earth” (which grows, slowly but surely, from a fragile seed of atmospheric guitars and ambient synths into a soaring monolith of thundering riffs, electrifying leads, and chiming melodic notes that elevates the band’s sound to an entirely new plane) Oryx demonstrate, definitively, that – whatever they once were – they’ve now truly become what they were always meant to be.