Today we’re stoked as fuck to unveil the debut album of atmospheric black metal storm bringers IMPERIAL CULT! The Dutch destroyers may be debuting their first album today, but they are no noobs in this game, hailing to the contrary from quite a few other bastions of the Dutch extreme underground like Turia, Nusquama, Cryptae, Lubbert Das, Horrid Apparition, Dead Neanderthals, Solar Temple, Heavy Natural, Iskandr, Celestial Bodies, and DungeönHammer. So you know what to expect here: black metal mastery of the highest order crafted by some of the most brutal and uncompromising musicians in the game today. In presenting us the work the labels have stated that “the phantasmal vocals, combined with the repetitive intensity of the music, create an impenetrable fortress casting its spectral shadow unto a scorched and barren wasteland”, and when you hear this thing you’ll immediately understand why they’d describe Imperial Cult this way…
Sonically A Spasm of Light brings to mind Fell Voices due to the furious, repetitive, and mind-collapsing repetitions and epic buildups upon which the compositions are built which throw the listener into a disorienting trance that annihilates the synapses. But while there may be some similarities in the general idea, Imperial Cult stands completely on its own as they’ve perhaps even crossed a new threshold in that realm of trance black metal and taken this approach to next level of absurd. Being A Spasm of Light a single 33-minute monster track, the album feels more like a voyage. A horrific trip straight into the eye of a humongous and vorticose storm that devours everything. Every single part of the song is a frenzy of constant motion, unrelenting, unyielding in its violent intents, self-replicating, and eternally multiplying, almost like the virulent and chaotic music is dangerously reaching a critical mass or a pressure point of no return at which point implosion and complete collapse will be inevitable and apocalyptic. While all these moving parts move at supersonic speed devouring everything in their path, it’s the repetitions and the cyclical haze of noise and background atmospheric that create this cyclonic effect that throws the listener into a hideous trance, and making for such a glorious and defiant listening experience. A Spasm of Light is out on —- through Sentient Ruin (US LP/tape), Amor Fati Productions (EU LP/CD), and Haeresis Noviomagi (EU tape).
Haeresis Noviomagi.
