Formalist releases its second album.
Formed in 2014 in Italy, the band released its debut album four years later. In 2023, Ferdinando Marchisio (vocals, Forgotten Tomb, Macabre Idolatry), Michele Basso (guitar/samples, Malasangre, Viscera///, The End of Six Thousand Years), Riccardo Rossi (drums/samples, Malasangre) and Marcello Groppi (bass) sign with Brucia Records and announce We Inherit a World at the Seams.
With Warfare, the first of three tracks, the band takes us into a dark, devastated universe where dissonance reigns in the company of raw screams. Slow, oppressive riffs feed the jerky saturated sound, which cuts off to let a few notes fly around us before very gradually adopting a disturbing feedback, then the sound becomes heavier again, while offering a fairly straightforward approach, guided by those regular vocal eruptions. The sound suddenly fades away to let disturbing sonorities guide us to Monuments, where the band places some soaring harmonics to accompany a distant clean voice, followed by the return of heaviness while keeping the very slow, suffocating approach. The band gradually encloses us under its veil of dissonance before letting the riffs break again to become much softer, but the suffocating saturation explodes soon again before the noisy final sets us free to let Selfish suffocate us with its macabre bass. A sampled French voice accompanies this progression into darkness, joined by the guitar, then suddenly the sound ignites, bringing both vocalist and drummer in while the rhythm strengthens while remaining slow, leading us into the eerie haze until those few devastating madness outburst before the final chaos.
Underneath their minimalist approach, Formalist exactly know what to do to hypnotize us while creating a heavy, oppressive, even macabre atmosphere. We Inherit a World at the Seams is by far one of the darkest, most pessimistic albums of the year.
80/100