VENOM PRISON

Thanks to two scabrous and impressive studio albums and, perhaps more importantly, frontwoman Larissa Stupar's enlightened, progressive and relentlessly ferocious conceptual vision, VENOM PRISON find themselves in the enviable position of being an extreme metal band with widespread support from metal media and genuine mainstream crossover potential. What comes with that, whether they like it or not, are the kind of high expectations that have often ruined aspiring young bands in the past. "Erebos" is manifestly the most high-profile album the Welsh quintet have made to date. But where lesser bands might have grasped the commercial nettle and diluted their formula to attract a more mainstream audience, VENOM PRISON have conjured a mercilessly heavy and creative storm of highly evolved death metal. Curiously, "Erebos"is more accessible than either "Samsara" (2019) or the band's "Animus" debut (2016),but it is their increasingly nuanced and dynamic songwriting, and the ongoing development of Stupar's vocal and lyrical efforts, that elevate this far beyond any previous achievements.

It was evident on earlier albums that VENOM PRISON took a liberal approach to cross-pollination, with shades of everything from old-school East Coast death metal to the billowing sludge of post-metal rearing its head. "Erebos" is vastly more diverse than its predecessors, with more room for melody and atmosphere, but the essence of the band's sound remains the same: a wild and willful mixture of extreme metal tropes, heavy on groove but thrillingly unpredictable. And again, these are the best songs that VENOM PRISON have written by some distance. "Judges of the Underworld" was hurled down as a statement of intent late last year, and if you need proof of how far this band have come in a relatively short space of time, here it is: five minutes of shape-shifting brutality, with at least three significant hooks and an explosive and commanding vocal performance from Stupar. It's wholly uncompromising but also grand, intricate and intelligently constructed. Similarly, "Nemesis" erupts with a flurry of screeched slogans and infernal riffing, before mutating multiple times across its waste-free, four-minute duration, and reaching a brilliantly thuggish crescendo. "Comfort Of Complicity" draws from more traditional death metal source material, and VENOM PRISON's restless spirit ensures that every seamless transition leads to somewhere equally heavy and repulsive, but often startlingly unexpected. The song's grandiloquent coda weaves in dark melodies and a sumptuous flourish of morbid theatre, with echoes of black metal's night-sky vastness bolstering an already punishing collage of riffs.

Arguably the one moment on "Erebos" that might give the metal applecart a robust nudge, "Pain of Oizys" elegantly combines hazy but grim post-rock atmospherics, a wonderfully bluesy lead break and another eyeball-popping Stupar vocal. It's the most daring moment on the album and an outright triumph.

Impressively, the second half of "Erebos" maintains the first half's lofty standards. When a band makes an album that both refines and redefines what they do to this degree, and with such self-evident passion for the creative process on display, it's a dark-hearted joy to behold. Laudably free of cliché, consistently vicious and imbued with supreme confidence and self-belief, songs like "Castigated in Steel and Concrete" and jaw-dropping, gleefully grotesque album closer "Technologies of Death" showcase a band that earned a shot at bigger and better things and absolutely rose to the challenge. "Erebos" is smart, exciting and bursting with new ways to raze this shitty world to the ground. Potential fulfilled. World domination next, presumably.