It took Spain’s enigmatic black metal contortion Délirant seven years to birth the righteous successor to its staggering 2018 self-titled debut album, was it worth the wait? You be the judge, because that wait is now over and the band’s sophomore LP “Thoughteater” has finally arrived, steaming in full exclusively right here:
And the simple answer is YES, massively worth the wait, because works like this don’t just shape overnight and require the right space, mood, and place to take form. And we say that with cognition, as the band and label have expressed this concept in their advance promotional material, making it clear that this album has had a laborious genesis that works as a sonic pilgrimage that represents everyone’s journey through the personal darkness that lurks in every corner of life, to seek the light. So this album is like a long, winding expiation in which abysmal depths of consciousness and of emotional turmoil must be reached in order to begin one’s own ascent. There is no ascent without the descent, and Thoughteater‘s music storyboards this long and sinister voyage through the labyrinths of self.
Total audial suffocation is the connecting thread that binds this twisted work together, with black metal used as an hallucinogenic medium to separate mind and body and initiate a violent upheaval into the discovery of self. The album’s crisp and dynamic production appears almost glass-like, as a transparent shell encloses it and offers insights into the working cogs and gears of the impossible object that it is, bound by complexity and absurdity and doing nothing to hide its incomprehensible mechanisms. Gnarled guitar patterns and erratic rhythmic pulsations torn by inhuman screams interweave for thirty eight minutes, creating a trance-like experience whose epilogue and conclusion leaves the senses smoldering and the soul scarred and ravaged. It’s when the listening is over that the realization arises that making an album like this must have been an excruciatingly cathartic and liberating ritual for the person who created it, giving the whole work an astonishing sense of storytelling that is closer to a near-death experience than to a mere musical listen.
With Thoughteater, Délirant and its mastermind D.B. demonstrate once again the true power of experimental sound and music, particularly when it’s this disfigured and deformed. Think of abominable evocations summoned over the years by bands like Blut Aus Nord, Deathspell Omega or Abigor in this sense, and you will understand which foreign mental dimensions Délirant have attempted to harness through it as well. Dissonant black metal in fact has the power to sound so unnatural, alien and antihuman, that an obvious other state must be harnessed to wield it, and at the same time the listener is forced to enter a similar state of “elsewhere” in order to properly perceive it and attempt to understand it. It goes with no surprise that this work is a deep dive into the un-, and subconscious, because the perfect medium to abandon reality was chosen.
Délirant’sThoughteater releases officially tomorrow, Friday, February 14, 2025 via Sentient Ruin worldwide (get it HERE or HERE).
