The relentless pace and depth of the industry’s release schedule is something that likely needs no introduction or explanation to those that grace Echoes and Dust’s hallowed pages. If you are reading this, or indeed any other website reviewing the music of our wonderful interwoven scene, then you are likely familiar with the exhilarating rush of ‘New Music Fridays’ coupled with the foreboding and somewhat mournful realisation that one simply cannot listen to it all.
So, while it isn’t atypical whatsoever for a band to have a long break between records, particularly in the auspices of the murky strange hinterland and netherworld of blackened extreme metal, it nonetheless remains still noteworthy when it passes beyond the five-year mark. Thoughteater, the sophomore LP from mysterious Spanish dissonant, clawing black metal entity Délirant, arrives from the depths of the miasma just over six years from the self-titled debut.
In nature, one of the most common colour codified ways of signalling poison, ill-intent and general danger or don’t-fuck-with-me energy is the mix of yellow and black. While there are a number of species one can point towards, most minds will surely have jumped to the wasp. Words that spring to mind when considering these insects are; insatiable, focused, relentless, temperamental, loathed, misunderstood, and – well – ouch. The buzz, they saw, they fly in numerous directions at acute angles at momentary whim, and they can sting multiple times. Délirant achieves all of these things and more. Thoughteater is the nest, the swarm.
The brainchild of black metal recluse ‘D.B.’ (perhaps that should be hivemind, given D.B. also being the progenitor of the excellent projects Negativa and Hässlig), Délirant seemingly arrived fully formed, rather than larval, in 2018. How wrong my past self has proven to be, though! Thoughteater envinces that further maturation was not only possible, but imperative. While each project already had its own particular genus, and traits therein, this sophomore album realises Délirant as a singular, necessary entity. It moves away, beyond, and arguably transcends its other associations.
Despite being only a few minutes longer in length than its forebear, Thoughteater is split into seven distinct yet interconnected tracks, unlike the four longer but slightly more separate movements of the self-titled predecessor. Both albums, and particularly this new offering, are intended as full-immersion album listens. The track titling (‘Thoughteater I’, ‘Thoughteater II’, etc.) only adds to the sense that once swallowed by the drone of bombinating crush, there is no escape from this horde and legion of the gnawing void.
While Sentient Ruin – who have aided in unleashing this monster upon our ears – give nods to the project’s sonic kinship to sounds from profoundly brilliant bands such as Blut Aus Nord and Misþyrming [and one does hear those touchpoints], there seems to be a more oblique black metal squall that brings projects such as Skáphe, Black Cilice and perhaps even Prava Kollektiv’s Hwwauoch to mind. True to the Latinate root of its’ name, D.B. injects a deleterious effect upon the language of black metal. Not only raw, and not just warped, this chainsaw black metal feels ravaged, deceptive, surreal, and unbowed, swarming as it does against the eardrums of an unsuspecting listener.
Radical yet panicked, intimate, also anxious, this opus is a blistering album that has gestated within the nest the debut provided it. D.B. has in the intervening years gone on runs of multiple releases with their other two projects. While any new Negativa and Hässlig music on the dimmed horizon would surely appal and delight this writer in equal fashion, it is my sincere hope that more Délirant may be served to us before too long. Intense and on the edge of sanity, Thoughteater is one of the boldest raw black metal albums of the past two or three years, and more wasp-like tracks to infest my mind would be welcomed, deliriously.
