Listen: Void Ritual’s New Split Holy Sh*t

Extreme metal can sound human-sized, like its authors are screaming at you from a distant valley while you ascend into light and great heights. It’s loneliness, self-reproach, and ugliness; it’s song for all our world’s Gollum-like wretches and their wrath. There, too, is extreme metal that lives in the verdant forests, the soundtrack to anti-civilization and an embrace of the ancient. Still more extreme metal hurls a listener out of any earthly dimension and into free fall of the mind, a charge into wildest possibilities of cosmic transcendence.

Void Ritual, so far, is none of these. On last year’s MetalSucks-worshipped Holodomor EP and now via one half of a new split EP, VR’s black metal is chaos, the sound of tsunami waves pounding shores and racing across steppes a mile deep. It is emotionless, without prejudice, marked by zero calculation yet elegantly plotted, like the bullet from a fumbled pistol that finds the skull of an infant. No offense.

It’s the type of metal that even fans of metal ask you about, like How can you even listen to this? To that, you can reply about your quest for understanding the darkest parts of life. Or you can say it sounds good and is good, and there it is positive. Or, as with that stray bullet, you can shrug and explain that you have no choice. You happened to be standing in its path. And you are.

Void Ritual’s split cassette with Barshasketh came out last week. Get it here.