It took three long years but the wait is finally over, Minnesota’s surrealistic death metal shapeshifters Aberration (who feature in their ranks members of Suffering Hour, Nothingness, and Void Rot) will return tomorrow March 22 2024 with their abysmally warped debut full length album Refracture, arriving three years after their debut self-titled EP and four years after the band’s formation. Witness the beast in full right here:
Refracture is a monolithic anomaly of highly deformed and crushing death metal of the absurd. The immanent dissonance that enshrouds the work throughout gives the album a regal and otherworldly vibe, while the odd songwriting and inscrutable stylstic shifts on the other hand juxtapose to that complexity a demented and atavistic aura that exalts the album’s primitivism and brutality. A similar approach has been developed in the past by Antediluvian, where a deluge of filth and acephalic primitivism was used to construct masterclasses of surrealism. This approach also has greatly rewarded Aberration’s ambition in creating something horrific and incomprehensible, drawing the listener into a world both mesmerizing and hideous, and thus, highly evocative. Hissing is another band that comes to mind in attempting to describe the absurd squalor and filth into which Aberration’s death metal revels without solution, having likewise delved into the same realms of the lurid and the absurd to create endless hellscapes of auditory pestilent hallucinations.
If you also like brutal dissonant shit like Altarage, then don’t sleep on this album as “Refracture” offers plenty of moods and variation through out its mind-devouring forty minutes, in which puzzling deliriums of abstraction and enigmatic ambience alternate ingeniously to moments of absolutely pummeling death metal carnage. “Refracture” drops tomorrow March 22 2024 on CD, LP, tape and digital formats via Sentient Ruin (get it HERE or HERE), and if you live on the US West Coast make sure not to miss Aberration out on tour with Diabolic Oath in May, a combo of hallucinatory death metal putridity that checks all the boxes to be an absolute bloodbath in a live setting.
