Mavericks from the start, Blood Incantation never gave the impression that death metal was the be all and end all. On their debut album, Starspawn, they announced their widescreen vision. Complex, cerebral and cosmic, the Colorado quartet were tricky to pin down, and all the more thrilling as a result. 2019’s Hidden History Of The Human Race took their brutal, psychedelic and prog-inspired indulgences deeper into uncharted territory, and the only sensible response was to gaze on in awe.
Death metal’s chief lysergic professors took an extraordinary detour in 2022, releasing the ambient space rock monolith Timewave Zero, and confounding most people’s notions of what Blood Incantation were capable of in the process. And now there’s this: a 45-minute, two-song exploration of what happens when death metal and progressive rock reach an exquisite state of symbiosis. This is not progressive death metal in the traditional sense. Instead, Blood Incantation have imagined and made real a world where extreme metal becomes just one of many vital threads in a kaleidoscopic, mind-bending tapestry.
