Aphotic's Massive Death Metal is a "Horizonless" Nightmare (Early Track Stream)

Listening to Aphotic‘s upcoming album Abyssgazer feels like plummeting down through an infinite void. It’s technically not infinite, coming in at a hefty but digestible (and vinyl-friendly) 44 minutes long, but every second of that runtime only seems to drag listeners deeper into the Italian band’s ever-expanding chamber of misery. It’s dense and enveloping, with indulgent layers of reverb attached to cascading layers of grief. We’re premiering the track “Horizonless” today: enjoy a five-plus minute slice of this doomed journey below.

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Aphotic intermingles enormous atmospheric textures with plain, nasty metal of both the doom and death varieties; it’s the bare-metal lethality that lurks at the center of the storm. On “Horizonless,” vicious barrages and generally just tasty death metal bits have a place alongside massive, reality-shifting sections where the guitars feel more like an ethereal force of nature than six-stringed riff-delivery vehicles. All throughout the track, a sense of dread builds, only reinforced further by the echoing vocals and jangly clean guitar tones that permeate. Here, as on the rest of Abyssgazer, Aphotic start from a genuinely exciting base of death and doom metal and only ramp it up from there with laboriously-executed atmospheric development.

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Abyssgazer releases March 24th via Sentient Ruin Laboratories. EU release will be through Nuclear Winter Records.