Ghold – Pyr

OWCH. You know that feeling when someone repeatedly bashes your skull with a meat tenderiser until it caves and the bone splinters and the pain goes fuzzy at the edges and your brain begins to swell and gradually the sensation dawns on you that you’ve transcended existence and you can see through time and space and meanwhile the hammering just DOES NOT STOP?

Pyr is a pretty good approximation of that, with its brutally heavy riffs played at a creeped-out crawl, and fleshed out at length by spacious blasts of tonal, teeth-shattering texture.

The opening three tracks feel pretty overpowering, but midpoint monolith Despert Thrang is where the album really does the business: 30 minutes of their remit writ large, making for one exhausting thrill ride. Admittedly, so much doom und drang gets exhausting – it’s certainly not for the faint-hearted – but Ghold will blow minds even while beating them into oblivion.