In their 2015 video for "I Hate People," IRON WALRUS's singer Aufi strikes an imposing presence. Staring menacingly at the camera, cut between his own pained visage and that same visage dripping in blood, it's as if he lunged himself through the ice-covered caverns of the Arctic ocean, four thousand pounds of iron-clad blubber clambering to the surface.  His walrus-masked bandmates sit bound around a table, as he alternately tortures and kills each of them.  It's a brutal, naked, raw Production metal reaching its most visceral levels of violence inspired destruction .  The band's fourth full-length, "Tales Never Told" sees Aufi and the band reaching apex predator type peaks. This is a band foraging forwards with the confidence of 3.5 billion years of evolution, a physical perfection manifesting itself through the dark sludge of extreme metal, as sharp and deadly as the meter-long tusks of an Odobenus (ferrum) rosmarus.

The album launches full-blast with "XDimensions".  When Aufi growls "we were born in another dimension, not of this world," you have to believe it.  It's as if the twin guitars of Ingo and Bene and the solid, propulsive groove of bassist Der Schmidt and Schnalli came growling up from deep within the bowels of the Earth.  Two minutes into the song, Ingo and Bene rip off a simple, catchy harmonized riff that characterizes the brevity and conciseness of the riff-making covering the entire album.  It's a punishing slab of dripping black paint, layered on so thick it seems like it's breathing on its own, pulsating with the heavy lungs of- well, an Iron fucking Walrus.  And then, somehow, "Dead Spot" follows up and bellows "hold my sea cucumber" and just collapses into a nasty, dark, sludgy groove while Aufi vomits up paeans to misery over the band's relentless march.  Towards the end of the song, the band drops out and Ingo and Bene let off a couple of single note squeals on the guitar that twist and move before dropping back in. It's an audacious choice: there's no doubt that these guys are technically proficient players, but the skeletal, primitive playing is an artistic move that screams of heavy metal integrity. It's the whole package: if you're going to name yourself IRON WALRUS, perform with masks in all black while your balding, bearded singer demands your attention like a pastor to the doomed, then the music needs to emulate that.  It's called vision.  And these guys can clearly see through those bad-ass masks.

The title track is a great example of this.  It starts off with a SABBATH-inspired three-note lead before collapsing into some warm, twin guitar melodies that sound like a mix of old MASTODON or BARONESS. But unlike those bands, the band never tries to flip the song-writing on its head with moments of musical histrionics.  The songs on this album are stripped down to their most primal levels, and as the album progresses these seem to slide even further down the slippery precipice into the bubbling, boiling insides of the Earth's mantle.  That's not to say that the quality of the songs regress, as the album never bores, but compared to the pseudo-mid-tempo groove of the first half, the last four songs- with the exception of the propulsive "Pay Your Toll"- are definitive contributions to the illustrious world of doom metal.  "Reborn" sounds as if it was carved from ice, the sound of a species on the verge of extinction. Aufi's vocals drip with sadness and lament, and the band reduces the groove to a sludgy, doom-inspired crawl. Penultimate song "Exile" continues to pile on the misery, a slow mix of NEUROSIS and ISIS and the icy winds of the Bering Strait. It's IRON WALRUS at it's best: a confident flexing of their melodic muscles complimenting the strain of their stoner-inspired ligaments and tendons, before ripping it all to shreds with closer "Under My Skin".

While it's early in the year, "Tales Never Told" is probably going to be holding a lot of weight come December when it's time to put together those "best of" lists, but that's what walruses do.  If anything, they are slow, imposing powerful forces of flesh and bone, and IRON WALRUS pretty much do the musical equivalent of that on their latest album: they are a weight-bearing force. "Tales Never Told" is a band at the top of their game, sated on the blood of their prey, entrails dripping from the sharpened tips of their heavy metal tusks. If you did, indeed, stumble upon a huddle of walruses during some illegal whale hunt, just know that the sounds bellowing from their powerful lungs would most likely sound a lot like "Tales Never Told".