Featuring JUPITERIAN members V and P, FOSSILIZATION have been poised for some time to take over the underground. After releasing the 'He Whose Name Was Long Forgotten' EP in 2021 and a Split album with RITUAL NECROMANCY in 2022, the band has returned with their debut full length album 'Leprous Daylight.' I truly believe this album will be among the most revered this year. This debut album brings a different sort of shade to their perpetual darkness. Although it still has plenty of doom elements, faster and, somehow, even more brutal musical escapades can be found within. They still slow crush when they need to but will bludgeon in between. The atmosphere and production are both exactly how music like this should sound: open enough to allow the searing brutality to flow yet rough enough to keep it all suffocating and unforgiving.

As a whole, I find the album does a damn good balancing straight up eviscerating death metal and dismal doom. The first full track, 'Once Was Good,' is the obvious and most immediate example. The song begins with a blitzkrieg of chaotic death metal-even at their most hectic, the guys have marksman's precision and know exactly where they want to take the song, which is why the switch later on to a slower groove is so organic to the ears. When the band rips, it goddamn RIPS. 'At The Heart of the Nest' is 100% how death metal should be done. The song writing has such depth to it but the approach is straightforward, a knife intonation vital organ. I love the low guttural growls when the song slows, and the double bass only makes the air thick with more unbreathable miasma.

The thick riffs of the title track are sweltering and keep the song tightly bound in claustrophobia even when they are acting as a musical feeding frenzy. The low, low rumble of the bass would probably register on the Richter scale but it makes the song sound just unhinged enough to unnerve. The final two songs ,'Eon' and 'Wrought In The Abyss' are the two best songs the band has vomited forth thus far. I honestly can't tell you how many times I jammed out to both of these. 'Eon' is a methodical death driver, the music effortlessly shifting tempo and riff styles like some living monstrosity. The tone is evil, ancient, and gives off an otherworldly vibe.  The movement from 1:40 to 2:07 is one of the album's best moments, just unrelenting with those thick riffs.

'Wrought In The Abyss,' is a journey into an abyssal wasteland.  With a pair of headphones on, this pulls you in...and under.  Rather than gasping for your last moments of life, you become up with finality, more of a creature of entropy than a dying soul.  From 3:30 all the way to the end is my favorite part of the song.....so much uncompromising doom, tinged with just the right amount of sorrow.  FOSSILIZATION's 'Leprous Daylight' is the album we have all been waiting for them to unleash.  Now that the album has crawled from the muck, the underground better be ready to put up a fight because this beast has what it takes to fight for a top of many 'year's end best of' lists that will be here before we know it.