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Old Year No Dissent

Mon 20th October 2025


Pete

/incoming/oldynodi.jpgIt’s been an incredible year for the most disturbing reaches of sludge and funeral doom. Albums from Coltsblood, Hell, Stomach, Gawthrop, Forged Relics and many more are proof that there is a beating pulse in the bleakest corners of extreme music, provided by a thriving international underground. Old Year arrive to barge into that reckoning.

No Dissent is a hellish noise. Even as it warms up seconds into the first track, the air is threatening, and it has my full interest. It launches into a tight, nightmarish sound, death vocals in the most extreme of sludge, something like a doom approximation of Altarage. Guitars wail in the darkness, engulfed by a black cloud formed by the miserly drums and bass, it does little, goes nowhere, but none of that matters – sludge, death-doom, whatever this is musically, it sounds cataclysmic.

There are only four tracks, but the impact of the unforgiving combined mass is profound. This is crackling, slovenly doom, death-doom devolved and diminished by such a degree it lapses into funeral doom, in a whirlwind of static fused noise. If you are looking for reference points then perhaps you’d think towards Primitive Man, Hooded Menace, maybe even right out to Khanate in its most desolate thoughts, but then take Mechanical Birth with its wonderfully bad trip atmospherics, eleven minutes of demonic procrastination, slothly in the darkest of worlds and as such unalike any one specific comparison.

It ends with the ponderous and yet grand Lock Step, uneventful as it relies on its atmospheric gloom, a fitting end. I knew nothing of this band before, but this cannot be allowed to fly under the radar, as No Dissent is close to being a funeral doom and death-doom mini masterpiece.

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