Anaal Nathrakh – Endarkenment (Review)

Anaal Nathrakh are a UK black metal band and this is their eleventh album.

You’ve gotta love Anaal Nathrakh. Albums like A New Kind of Horror just keep on giving, and I’d pretty much recommend anything in their discography, (also check out The Whole of the Law and Desideratum). Endarkenment is another adrenaline-filled ride into darkness and ferocity.

Endarkenment features 41 minutes of throat-lacerating violence in the guise of visceral industrial blackened extremity. The nightmare brutality of the songs is mercilessly ripped through by sharp streaks of melody, adding texture and colour to music that revels in foulness and horror.

The key to Anaal Nathrakh’s success is their capacity to blend extreme aggression and venomous hatred with the ability to craft actual songs with hooks the size of mountains. Seriously, there are some horrendously catchy moments on Endarkenment. It’s rare the you hear brutally violent grinding barbarity, sleek murderous melodies, and soaring epic choruses in a single song, and yet Anaal Nathrakh have somehow mastered this unusual art.

As vicious as this is, it’s also every bit as well-written, meticulously rendered, and flawlessly delivered as A New Kind of Horror was. I loved that album, and I love this one. Anaal Nathrakh have been doing this for some considerable time, and know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve developed their own sound in their own filthy niche of the extreme metal landscape and they rule it with an iron fist. Endarkenment is another exquisitely nasty example of a band offering something of the highest quality.

Intensity and emotive substance are strange bedfellows, yet this is what underpins Anaal Nathrakh’s sound. On Endarkenment the band have refined this further and produced a scorcher of a record.

Essential listening.