ORTHODOXY Ater Ignis LP [VINYL 12"]

LP version comes with an insert.

Listen: https://orthodoxy.bandcamp.com/album/ater-ignis

"It was but 2019 when Orthodoxy made their full-length debut for The Sinister Flame with Novus Lux Dominus. With members hailing from Domains, also part of The Sinister Flame's very selective cabal, it was perhaps unsurprising that Orthodoxy emerged with such impact and immediacy. Although salacious, supernatural slime had been brewing with the band's 2015 demo - and the Spaniards had formed sometime during the past decade - Novus Lux Dominus was a magickal experience: all-caps DEATH METAL, pure and proud, but with sights solely focused on the Beyond. Its incredibly dark and sinister delights were hailed far and wide.

Now Orthodoxy dive deeper into the bowels of the Beyond with their second album, Ater Ignis. Thankfully, no great changes have been made - their execution's still utterly gutted, muscularity in hideous alignment with atmosphere, and production sympathetic to both - but there's a pronounced lurking dread here. For one, the seven-song/45-minute album suggests more epic constructions, and twistingly epic songwriting one will find here in Ater Ignis' abyss. That that songwriting seems to slither and twisted in vulgar ways renders Orthodoxy's Metal of Death all the more unique when stacked against nowadays' glut of "caverncore." For another, while their attack still maintains a straightforward sensibility, there's equally a sense of the ceremonial here - of eldritch blood rites, celestial sadism, the taboo made flesh. The crisp production once again heightens Orthodoxy's subtly keen execution, with the occasional appearance of haunting leads further making Ater Ignis an otherworldly experience.

As founding multi-instrumentalist NTN cryptically concludes, "Devoted to constant transformation, under our prism and sole dictate, a phantasmagoric embrace blooms in Ater Ignis. An occult manifestation, as dynamic as relentless, a solid and ruthless force of gnarly Sinister Death Metal."