NOTHINGNESS

Life has been pretty eventful in Minneapolis over the last few months. The third album from NOTHINGNESS is almost certainly not a direct response to anything happening on the streets, but it still sounds like a sizeable act of rebellion, if only within the thriving US death metal scene. Building upon the left-field brutality of 2023's widely praised "Supraliminal", these inveterate weirdos continue to eschew their peers' more straightforward approach, preferring instead to make music that is as perverse as it is monstrously heavy. Against the usual odds, "Godslaughter" manages to score highly in terms of both old-school grit and off-piste subversion, with songs that satisfy all the usual death metal requirements while also taking the genre down some willfully obtuse and gruesome new paths.

It starts with a short and savage blast of violence. "Incinerated Immediately" is a jaw-dropping entry point into NOTHINGNESS's singular world: scabrous, scuzzy and brilliantly chaotic, it takes less than two minutes to nail this band's colors to a grainy, bloodstained mast of their own creation. In contrast, "Convulsing Putrefaction" is a more revealing glimpse of the Minnesotans' wild imaginations, as DEMILICH-style discord collides with unstoppable grooves and a bewildering deluge of ugly riffs. Both "Skull Evulsion" and "Trenchant Glunch" have been released as singles, but any hopes NOTHINGNESS had of conquering mainstream radio are swiftly dispatched with maximum violence, and a never-ending stream of abominable filth. In particular, "Trenchant Glunch" comes as close to more routine notions of modern death metal than anything else here, but even within its relatively normal structure, there are some deeply warped elements festering away in the background.

The nausea-inducing churn that NOTHINGNESS harness throughout "Godslaughter" is on full display during "Vanquishing Providence". Initially a pitiless, doomed-out horror-show, its seven-minute duration is full of eccentric, ever-mutating riffs that punch their way out of an overall cacophony of militant extremity, with multiple shifts in mood and tempo that conspire to render the whole thing entirely beyond comprehension. Fortunately, NOTHINGNESS are as shrewd as they are deranged, and "Vanquishing Providence" contains just enough memorable guitar motifs and pugnacious vocals to allay fears that its creators are disappearing up their own collective fundament. The same is true with "Divine Irresponsibility", which begins like classic INCANTATION in full-on abyss-summoning mode, before exploding into bursts of feral speed that are made even more devastating by the sheer horror generated by an unhinged ensemble performance. There are plenty of bands that can rival NOTHINGNESS when it comes to heaviness and devotion to the old-school cause, but very few that write songs with such a skewed core essence. Creators of a wall of sound so dense and discombobulating that it often threatens to descend into abject chaos, these miscreants are turning the irrevocably sick into pure, metallic science.

The final three tracks take "Godslaughter" even further into the twisted territory that sets NOTHINGNESS apart from the contemporary hordes. "Incredible Violence" is disgustingly extreme and visceral, as blastbeats erupt like machine-gun fire and vocalist Barclay Olson hits a new level of guttural command; "Umbral Spear" is darker and more atmospheric, but still utterly vicious and defiantly nontraditional, with grooves hijacked by choking dissonance and a magnificent guitar solo that makes sense of the whole feverish mess of riffs and growls. The closing "Novus Hegemonikon" is the most startling of the lot: a hazy, drumless overture gives way to a monumental, slow-burning journey through pitch-black hell-scapes, as NOTHINGNESS become collectively locked into what sounds like a harrowing descent into some surreal, sanity-threatening state of furious despair. The riffs pulverize like runaway bulldozers, Olson belches his lyrics like a man possessed, and strands of fractured feedback and unsettling keyboard noises add yet more weight and weirdness to the onslaught. "Godslaughter" is anything but a routine death metal album, this is an idiosyncratic dismantling of the expected blueprint, and one of the most adventurous and obnoxious records of the year. Horrible.