From their EPK, “Once an inferno of smoke, molten metal and flame, of poisoned waterways crawling sluggishly through slag heaps and waste, the air heavy with the stench of chemicals…every raindrop carrying soot within its heart. Its towers have toppled and its flaming maws grown cold, yet still it stands, a monument to blood and sweat and tears. A wound cut deep into the landscape and a scar upon the moor but surrounded by the windswept grasses and forests of oak. Snakes bathe on sun-warmed rock amongst the heather, while the last furnaces roar in the valley below. A place of contrasts and complexities, of history and future dreams, the resilience of mankind and nature side by side. A cradle of stories…a home.”

The album has six songs, and “Mother’s Concrete Womb” is first. It has somber entering tones, and the big riff that enters follows suit. It soon rolls into a heavier and more aggressive Black Metal sound, with a wall of guitars, vocal shrikes, and fast drumming, but it doesn’t lose its somber edge. There are also gorgeous layers of subtlety…the kind that make your heart ache, and there is an inner struggle here that can be clearly heard. “Waxwork Gorgon” also has a fairly gentle opening that is blackened by deep aggression. The melancholy side is locked in battle with the contentious side throughout, with neither giving an inch. “Floral Cairn” has a heavy dissonance among some chords that are even jovial, and the two extremes have rarely been this far apart. Just when you think the anger will be your end, despair swoops in and takes its place.

“Well of Sorrows” has entering tones that are so deep and hurtful, they know no bottom. It’s like staring into a hole and expecting something profound. The Black Metal vocals are grating, but the music stays above water. Even one scream is enough to drain the life out of you, and they continue like blows raining on your dead skull. “The Ocean That Fills a Wound” is a massive 13+ minutes that for me are like the winds of a tornado advancing quickly and raging for what seems like hours, but was only a few minutes in duration. There are brief moments of reprieve, but they don’t last long enough or leave enough of a mark to matter. “Legaso” closes the album, and it’s a reminder that the pain is just something that you are going to have to live with, and find a way to push through it. Indeed, it’s like a chain with a large heavy ball on the end that you can never untie or sever.

The album is an unrelenting tug-of-war between opposing forces, an exercise in extremity that explores contrast as a permanent state rather than something to be resolved. It’s about the eternal push and pull of human emotion, artistic purpose, and existential uncertainty. It’s an album where extremes aren’t a means to an end — they are the end. In that refusal to resolve, it leaves you with something far more unsettling: the truth that some wars aren’t meant to be won, only endured. Can you endure “The Fine Line Between Heaven and Here?”