When listening to Nekus you feel as though you are descending into a dark cavern beneath the Earth, eventually finding yourself lost in a spectral dominion where ghastly apparitions slowly come crawling out of the pitch black shadows. The German/Italian death doom act really unleashes a suffocating style of monolithic sounding destruction with the upcoming release to their debut album, “Sepulchral Divination.”
The album traverses far down into the hellish death doom depths by hammering out some utter agonizing riffs and sludgy sounding arrangements. As much as I would consider this a death doom album, I hear influences from sludge/doom bands like Noothgrush and Grief, which is why this album sounds inhumanely heavy at times. Compared to a lot of death doom that I have encountered over the years, Nekus finds a way to capture your attention with extremely vivid ominous sounding atmospheric elements to accompany the merciless aural bludgeoning.
The six tracks featured on this album are very well produced and tell this nightmarish tale as you become engulfed by the monstrous sounding riffs. On the opening track, “Nekyia,” I was completely taken back by the song’s abrasive tone as well as the more frantic sounding arrangements. I really liked the drumming on the first track, which I thought added a great deal of seismic force to compliment the juggernaut sized amounts of distortion coming from the guitar parts. Track number two, “Eidolon,” starts out with a more sludge metal like feel at first and then continues to move along to this sadistic and haunting tempo. The song is utterly horrifying, primarily due to the purely evil riffs accompanied by even more abhorrent sounding vocal parts.
Another point to bring up about this album is that there are quite a few ten minute plus songs, however the compositions do not come across as egregiously repetitive, nor do they sound cheaply thrown together. Take for example the last song on the album, “Elysion,” which is eleven minutes and probably one of the most putrid offerings off of the album. During the beginning of the song you hear these agonizing cries in the distant as the guitarist slowly hacks away at some malevolent chord progressions. You are left with this feeling that you are alone sitting in complete darkness as the distortion fills your mind, twisting your sanity until you become paralyzed with unfathomable fear. One of my favorite tracks on album, “Stygian,” was also very much an exploration through these punishing dynamic arrangements that delivers a tremendous amount of ferocious death doom destruction.
“Sepulchral Divination,” is an extremely ear shattering debut album that once again compliments the Sentient Ruin roster. Nekus is definitely a band that I hope to see continue to explore this type of approach, especially given how impressive the overall production was in terms of creating an insanely loud and pestilent soundscape. This is an album that I highly recommend checking out if you are a fan of death metal which puts emphasis on slow gruesome arrangements, while even offering an abysmal touch of sludge to give the music an even more hellacious sound. Also, make sure to turn the volume up really loud when listening to the album, that way your neighbors can also hear the cataclysmic death doom devastation!
Check out the track "Katabasis" below (Album comes out April 7, 2023):
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