HIPOXIA is a doom metal band from Spain who formed on 2009. Their latest release, “Fragmented Revelations,” is actually a compilation of hard to find/unreleased songs. To date, they have released three full-length albums, a demo, a live album, and two splits. Lately, I have been reviewing bands I am unfamiliar with. I love it. To discover a new band and then having to review one of their albums is awesome. HIPOXIA definitely impress me enough to go back and listen to their other material. The band's doom sound includes several different styles including death, ambient, sludge and drone. Of the album's seven songs, three of them are long dirges that make up the bulk of its runtime. They are low, slow and made of pure, sickening darkness. Funeral doom fans will find a lot to like here but the album throws in enough ideas to make it far more dynamic than a lot of doom of this extreme nature is, ensuring even those who don’t care for longform songs will still find a lot of material to engage with.

The first of these three epics is the opening song, “Gangrened Reality.” The build up is long with odd spoken word passages/sound bytes as the atmosphere straddles the line between alien and psychedelic. The throaty screams are distorted and hit as hard as the guitar and bass do. It takes talent to make slow music engaging, the drums here doing a fantastic job with that. The tempo speeds up slightly in the later half, the drumming, particularly, ramping up the aggression The next doom rager is “False Destiny,” and I really enjoyed the dark tones in the opening moments, especially with how well they pair up with the bass. This song is less abstract, focusing more on the death/doom side of things. Musically, it’s like a dark storm that hangs over to rain down terror instead of moving on through.

The fifth song, “No Tememos un Mundo en Ruinas,” is a faster cut, with blackened elements, yet another style the band pulls off very well. This song has an unsettling atmosphere, especially when it brings in ambient touches led by the bass. The middle part brings in their doom sound, resulting in music that is as crushing as it is abstract. The last full length song is “Children of Winter” and it is my favorite song on the album. The mix of clean tones and heavy riffs is tastefully done, creating a foreboding atmosphere that has danger lurking around each corner. The halfway point walks a path that is similar to funeral doom but it leads into an aggressive vocal display before the song fades out in cavernous tones. The other three songs are ambient instrumentals. As individual pieces, they aren't as engaging to me but taken as a whole when listening to the album straight through, I definitely appreciated them more.

Ultimately, HIPOXIA’s “Fragmented Revelations,” is an album for doom lovers but it also stretches outside the confines of the genre enough to be enjoyed from many different angles and provide a lot of reasons to return to it multiple times. It doesn't feel like a random collection of songs but instead a large, cohesive, sprawling, piece of music.