Archgoat - Worship the Eternal Darkness (2021)^{Release ID: 32510}

I absolutely love Archgoat's blistering approach. Their war-drenched blasphemies assault your eardrums and take no prisoners when it comes to black metal extremity. This latest release, Worship the Eternal Darkness, is not as much carpet bombing as a laser-guided, targeted approach however which results in quite a bit of variety from a band who usually crank out the war metal riffs like there's no tomorrow. I mean, after the short intro, Heavens Ablaze is a typical piece of Archgoat war metal, then this is followed by Black Womb Gnosis which sounds much more like standard black metal fare and then comes All Christianity Ends which verges very much on old-school death doom. This makes a nice change, because no matter what the essential style Archgoat are striving for they still kick ass like few others and this stretching out of their sound is a welcome departure - provided they still throw in the odd war metal face-melter here and there to satisfy the faithful.

The modern production values on Archgoat's releases means that they have to be even more on point than some of the old-school war metal acts like Blaphemy and Beherit because they can't hide any shortcomings in a muddy production job and they accomplish this with aplomb. Lord Angelslayer's are still the most badass vocals in extreme metal too and so with Worship the Eternal Darkness I think the band have done enough to evolve their sound without alienating any fans of their existing rabid style of blitzkrieg metal. I genuinely find Archgoat one of the most exciting modern metal bands to listen to and with this latest ripper they haven't disappointed.