Review: VoidCeremony – Abditum

November 13, 2025

194

Blessed are the Bizarre

The various strains of death metal that emerged from the late ’90s onward to around the mid 2010’s can primarily be understood as a series of responses and course-corrections, often situated against one another. The adversarial nature of these movements resulted in various facets of death metal being pushed to their limits before falling into narrow, inward-gazing aesthetics. Eventually another movement would arise in response before falling to the same shortcomings. Conflict and dissatisfaction continually loops back into itself and repeats the cycle of over-correction and ensuing failure.

The hyper-speed blast worship wherein death metal became an almost entirely American genre in the ’90s, giving rise to modern brutal and technical death metal as a whole which expanded on the sonic arsenal. This narrowed the focus of death metal heavily to the pure immediacy of primarily its New York and Floridian schools, leading to the OSDM, “dissodeath,” and caverncore movements rising in response in the late 2000’s. This re-established the idea of Eurodeath, particularly its Nordic schools, as well as the atmospheric and eerier, implicit rather than overt aspects of the genre, many of which were learned from black metal. Yet after becoming so prominent, they too fell into their own pitfalls. OSDM has quickly become just as trendy and run of the mill tedious as the perceived soulless blasturbation it emerged in opposition to, caverncore faded away into sonic wallpaper, and dissodeath deconstructed itself into being every bit as tedious as the tech-wank it was the darker mirror to.

The primary failing of all major modern death metal movements (mid to late ’90s onward) had been its tendency to go all in on a particular set of aesthetics. This inevitably allowed market forces and prominent labels to exaggerate their titular characteristics to the extent of flanderizing them into stylistic rigidity. Promising ideas tended to work best before they became entirely self referential and the range of what a subgenre or style could express was not so strictly bordered off, with say, technical death metal having become an increasingly less diverse subgenre coinciding with the narrowing of death metal as a whole to an almost entirely American style of metal. The stylistic diversity that allowed for a broad ecosystem of Afterlife (Indiana), Demilich, Afflicted, Liers in Wait, Gorguts, Pavor, Iniquity, Amnesia (Canada), !T.O.O.H.!, and Exuviate was narrowed down—lawlessness gave way to order, order gave way to incestuous inbreeding, and the promise of a subgenre reduced to just a few specific possibilities.

It would be easy to dismiss these movements as failures but each one changed the landscape of death metal irreparably. Lessons were passed on through the decades and around the time the current dissOSDMcavern paradigm began to reach critical mass, anomalies began to appear. Not part of the hyperblasting American paradigm, the dissodeath one, OSDM, caverncore, brutech, these bands at best generally fit into an avant-progressive sphere. Zealotry, Inanna, sophomore Polyptych, recent Sallow Moth, Symphony of Symbols, Undersave, Aenigmatum, Putrescine (USA), Ghoulgotha, Cosmic Putrefaction, Fabricant, and Misanthropy (Chicago) are among the many who signified a shift towards a hyper-specificity that avoids falling into the major established schools of death metal. Many of them were influenced by them but others emerged utterly spontaneously, but all of them reflect a movement away from the narrowed horizons of most death metal movements.

VoidCeremony began in 2013 and debuted a year later with the raw, blackened demo Dystheism. I hadn’t been particularly gripped by the 2020 debut like how the Foul Origins of Humanity EP did in 2017 but it was hard to deny the sheer promise of their sound. It was 2023’s Threads of Unknowing that put them on the map for me, with an impressive lineup of not just main brain, guitarist, and vocalist Garrett Johnson but Phil Tougas, Damon Good of StarGazer, and Charlie Koryn of too many things to list. The bar raised substantially and VoidCeremony became one of the premiere leaders of this new movement of hyper idiosyncratic death metal. Phil and Charlie would later leave but their replacements were no less promising. Dylan Marks was previously on Foul Origins of Humanity and currently is Atheist’s live drummer. Jayson McGeheehe had been a guitarist on what would have been the third Crimson Massacre album, I believe having contributed to some of it but otherwise is the only one here without too much recorded history based on their Metal Archives profile.

