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PHRENELITH
Ashen Womb

Me Saco Un Ojo / Dark Descent (2025)
Rating: 8/10

There’s no better way to spend 40 minutes of your time than in the lower levels of volcanic miasma, otherwise known as the new Phrenelith album. Ashen Womb is the third full-length studio offering from the Danish combo, a clan which has every intention of dragging its audience into the flabby, humid pits of its own furnace folds.

As with previous releases, Ashen Womb churns like a stomach that’s been forced too many roast dinners! Great colossal riffs form like miasmic shifting plates of creaking, creeping aplomb, oozing their way like grey, sodden slime that consumes all in its suffocating wake. As ‘Astral Larvae’ grinds in after the short introduction of ‘Noemata’, the Copenhagen-based band weaves vast, emphatic chunks of melody between gargantuan yet steady waves of teeming horror.

The album never really wavers from such monstrous dynamics, and one wouldn’t want it to. Phrenelith are masters of such orgiastic terror; steaming and squalid geysers which spew forth noxious rushes of purulence as ‘A Husk Wrung Dry’ will attest with its blustery cold draughts caused by the rush of riffs and percussion before climaxing in a crushing yet measured finale.

The band constantly shifts from lumbering doomscapes to more chaotic yet controlled rampant gloom. The hideous displays of ‘Chrysopoeia’ tumble with the violent tumult of drummer Andreas Nordgreen (Chaotian / Sequestrum) who has been doing a mighty job since joining the group in 2021. Of course, the most obvious quality here are the huge riffs which sweep everything up in one mighty swoop; case in point being the hammering ‘Stagnated Blood’ with its blackened spine, alongside the dismal bluster of ‘Nebulae’.

Due to such massive constructions Phrenelith sounds naturally epic, but the closing title track just takes things to new levels of dank horror as once again cold scurrying axe work merges with bellowing vocal gusts which permeate the foul air like a sudden snowstorm within a dismal rain. To an extent it’s exactly what I expected, and that’s not a bad thing. The morbid accelerations alongside the usual harrowing slabs are welcomed and yet somehow there is a real sense of cleanliness here, maybe due to the excellent production. It certainly doesn’t deter the bleakness, but sort of refines and filters it so that the smog of ash is not as toxic as one would think.

If one closes their eyes they will see the immense bulging landscapes that Phrenelith speaks of, in turn the likes of Incantation and even Immolation may spring to mind, the end result a sprawling canvas of rich textures and auburn glows cast by ever thickening flames.

Neil Arnold

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