Knowledge Through Suffering

Knowledge Through Suffering Eliminates Celestial "Concealment" With Annihilating Insight (Early Album Stream)


Blackened death metal is, for my money, the best combination of metal’s philosophical inclinations and genre-exclusive pleasures. It has the best of black metal and death metal while existing in and of itself, congealing death metal’s tangibility and ease of appreciation with black metal’s effervescence. It takes the difficulty in defining the merits of the latter and puts them into the lens of the former. With this framing, the one-man Italian band Knowledge Through Suffering grasps for answers to questions befitting only a god on his debut album Concealment, which we’re premiering in full below.

Knowledge Through Suffering is the pummeling child of black metal’s soul-searching through musical extremities, doom metal’s scope, and death metal’s putrefaction, with his biggest strength being his sheer magnitude. On Concealment, they trudge through three colossal tracks sticking closer to a death/doom framework with the desperation of black metal. Though the sonic traces are scarce—you won’t find tremolo picking, raw production, or drilling repetition—black metal’s drive beyond humanity for ethereal solace is present. Knowledge Through Suffering is searching for an expression that can only be sincerely exposed with immensity.

Concealment lyrically and conceptually focuses on God’s disappointment with his children. He must reckon with his offspring’s sins leading them astray from his path. Buried within that is a tinge of self-loathing, presented itself through the monstrous riffs. There’s segments of caveman, warlike death metal that punctuate Knowledge Through Suffering’s disgust with mankind. God dismisses the Earth and humanity as wastes, while he is saddled with shame— both are his creations, after all. This internal tension presents itself in pig squeals and raw shouts in the closer “Of Flesh.” Elsewhere, the riffs are so densely layered you can feel God sweating under the pressure.As much as Concealment is an album of vitriol—the best kind of vitriol that caustic, unfiltered, old school death metal bleeds—it’s also a meditation on one’s complacency with dissatisfaction.

From the band:

Concealment stands for regrets and drastic solutions; as everything concerning K.T.S., this record is a declaration of war to the very self on multiple levels. The point was tracing similarities and parallelisms on the subject of creation between mysticism and art: as God relentlessly tries to create the best version of himself through matter and space and inevitably fails, so does the true seeker of beauty through his constant but futile efforts to become what he will never be. Ironically, my last effort of beauty is a putrid and filthy hybrid of Black, Death and Doom Metal that wants nothing but to bring your spirit down through a spiraling void of HM-2 guitars and cavernous sermons on divine judgement.

Concealment releases September 15th via Brucia Records.