Both musicians are more modern in their style and it leads to Abditum being a hard shift away from the abstraction of its predecessor. The level of musicianship remains high but the rhythmic topography has become jagged and jarring, with the influence of 2000’s brutality and technicality like Deeds of Flesh and Decrepit Birth re-energizing VoidCeremony’s sound. Simply put, in 2023 they were a progressive-minded band, now they are a technical death metal band. They are not an entirely modern one in spite of the relentless pacing and cluttered compositions; the tech-thrash derived agility and occult mysticism of groups like Atheist and StarGazer are still present in their sound. The end result combines two very different realms of high-tech death metal together, bridging the old school and mystical with arms race showmanship and intensity. Its heritage makes it an anachronistic anomaly while the ambiguous tonality, feeling almost fusion-like in its tonality as it blurs consonance and dissonance into alien shapes, lends it a strangely reflective and even pensive atmosphere. Abditum is highly aggressive, yet it’s defined by forlorn atmosphere, not entirely stereotypically dark even if it is often otherworldly in nature.

Abditum also is the band at its most jam-packed, with every song bearing an impressive level of activity and musicianship. There’s little that needs to be said about every performance beyond them being immaculate but how it comes together is more cryptic in nature. From a glance, it’s a barrage of disjointed and oddly shaped riffs, avoiding conventional rhythmic chunk or straightforward patterns. Everything always sounds a little off, not quite melodic but not outright atonal either, and they don’t like to stick to a pattern very long before jumping to something entirely different. This moves the band back to the chaos of the older material, but the lessened usage of tremolo in exchange for sharper, punchier rhythms changes the flow and pacing considerably.

Variation comes off far more sharply, with contrasts within riffing coming with heavy flourishes and ornamentation and the sharply picked patterns are interrupted with considerably heavier, visceral segments. It’s never slamming or plainly chuggy, with everything tinted with enough dissonance or almost Watchtower-esque notation to add to the sense of perpetual flux. Thematic through lines of variation and mutation are still present but Garrett and company have obscured them behind a dizzying array of techniques. It’s a far more obtuse album than previously but figuring that out is part of the magic. VoidCeremony have always been brainy metal but this is the band at its most intuitively visceral and conventionally heavy, perhaps owing to its brutal heritage.

In spite of this, the songs in a way are both a bit easier and harder to follow: easier in the sense that it’s very concrete thanks to its technical choices, harder because there’s more of everything to juggle. A few central themes start each song and are warped, contrasted, and pulled apart with a wide array of ornamentation and elaborate deviations. Anything that might become straightforward and simple inevitably splinters away into increasingly bizarre and contorted shapes. Garrett and the gang are constantly deviating from yet eventually looping back to a core theme in increasingly mutated variations. All of this is happening very quickly with even the frequent breaks from blast-speed only adding to the effect of being violently tossed to and fro, subsequently making the ensuing blasts feel all the quicker.

Songwriting is where they’ve seen a similar degree of improvement as technical choices. “Failure of Ancient Wisdoms” has a speedy opening riff that morphs and mutates into flurries of strangely catchy and oddly syncopated rhythm with flurries of dual guitar fretboard inferno. Jayson and Garrett converge on nimble dual guitar harmonies with Damon’s bass plunking away, Dylan sounding like he’s trying to apprehend all three for illegal fireworks. “Veracious Duality” starts off in the most obtuse way possible (fuck yeah) with jagged, angular chords pausing amidst blasts that continue lurching amongst highly accommodating rhythm. Halfway through they’ve split into almost Control and Resistance-esque dissonant picked patterns, morphing the song into a nimbler form teeming with all kinds of eerie notation. There’s always a surprise of some sort waiting around the corner and Garrett is seemingly allergic to the idea of anything ever feeling too secure and stable.

