New Sounds from Neige Morte, The “Eaters of Worlds”

Neige Morte (“Dead Snow,” for those keeping score at home) are a French band with deep roots in black metal. I’d go so far as to say that their overall sound fits firmly within the genre, but with a few caveats. There’s a lot going on in their ultra harsh compositions, but the shit they come up with is a far cry from the Blut Aus Nords or Deathspell Omegas their region’s best known for. Barbed with noisy swathes of stagnant doom, pitch-black hardcore, depressed scraps of melody and inhuman vocals, their new album Bicephaale is a nightmarish hodgepodge that somehow manages to make its blasphemous flirtations with sounds found beyond black metal’s ken seem not only natural, but inevitable. Also, if that vocal furnace sounds familiar, it’s because XT (Xavier Théret) did time in the seriously sludgy Gallic outfit Overmars… and suddenly, those torturous doom leanings make sense.

“Eaters of Worlds” blends panicky hardcore with icy tremolo riffs, clanging leads, and guttural Attila-isms that swiftly devolve into a wretched, sluggish morass. The tension between lead and low end will make your skin crawl, and when it all falls apart at the end, you’ll be too overwhelmed to do anything but say, “Damn.”

Bicephaale is out soon on Consouling Sounds. Listen to “Eaters of Worlds” here: