GUTVOID - Breathing Obelisk MCD

Since their formation in 2019, the ascent of Canada's GUTVOID has been nothing if not meteoric. From their initially digital-only debut EP, Astral Bestiary, receiving a physical release courtesy of BLOOD HARVEST to the Four Dimensions of Auditory Terror four-way split shared with BLOOD SPORE, COAGULATE, and SOUL DEVOURMENT the following year - again, via BLOOD HARVEST - GUTVOID churned forth a world-eating Metal of Death that duly devoured the listener whole. Still, massive potential lurked, and it arrived with one of the most fully-formed death metal debut albums in 2022's Durance of Lightless Horizons. Hailed far and wide upon its release and thereafter, Durance of Lightless Horizons simply intensified all the hallmarks of their sound - heaving, vertigo-inducing, spiraling like tar-thick smoke - and then sharpened them with a sterling sense of clarity, allowing their yearning, come-hither melodicism to evoke both melancholy and malice.

Taken individually, each of GUTVOID's recordings builds upon the last but offers surprising twists of the knife. And so it goes with the band's brand-new mini-album Breathing Obelisk. Totaling 31 minutes across four tracks, one can easily do the math and surmise that GUTVOID here are stretching out into epic territory. Fittingly, they open up their world-eating sound to include looser execution, more fist-pumping mid-tempos, hypnotic repetition of melody, linear-but-not-really songwriting, and a strange style of grooviness...or "grooviness" in that it's akimbo and angular and yet still supremely rhythmic in a manner most surprising for tried-and-true death metal. Here, the band eschew much of the doominess of their preceding work and instead allow those vast vistas of space pregnant with tension & terror to be built back up with rolling tank-treads of mountainous might. The cover art to Breathing Obelisk, then, begins to make more sense in the context of this textural shift; it's GUTVOID at their most approachable and most alien - clearly recognizable, fully in focus, and yet somehow incomprehensible for the strange transmissions they're emitting from some unknown outpost. That these four songs run anywhere from six minutes to nearly ten bespeaks not bloat, but rather a desire to patiently unfold their dread landscapes - and then do so with a remarkable memorability that's not predictable verse/chorus formulae. And the rougher, dirtier production heightens this unfussy uniqueness that much more.

Cementing their status as one of the best still-young death metal entities around, GUTVOID challenge you to stand before their Breathing Obelisk