There are times when album art seems absolutely representative of the music contained within. So it is with Irkalla (The Artisan Era), the forthcoming album by Green Bay, Wisconsin’s Aronious. The technical death metal group’s follow-up to their 2020 album Perspicacity, rushes at the listener in relentless, head-spinning waves, as though the band was charting the soundtrack to the formation of galaxies.

Bookended by two brief, deceptively soothing instrumental pieces — where dreamy, layered pianos make no reference to the intensity contained between — about 98% of the rest of this forty-minute album is a whirlwind of wild guitar lines, ridiculously fast double-bass peddling, and aggressive death metal vocals, performed by a band equipped to dazzle with their musicianship and delighted to suddenly pull the listener from one rhythm to the next at the drop of a hat.

Once the second track ‘Descent of Inanna’ opens with an immediate barrage of rapid drums, lurching guitar, a satisfyingly thick, rubbery bass sound and vocals delivered with a whiff of Cannibal Corpse’s Corpsegrinder about them, there’s barely a moment to catch breath. The first breather possibly comes in the fourth track ‘Ereshkigal’, when the track opens up into a proggy, cosmic meander for a few moments before diving back into the powerful, technical assault.

Trying to imagine what one could do with this music in the background is tough. Sex? You might lose a limb. Exercise, you might crash through a window. Perhaps the best thing to do is sit back and just take the waves of death metal intensity and enjoy the spasmic, avantgarde guitar lines that blurt out on tracks like ‘Enkidu’.

Occasionally — as on the previously mentioned ‘Descent of Inanna’ and album highlight ‘Nincubura’ — there’s a flavour of Meshuggah to certain passages, where militant drums underpin convulsing, fluid guitar rhythms. This is just one component to the Aronious sound though. These passages are certainly cool and enjoyable, but the band never hangs around too long before pulling the listener off in some new direction of travel to see some other reaches of the cosmos coming into existence.

Certainly, to enjoy this record the listener has to be in the mood for what the band is selling and that’s near-non-stop technical death metal pummeling away at you and dragging you from left to right at 100mph. If you’re down for that, a very good time awaits.

With all the flashing shifts from one passage to the next, the “money riffs” when they come are all the more satisfying. Up with the brilliant, spiralling latter passage of the previously mentioned ‘Nincubura’, ‘Elu Ultu Irkalla’ plots a mad path of technical carnage, tricks the listener with a false ending and then treats them to a closing sequence that sounds like Opeth’s Blackwater Park outro shot through a dying star. You’d be hard-pressed not to bop your head.

Occasionally fatigue almost sets in with the relentlessness of the tech-death merry-go-round, but with the few pauses for breath, the many points of melodic interest and the moderate run time this should leave fans of the style wanting more rather than tiring before the end. Ready for a blast into new dimensions? Strap in, Aronious is at the controls and they won’t be slowing down to take in the scenery.

Buy the album here: https://aronious.bandcamp.com/album/irkalla

8 / 10

TOM OSMAN