From their record label’s website, “With "Dirge for the Doomed," the North German collective ORACLE HANDS presents a debut album that pushes the boundaries of post-metal while constructing a brutal, atmospheric sound wall. After their promising demo tape in 2023, the band returns with seven intense tracks, firmly establishing themselves in a musical realm influenced by genres such as doom, black, death metal, as well as punk and grindcore. The band manages to carve out their own voice within the dense post-metal genre and deliver a debut work that demands attention. No enthusiast of intense, emotionally charged metal should miss this album.”

The album has seven songs, and “The Order” is first. The opening tones are slow, weighted, and cavernous, and the vocals are angry. The picture that they paint is one of desolation, destruction, and disorder. “Nihilistic Rites” is even more desperate sounding, and the sterile riffs are cold, and biting. There is an intensity that never lets up, even for a few moments, and the vocals take most of the front and center in the song. “Dissonance of the Tongueless” has a driving and punishing beat, and again, the rage in the vocals is impressive. The riffs are so low and they rattle incessantly in your ears, beating you into submission. “Pulse” is nearly seven-minutes of some of the angriest music you have heard, although there are some fleeing moments of melody, solidifying the Post Metal approach of the band.

“Black Fields” swings back to a crawling pace that is so weighted, it burrows a hole all the way to the abyss. The smooth spoken words contrast so sharply with the music, they almost seem out of place. “Drain the Poison” has a smooth entrance but you can feel the weight of the freight train coming barreling down miles away from the track. An unbridled energy flows through the song and it has no off switch. “Into the Abyss” closes the album, and some gentle melodies pepper the otherwise desolate landscape, combined with thick, meaty bass notes that wet your appetite. Anger seems to grow as the song moves…getting darker and darker, until the blackness of the abyss is finally reached.

“Dirge for the Damned” is a harrowing journey through raging desolation, a phrase that perfectly encapsulates the storm of emotion and sonic violence unleashed across its runtime. Beneath the violent surface, there’s a clear emotional arc—a story of isolation, reckoning, and the flicker of something like resilience. The juxtaposition of harshness and occasional moments of clarity mirrors the human experience of loss and rage: unpredictable, messy, but undeniably powerful.