The year 2021 is the year Humanity’s Last Breath comes back to crush us again.
Created in Sweden in 2009, the band composed of Buster Odeholm (guitar, Echopraxia, Vildhjarta), Calle Thomér (guitar, Vildhjarta), Filip Danielsson (vocals, In Reverence) and Marcus Rosell (drums, Dead by April) offers us Välde, its fourth album.
Since Do?dsdans, the introduction, we quickly understand that the only goal is to flatten us, to nail us to the ground and to oppress us. The tuning is extremely low, and allows a nearly permanent chaining of super powerful breaks completed by a suffocating dissonance and an unhealthy blackness, but howlings are not left behind. We immediately understand that they are a huge asset for this discomfort feeling the band offers, just like on Glutton, or the mad Earthless, where screamed backing vocals come to enrich this aggression. But the band also offers majestic samples, like on Descent, piercing leads on Spectre or an alternation between fastness and languor on Dehumanize. We find some Downtempo influences on Tide to make the crowd mosh, before offering a magnificent part with heady clean vocals. No time to digest what is in my opinion the album’s climax, because the band continues with Väldet, a heavy instrumental interlude, but also Sirens, which is one of the most dissonant and weighing songs of the album, the fast Futility, that doesn’t forget to be massive, and Vittring, the last composition that will assume to let us on the ground with a single will: being crushed again.
Humainty’s Last Breath was quite discrete lately. Välde’s impact is only beautified. The album offers a massive sound that only few bands can create, a relentless oppression, and an unbeatable blackness.
95/100