Although they’ve been at it for four albums and almost 15 years now, Horrendous rarely if ever fail to impress with the length and breadth of inspiration they take from other genres. The album is littered with surprise twists and turns, the writing and production of which is best encapsulated by this quote from drummer Jamie Knox, “Surprises always come up during writing — spontaneous ideas pull you into new territory and enable the realization of novel possibilities that previously were inaccessible.”
Perhaps most interestingly there are several tracks on the LP that were born from jams. Knox has noted that the band have a penchant for spontaneous jams at the start of their practice sessions. Sometimes this is just a warm up, other times the band realised they had written a track, that with a few tweaks was ready for the recording. This is most clear in the track ‘Exeg(en)esis’. The opener for the track, a simple 80’s heavy metal inspired palm muted riff soon turns into a psychedelic rollercoaster of pick scratched noodly leads and the searing lead guitar tone that has come to be one of Horrendous’ defining sound.
“Don’t be surprised if you find thrash and NWOHM fans jumping on this record as their first foray into the quagmire of death metal.”
The track ‘Ontological Mysetrium’ stands out on the album, in the fact it perfectly encapsulates everything there is to like about Horrendous. It’s got riffs, guitar mastery, out of this world drumming (as an aside the drumming on the album as a whole is top tier, hats off to Jamie Knox, you’ve killed it), and the bass tone is pure *chefs kiss*. Whilst the song itself broaches the difficult subject matter of the meaning of being, it does so in a HM2 riddled, riff a minute package that stands up there with some of Horrendous’ best tracks.
Whilst this album is the successor to the mind-bending prog onslaught of 2018’s Idol, the band look further back to their album Anereta for inspiration here. OM is more straightforward for want of a better word. Whilst it still maintains that cutting out-of-the-box thinking that makes Horrendous so much fun, it also seems more assured of itself, confident in the format, the riffs, the melody. There is no room here for needless meandering (not that there was much of that on Idol either) but the fat is trimmed to create this lean, chainsaw toned, Death-inspired beast. To be honest, what little fat there was, and it’s trimming might just have made the bands most accessible record to date. Don’t be surprised if you find thrash and NWOHM fans jumping on this record as their first foray into the quagmire of death metal.