ninehertz

It's the first time I'm playing this and I'm struck dumb. It grabs you, trapped in excitement from the first second, launching as it does into this lo-fi, almost dungeon synth, black metal riff, heralding the arrival of totally unhinged, unleashed squeals - a minute in and I love it already. Lust Hag have this happy knack of creating something slightly new and warped within the tight confines of black metal, a back catalogue behind them worthy of deep dives. And yet they come again, with probably their best work so far.

It is the title track that greets you so spectacularly, before morphing into a thumping riff overdrive, a madness at the core of it that means it goes all over the place, yet always bringing it back to that ghostly black metal beauty. This is how I want black metal to sound.

This is black metal giving no quarter, the primal venom of the genre at its heart but with subtle deviations to create much needed individuality and their own identity. From the standards of the sound rise strange noises, conjured from the ether. Take Righteous Deception, buttressed by synth which feel like an evolution of dungeon synth sounds beyond novelty, then further, beyond utility, evolved into something different again, an eerie accompaniment to the pounding drums that batter the song through.

The rabid black metal forays never relent, the inventiveness just happens to slot in seamlessly. Feed the Mother Monolith has this just ever so slightly off-kilter oddity to the guitars, sharpening the mystical weirdness of it. Only the vocals' sheer hoarse unpleasantness bring you down to reality, but even that adds to the whirlwind vortex that consumes the track in chaos.

Irrevocably Drubbed has a majesty to it, black metal that can retain all the key tenets that make it dangerous and unwieldy, but with a skilled sleight of hand nous to imbue the songs with an individuality that comes across both maniacal and fresh, much needed in a crowded genre.