The sublime 4th full-length from UK avant-Black/Death Metal band LYCHGATE advances the kinetic potency of their 2020 DMP-debut EP, “Also sprach Futura”, to a frightening level of mind-mangling intensity.

“Precipice” is progressive Extreme Metal plummeting inside a black hole: scorching, twisted and transfixing. The band have upped both the dystopic prog-Death quotient and their sense of experimentation, moving with formidable, mechanised poise and a surrealist’s sense of dread.

LYCHGATE layer fusion riffs, leads and rhythms into skewed melodic entanglements which erupt into strident bludgeon – balefully contrasted with spacious, keyboard-led, classical/jazz-inflected passages rich with tension-heavy dynamics. The players bursting forth in a rush of devastatingly claustrophobic vocals and finely-honed avant-Black Metal mastery.

Interweaving literary, philosophical, and cinematic influences, “Precipice” is conceptually based on E. M. Forster‘s “The Machine Stops” (1909) – a story of humanity’s underground existence and total dependence on a god-like machine – and also draws from Plato‘s ‘allegory of the cave’, H. G. Wells‘ “A Story of the Days to Come”, and T. S. Eliot‘s “The Waste Land”.

Recommended if you like: DODHEIMSGARD, EMPEROR, THANTIFAXATH, ABIGOR