Instrumental “Silence Which Ceases All Minds” starts off as if it’s getting ready to drown you with enough riffs to make Spiritually Uncontrolled Art and Damnated Hells’ Arrival blush. In a rare moment of mercy/non-homicidal lunacy, we’re instead greeted by some gorgeous, relatively slower solos I imagine will be seen as jazz fusion-esque linked to some gorgeous, relatively slower tremolo patterns creeping all across the strings. It’s still got the whole band going nuts but for a brief three and a half minutes, the band almost feels relaxed. “Gnosis of Ambivalence” is the album’s conclusion, alternating between passages overflowing with frantic activity and slower digressions into meditative, measured musicality as if slamming the brakes whenever things are about to morph into a blur. Like with the opener, the actual closing track is a pleasantly ghost-like video game dungeon-synth number, ending the album on a slightly foreboding, tantalizing note—future strangeness is to come.

On a lot of levels, Abditum is an improvement over the already monumental Threads of Unknowing. It escalates the raw intensity and musicianship and has their wildest songwriting to date. At the same time, sometimes I kind of miss the parts of its predecessor that could simply hyper-focus on a particular unencumbered idea—moments of reflection embedded into single-minded intensity. There is enough going on here to fill up what feels like three or so other albums worth of material for lesser acts and for some, this will definitely be overwhelming. Wild, but I can’t help but wish there was a little more. There are only 6 straight up metal tracks here, one of which is just a minute long, and the rest are a bit shorter than on the predecessor. You’ll speed through the album quickly but it’s hard not to feel as if secret rooms and treasures were missed. There’s so much that goes on here but when it abruptly ends, you almost wonder if you missed a few things on the way.

When your only major shortcoming is that “there aren’t enough songs,” then you haven’t done anything wrong on the musical front. Garrett’s extremely specific, consumer-hostile take on death metal continues to find new ways to mutate and the end result continues to be delightfully specific. The moment-to-moment action is at its most intense with the hard shift from a progressive focus to a purely technical one resulting in the widest arsenal in the band’s possession thus far. Add in a beefy, clear production with excellent separation and mixing, and VoidCeremony’s strange visions have a newfound clarity. The predecessor could sound a little grainy and distant but befitting of their newfound intensity, all the violent details are audible with the utmost clarity.

VoidCeremony can be easily classified in terms of subgenre but their place in the modern paradigm of death metal continues to be elusive. Even the Death In Opposition classification isn’t a rigid one as much as it is a broad swathe of oddities that fall through the cracks of major schools. The one thing that has stayed the same for over a decade now is their dedication to being an anomaly that avoids being too attached to any particular school of thought regardless of subgenre classification. The core ideas it runs on aren’t alien to even a newer listener of death metal but the forms it takes continues to feel like an alternate history. One where rather than subgenres and styles morphing into rigid monoliths, the various tribes, movements, and forms death metal takes were more open-ended in terms of their focus. It casually crosses internal genre boundaries as if they were little more than that; ideas that became sectioned off primarily to particular lineages many years ago as the genre began splitting apart.

In that sense, Abditum offers not just a reimagining of VoidCeremony’s sound but a better vision of how to approach the genre. A lot of people talk about breaking down genre or stylistic boundaries mostly as PR statements for band promos, but VoidCeremony sound more like they didn’t even notice them. It’s anachronistic and doesn’t tie itself to a particular period in time even if a studied ear can figure out the particular episodes in time most of its ideas find their roots in. Influences only go so far and the chaotic, if well-organized and highly particular way this is expressed is something far from those. The ambiguous tonality that emerges through structures chaotic yet controlled, the moments of blissful clarity emerging amidst harrowing anxiety—the entire thing has the idiosyncrasy of a bedroom solo project but it’s backed up by some of the most capable musicians out there. While I don’t think I would put this quite on the same level as its predecessor, the gulf between them is short and in terms of style, this was entirely the correct move to make. May the 4th Ceremony be grander than the last.