Just WOW. And from literally out of nowhere, meet Assumption, a band who’s perhaps created one of the (if not THE) most majestic, dismal, and crushing death-doom albums of the year. Absconditus is their first proper LP (after two past EPs) and it’s an utter monster, worshipping right at the altar of legends like Disembowelment and Winter. The colossal album is officially released TODAY April 20th on CD through Everlasting Spew Records (get it here or CDs here), and on tape through Sentient Ruin (get tapes here or here), and both labels will issue an LP version in late summer. The magnificent artwork of the album was done by none else than Lauri Laaksonen, mastermind behind Finnish death metal heathens Desolate Shrine. Behold the behemoth in full:
Through it’s vast and otherworldly soundscapes, within Absconditus the listener is placed at the center of a vacuous cosmos, crushed by the weight of nothingness, and then pulled apart by invisible tidal forces. Assumption are masters at re-evoking with sound this horrific feeling of drifting helplessly through space till death overcomes. Their slow moving walls of sad, cosmic death push you down toward the event horizon till you then start to decay and get slowly and meticulously consumed by the singularity. Right before this horrific and silent death occurs, the listener takes their last breath and gets the last glimpse of the beautiful majesty of the universe all around them, right as they disintegrate inside the dying star. This is the moment in which Assumption mesmerize with beautiful psychedelic passages made with harp, synths, violin and flute, before their skull-crushing tidal wall of appallingly slow, crystalline, and downtuned guitars rears its head again, and stomps the listener down into absolute and omnipotent cosmic torment.
Assumption are undeniably one of the most intriguing, mind-expanding, and abstract death-doom bands to appear in the underground in recent times, and this may explain why they are so criminally underrated as they fit into no mold whatsoever. Their Thergoton, Disembowelment, Esoteric, and Evoken-worshipping riff mastery is just one side of their sound, while the other side is made of beautifully executed and crafted minimalist psychedelic dirges, as if drone, chamber music, and ambient almost made up half of the band’s sound. Undoubtedly one of the greatest, and most exquisitely unique releases of the year in the genre.
