DRUPARIA

Sending us on our way into a new year with more energy than seems strictly reasonable, DRUPARIA have jaw-dropping potential. "The River Above" is another album that could easily get overlooked amid the chaos of Christmas, but it deserves much more. Creators and skilled peddlers of a technically devastating and often ferocious strain of melodic death metal, the Ohio quintet make countless brave and bold choices on their debut.

The first thing that most will notice about DRUPARIA is how tight and brutal they are. "Voiceless Regret" feels like a statement of intent, with spine-jolting precision and explosive individual performances that mesh together into a single, focused bolt of sound. A notch or two faster than the majority of like-minded melo-death bands, they really tear the place apart.

"The River Above" seems to draw from a wide spread of influences, and not always the most obvious melo-death pioneers. There is a strong European vibe throughout, but even the most obvious nods to AT THE GATES are tempered by fearsome undercurrents of American metalcore, and bands like HIMSA and DEAD TO FALL, circa 20 years ago. The sum of those parts is subtly distinctive and married to some truly great songs. "Voiceless Regret" and "Under The Shade Of Sand" lay down the template: classic metal pushed to a breathless extreme, but driven by a very modern intensity. "Under The Shade Of Sand" dips into the iciness of blackened melo-death, rips along like THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER in a hurry, and hits home with a constant stream of pristine hooks and elegant athletics from drummer Noah Van Dyke; "Bereavement" is a lung-exploding sprint with an infectious melodic refrain, blistering lead breaks and the perfect amount of turbocharged MAIDEN worship. Progressive touches are deftly executed, too. A gorgeous mid-song interlude has the delicate depths of early OPETH, and several other songs take similar detours into more ornate and eccentric realms.

But at its heart, "The River Above" is all about exhilaration and supreme focus. DRUPARIA are such a lethal, locked-in unit, with so many tricks up their sleeves, that the whole enterprise feels vastly more mature and meticulous than we might expect from a debut. Songs like the grandiose and melancholy "Kintsugi", and the triumphant, whiplash-inducing title track, are tightly structured and delivered with wide-eyed, evangelical zeal. Tangential leaps like the snow-blasted melodrama of "When Cranes Return" make perfect dynamic sense and point to greater compositional depths that DRUPARIA are destined to explore in the future. Most importantly, when they are flying along at full pelt, as on the shapeshifting, heads-down attack of "Bled For Comfort", they kick up an insane amount of elite-level, melo-death dust. A new force awakens. Exciting.