Are you ready to get crushed by a putrid slab of blasphemous, catacombal Avantgarde death-doom? Look no further, Minnesota’s Ritual Ascension have diligently provided, transposing onto American soil the oddities and monstrosities of Australian weirdo extreme metal (Portal, Grave Upheaval, Dismbowelment), creating a dissonant and deformed abomination entirely their own. Behold their monstrous debut album Profanation of the Adamic Covenant streaming in full for the first time ever right here:
And what’s up with that title you may ask? Well, Heavy Metal has told us and warned us for decades now that organized religion is evil, and by now, we should all know that it was true and correct all along. What we however fail or forget to remember is that while Christianity gets most of the heat from metal, organized religion comes in many forms and organizations, or so called “cults”, and that the enemy to the free thinking man does not only lurk inside the palaces, influence and bureaucracy of large-scale monotheistic organizations like Christian Catholicism etc, but also inside its many man-made alternative and quite imaginative declinations, and that includes the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (AKA the LDS Church, or the Mormon Church), a religious organization founded in America that since inception has been widely documented to include racist doctrines, social darwinism and many other forms of ignorance, human control, and social manipulation within its founding history. Big Surprise. But really, it should come as no surprise actually, especially if one of the members of the band was once a part of the Mormon congregation as a youngster, and has now decided to open up and rebuke their religious past, emerging with their homies with a blasphemous slab of anti-religious heavy metal that denounces the manipulation and lies they endured in said Church. Another big surprise. States the band about the song “Kolob (at the Throne of Elohim)”:
“Kolob (at the Throne of Elohim)” and the album as a whole guides the listener through the sacred rituals that occur in the holy sanctums of Mormon temples. Perverse signs and tokens, sworn under divine oath, offered to Elohim through the veil as the hand of god molests those who have been washed and anointed.
Elaborating further on the song “Womb Exegesis” that was recently premiered by Decibel Magazine:
“Womb Exegesis” is the Mormon doctrinal foundation behind the pre-existence of God. Matter, unorganized, is formed into the hideous excremental creation called Man – foreordained to an eternal existence of misery and suffering at the hands of his creator, Elohim.
It’s cool to see extreme music bands dissect and analyze these abominations called religions and always offer a different perspective on the utter plague they are on our society in their many different manifestations; a millennia-old plague which we hope will be surpassed and left behind one day. We’ll get there. But in the meantime, noteworthy is also the chosen medium wielded by the band to soundtrack their blasphemous dissection of a centuries old lie: catastrophically heavy and obfuscating dissonant death-doom. Slow moving, absolute death, delivered like a payload of pestilence to the human ear with crawling, agonizing tempos. The band emerged as an offshoot of another great Minnesota-based weirdo death metal band, Aberration (which features essentially the same members, minus one, who in turn are also members of Void Rot and Suffering Hour), and Portal was mentioned up here. Indeed, Ritual Ascension seem to have springboarded from the foundational oddities of Aberration, and magisterially transposed the Australian surrealistic metal masters’ referenceless, mangled riffs into a slowed down doomed miasma. A catacombal, dimensionless crawl devoid of any light that just lumbers forth consuming everything in a continuous life-devouring dissonance, and evoking aeons of subterranean, sepulchral torment away from any light or salvation.
Ritual Ascension’s music isn’t only grandiose, it isn’t only good, it isn’t only heavy, crushing and evocative, but it is also important. And its importance lies in the daring sonic research it undertook to be created, and in the eye-opening subject matter it covers, ensuring for a listening experience that is both abysmally suffocating and blood-freezingly sinister.
Profanation of the Adamic Covenant releases officially tomorrow, Friday, February 28, 2025 via Sentient Ruin worldwide (get it HERE or HERE).
