Dimholt is back.
After a few years of silence, Woundheir (vocals, Embrace by Dark, Impenitence), Asen (guitar, live for The Revenge Project), Rumen (guitar), Yavor (bass, Black:I, Brodnik), and Stanimir (drums, Black:I) reveal their third album, Metaform.
The album begins coldly with MetaForm, the title track, which starts with a fairly calm guitar, joined by a second guitar and then the rest of the band, including solemn growls, creating a majestic but relatively slow and heavy sound. There are a few accelerations on the drums that lead the charge towards rougher and even more suffocating passages, still allowing the leads to offer a bloody touch in the avalanche and its choirs before joining Radiance of Dying Light, where the atmosphere changes radically to become more aggressive. The riffs are much faster, blast beats reign supreme to accompany the onslaught, and even if the roars are still as calm as ever, they fit perfectly with this contagious rage, which eventually subsides to join Totem, which develops its harmonics to create a heady veil before the rhythm section ignites. The track remains in these wild, dissonant Old School keys that flow naturally before moving towards hypnotic patterns that easily invade our minds on Reality in Timeless Comatose, where the contrast with the vocal parts is deliberately quite marked. There is a very ethereal dimension to this track, amplified by the agonizing break before the return of violence, then The Horrors of Maddened Eyes transports us once again into a cold and imposing sound before revealing its devastating riffs in waves, still tarnished by the ambient darkness, but the track passes fairly quickly overall. To Embrace Profound Stillness follows suit with initially haunting tones, offering a catchy rhythm that borrows from different roots to develop these intoxicating patterns, then suddenly bursts into flames and carries us away in its furious flow. We move on at full speed to Tomb of Molten Stars, which takes over after a short moment of hesitation and revives the wave with extremely raw and abrasive riffs played at full speed, creating uncontrollable, scathing harmonics before moving on to the very long Tapestry of Shapeless Eternity. This last composition first imposes a massive sound on us before finally offering a slow march that intensifies slightly before giving us a moment of levitation with its gentle melody, which eventually accepts a final dose of saturation and carries us into silence.
While Dimholt does not deny its furious and abrasive roots, the band has also developed a very melodious approach over time. Metaform is the culmination of their darkness, where imposing coldness meets aggression and meticulous work on harmonics.
85/100