NILE

Every time NILE release an album, it feels like something monumental is taking place. More than 30 years after first forming, and 26 years since the release of their debut album, Karl Sanders's crew are one of the biggest and most revered bands in death metal. From early classics like "Black Seeds Of Vengeance" and "In Their Darkened Shrines", through to more recent efforts like 2015's excellent "What Should Not Be Unearthed", NILE have established and nurtured a strong and powerful identity that has somehow retained a degree of mystique, even in this age of remorseless oversharing. Their tenth full-length studio record, "The Underworld Awaits Us All" has an aura of invincibility, even before it starts. When it does burst into life, it soon becomes apparent that NILE are on terrifyingly good form.

NILE are definitely not here to fuck around. Death metal albums often favor the reliable dynamic of a spooky, instrumental intro, but "Stelae Of Vultures" has absolutely no time for such nonsense. With everything propelled along by the spectacular drumming of the inestimable George Kollias, NILE go straight for the throat, waiving the need to set the ancient Egyptian scene, and delivering a mind-bending display of virtuoso prowess for six bewildering minutes.

It would be easy to miss how utterly alien and disorientating this band's music can be. It swirls and swarms like a biblical plague, both miraculously agile and relentlessly punishing, and conjures a dense, claustrophobic atmosphere all of its own, even without aesthetic or musical signifiers from the ancient world. Here, songs like recent singles "Chapter For Not Being Hung Upside Down On A Stake In The Underworld And Made To Eat Feces By The Four Apes" (song title of the year, or maybe any year?) and the short, savage "To Strike With Secret Fang" are products of boundless confidence and self-belief: artful, uncompromising death metal with sky high technical standards and the darkest charisma. More importantly, NILE fucking rip. Whether it's Kollias's insane chops, Sanders's seemingly bottomless supply of excoriating riffs, or the priapic energy of a revitalized lineup (guitarist Zach Jeter and bassist Dan Vadim Von make their debuts here),  everything that occurs within those tight whirlwinds of aggression builds an otherworldly atmosphere through intensity alone. When the expected passages of ghoulish grandeur interrupt the quintet's merciless forward march, the impact is far greater than it would have been had "The Underworld Awaits Us All" been awash with prolonged interludes and dynamic scene-building.

Nonetheless, diehard fans will not be disappointed with the mutant mirages that these songs summon. In particular, "Doctrine Of Last Things" is a phenomenal creation: with deformed doom riffs and hyper-speed payoffs, shining welcome light on NILE's progressive instincts. Similarly, both "True Gods Of The Desert" and the title track revel in the open-ended promise of this band's epoch-shattering sound. The former is a brutally slow and gleefully overblown slither through sand-blasted ruins; the latter is a ferocious maelstrom of vicious riffs, triple-headed vocals and retooled old-school tropes, rendered timeless and undeniable by the near-magical skills of those performing it. NILE are plainly one of the greatest death metal bands of them all, but it is also worth noting that they are a fantastic and versatile heavy metal band at heart, and even at their most extreme, a wayward sense of melody looms large.

Ultimately, NILE are just better than most other bands, and "The Underworld Awaits Us All" is another triumph. But if the Four Apes tell you to eat feces, just do it.