Track Premiere: Ashen Tomb – “Ecstatic Death Reign”
“One must speak of the Ashen Tomb only when necessary. Deep under a land of crumbling castles and waterways strangled with the dead lies the cradle of a great evil; something crawled up through the earth and found a taste for mortality in the burial chamber, and set out to create more of this delicacy. Its reach is nearly absolute, and even a whisper can call it crawling from the edifice, eager to spread the miasma of its ‘Ecstatic Death Reign.'”
From the subtly technical intro riffing to the pit-stirring triplets that follow, it’s clear Ashen Tomb hasn’t been merely mouldering since their inception in 2021. While they’re more interested in bashing you over the head with a wheel than reinventing it, new influences have infected their songwriting; punky d-beats jut from graveyard soil, and a bouncy, open-note groove leads into the song’s latter half, touching as much on hardcore as it does OSDM. (I’d be remiss not to mention the positively fetid bass riff leading into this section, courtesy of TovH alumnus Karhu Kuru, or Nordling Rites ov Karhu as you may know him.) Whether incorporating whiffs of slam or grindcore tempos into their songwriting, the band never forgets that variety is the spice of death.
“You were warned to keep your voice down—and now the birds flee in their thousands. Clouds form in sickly, verdant hues. The denizen of the Ashen Tomb draws near, and there is no stopping the approach of its malignant heart.”
Ecstatic Death Reign releases October 18 through Everlasting Spew Records.
