Alien hell sounds from the Mountains of Madness? Seismic rhythm changes and strange rumbles in the pelagic depths? A sterling death in a wasteland of serpents and sinewy riffs? All for the low, low price of absolutely free? Sign me the hell up.

One of my favorite things in the fast-paced world of metal-blogging is stumbling upon something genuinely mysterious. Exlimitir‘s Bandcamp page is an enigma wrapped in a riddle, a wasteland barren of any identifying information beyond a cryptic message (warning?) regarding debut album It Weighed Itself in Silver‘s content.

Your painful, journeying wires happen upon more despair than you already carry as they sink into the universe. You feel them at their infinite lengths tangle and squirm, pulling at your skin. You tug them away, wincing with every jostle, as their barbs microscopicly tear your flesh. It’s no use, they’re embedded in the sludge of matter below. Screaming for release, you rip one out. It falls down into the darkness, shrieking the entire way. The wires transmit their painful sensations from their awful realm. You wish to disconnect, but the longer they suffer and the more they writhe, the deeper they embed themselves into you. You panic and contort. Desperately you wish to free yourself, but they dig into you from pain and confusion, not knowing why you won’t pull them up. More and more they consume and enmesh with you as you can no longer discern where your own flesh begins and they end. But still, you two, as parasites, ache in parallel and unison.

Finally, when your consciousness hazes from the pain, the wires begin to transmit these sounds to you.

Not much to go by, that. Still, there are filaments of truth, fibers of answers tangled in that jumbled mess of hyperbole and menace. It Weighed Itself in Silver is an album that worms its way inside you, infecting your eardrums with pain and ecstasy in equal measure. It’s catchy, addicting, reclusive, the kind of album you’ll put on repeat again and again and again, if only to try to glean one more clue from its esoteric tapestry of hieroglyphs and elusive allusions.

What we do know is that this is a tremendous effort entrenched in the Demilich-school of learning via the walls of sound heard in recent fare from the frozen north of Europe. Off-kilter, bass-heavy riffs reminiscent of Chthe’ilist (immediately discernible in “Occulters of the Psylent Wayyy”) bob and bounce amid a sickly soup of percussive waves (see: Abyssal, Misþyrming), gross-ass bass swells, and serpentine leads. That rhythmic cacophony is itself a simulacrum of the most degenerate strains of metal drumming’s DNA, a facsimile of a simulation produced synthetically to lend Exlimitir an even more inhuman, alien, subversive bent. On a lesser metal album, the synthetic blasts and constricting rhythms would be decidedly off-putting; here, as heard in “They’re Building an Infinite Tower to His Finite Glory,” the effect is the same but welcome. This is a record that wants you to know upfront that this is a death metal no-man’s land of the boldest rituals of 90’s weird death juxtaposed against the emergent school of Icelandic dissonant death and black metal.

And yet, despite the inhospitable nature of Exlimitir’s presentation, both aurally and visually, there’s an undeniable allure to the extraterrestrial edifice. Each of It Weighed Itself in Silver‘s eight tracks is unique, catchy, and intriguing. There’s little fat or monotony to be found amid the alien riffs’ constant adaptation-mutation-extermination. Instead, Exlimitir offers us in foreign tongues an invitation to accept those hideous worms alluded to in its self-description, to ingest the jaunty – and at times perverse – riffs over and over again.

And for the low, low price of 100% free, that’s a nasty-ass riff worm that will go down smooth.

You can download the album for free (none of that justification-is-masturbation garbage you people do to convince yourselves NYP is free) on Bandcamp. This is usually the part where I’d tell you to follow the band on Facebook, but alas, Exlimitir remains a mystery.

For now.