Cult Burial – Cult Burial (Review)

This is the debut album from Cult Burial, a death/black/doom metal band from the UK.

After being a big fan of the band’s early work, expectations were high for Cult Burial. I have to say that they have been met, and this is a superlative album. Cult Burial play a hybrid form of blackened extreme metal, one which takes what it likes from black, death, and doom metal and then slaughters what’s left.

Cult Burial care not for the past, other than what they can use from it, so the 44-minute journey they have crafted on this album is its own brand of extremity. You can hear old-school influences for sure, but these are brought screaming and dying into the modern era, mixed with more contemporary sounds. The end result is an album that sounds old-school, modern, and timeless all at once.

The band’s brutal death metal side is at constant war with its blackened overlords. It’s a war it’s probably destined to lose, but until it does, we’re cruelly subjected to a heavy and aggressive sound drenched in atmospheric darkness and macabre melody, (and we love it). Cult Burial seem to have a knack for creating songs that balance aggression and emotive substance very well, and the album is full of them.

It’s not enough for this group to show a ready mastery of both black and death metal though. Oh no. They also seem quite adept at throwing in the occasional doom, progressive, or post-metal elements. Like the death metal aspects of the music these are smothered in blackened moods and laced with black metal’s venomous bite. There’s a lot going on here, and Cult Burial is a diverse, well-developed debut. I can hear everything from Bolt Thrower to Celtic Frost to Doomed to Primitive Man to Bloodbath in this album, (and many more besides), and I’m very happy with it, especially as Cult Burial speak of these influences in their own powerful voice.

Cult Burial are doing bleakly wondrous things with blackened death metal, and I urge you strongly to check this out.