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UNEARTHLY RITES
Ecdysis

Prosthetic (2024)
Rating: 9/10

Unearthly Rites is another new Finnish act bursting not only with talent but a foul smelling mix of death metal and crust. Ecdysis is one of the nastiest slabs I’ve heard this year and has so many dirt-caked qualities from those rough vocals, the harsh bass lines, the gritty drums and rank riffs that emit clouds of toxic ash.

The cover art reminds me of one of those 80s independent punk atrocities fused with the band Doom and the sound is an apocalyptic avalanche caused by gnashing riff rats Santtu Markko and Simo Perkiömäki. Imagine vast acidic geysers bursting with cascading silt; dense unfiltered fumes form suffocating mushroom clouds and lead man Sisli Piisilä is genuinely a soul possessed. His vocal style is so demonic and putrid, somehow a fog horn through the ever gathering and choking mists, and, dare I say it, almost original in their aggression. The hideous nature of the vocal delivery is only matched by Jennika Vikman’s grinding bass tone as great, chalky walls of grey are constructed amidst flurries of despair and grief.

With each spin I can only marvel at the extremity in each department within the group as Unearthly Rites one moment provides juggernaut rhythms like Bolt Thrower, the next a crust-coated grind that billows and discharges plumes of soot. ‘Deep Drilling Earth’s Crust’ begins like some harsh radio frequency picking up debris from deep space before the abrasive grunts emerge through the hectic static. The quintet slogs to a grinding chug, the guitars clogged with cement and the drums caked with grey clay.

‘The Master’s Tools’ marries a fuzzed death doom; bleak and dissonant as the bass strings hang low, occasionally scraping the ground and disturbing the smouldering layers. The brief ‘Fuck Ecofacism’ is as equally dragging as the colossal title track, as with each buzzing composition the band thickens the smog. The vocals become more and more choked, gasping through the cloying wisps of blizzard rust.

‘Doomed’ chugs with such a foreboding as one pictures once angular Voivodian landscapes now crumpled heaps of twisted metal. If legendary death doom act Winter were to ever return from the ice, I’d expect Unearthly Rites to get the call to support them on tour because Ecdysis has that same sluggish grind of misery; a sound that conjures images of gaunt pallid spectres wafting between anaemic shells of once vast structures coated in coagulated powder.

‘Sacrifice Zones’ is that epitome of despair, a heaving and laborious ooze with a fetid spine of ever disintegrating ash. ‘Capitalocenic Nightmare’ escapes from the intoxicating sediment by providing a steamroller effect, rolling like a crater-face behemoth of pulsating quakes and distorted throbs. Meanwhile, ‘New Venus’, at least musically, powers with a crust punk sensibility, but there is little here to jog along to, instead, Unearthly Rites is the musical equivalent to a rancid shower at Chernobyl. It’s all unpleasant, leaden and grief-stricken and leaves the listener alone and collapsed within a thick overcast shroud of hopelessness.

Neil Arnold

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