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So I have finally gotten my hands on the new Hollenthon record, and it is fucking great.

I’ve been a huge fan of Hollenthon for a long time; they put out two records, one in 1999 and one in 2001, that were just thoroughly fantastic. Really groovy, well-written death metal with a fantastic array of samples (and keyboard parts? never can tell). I’ve never seen anything else like them, really; Amon Tobin-style strings, chants, Yat-Kha, a lot of Leonard Bernstein or Holst-esque orchestration. Of the two, one focuses more on ‘world-music’ style folk and chant, and the other on huge string and brass ensembles. Really, some of the only symphonic metal of any stripe that’s worth listening to.

And then they took 7 years to make a new one, partly while Martin Shirenc worked with his other band, Pungent Stench. At some point last year I became aware that they were working on a new album, and became suitably excited. But my repeated visits to the Hollenthon homepage for any scrap of new information, my high hopes, my love of the original albums, and their incredible distinctiveness also left me a little nervous that the new record wouldn’t be as good.

It’s almost inevitable, after all, that over 7 years a band that so clearly works from a position of originality and creativity would change up, and then who knows whether it would be good or not? And I watched 30 seconds of a Youtube video of the new single, “Son Of Perdition”, and was not buoyed. It was pretty simplistic and lacked the texture and layering that made Domus Mundi and With Vilest Of Worms To Dwell so rich.

So now that I finally have the album, I can say that all my fears were unfounded. It’s a little glossier, as recording techniques have become marginally nicer in the last seven years, but (the first half of) “Son Of Perdition” is a definite outlier; its simple, slightly boneheaded main riff is unlike anything else on the album. The rest of the songwriting on the album is incredibly vital; if Shirenc needed to wait 7 years to write songs that didn’t sound tired or overworked, I won’t begrudge him them.

The sample work on this record kind of splits the difference between the orchestral and the world-music sides. But the nice thing is that the riffwork is awfully catchy, and very much in Hollenthon’s characteristic style. And at first listen the rhythm section has everything very much nailed down; with all the chants and horns, pretty much every track has a monster groove to it.