Marduk – Memento Mori (Review)

Marduk are a Swedish black metal band and this is their fifteenth album.

Memento Mori contains 42 minutes of passionately crafted blackened intensity. It’s like bottled chaos and frenzied mayhem, with moments of dark storms and nightmare worldbuilding. Yep, Marduk are back.

The songs are uncompromising and harsh, delivering the sort of raw nasty aggression that Marduk do so well. Memento Mori is merciless and malevolent, striking a balance between Marduk’s old-school approach to intense brutality and the more contemporary hostility of the singer’s band Funeral Mist. The album also bears some comparisons in certain different places to acts like Dark Funeral and Wiegedood. It’s ultimately all Marduk though, and they stand strong on their own Hellish merits.

The riffs are as sharp as blades and the singer’s screams lethally acidic. The drums are relentless blurs of punishing skull-beats, and the bass pulses with malevolence. Most of the songs barely give you a chance to catch your breath before the next assault. Marduk are not holding back. There’s a huge amount of hyperfast material on Memento Mori, although it definitely isn’t its only setting.

Occasionally the band slow down, allowing for the creation of moodier atmospheres that don’t rely on infernal speed to power them. Instead, they’re imbued with a dark majesty that’s bleak and uncaring. The entire album benefits from a starkly grim demeanour though, no matter what the pace Marduk operate at. Whether fast or slow, there’s an atmospheric side to the music that exists separately, (although linked), to the scathing wrath of the material’s core. As examples, parts of both Blood of the Funeral and Red Tree of Blood manage to conjure up a terrifying presence at a blistering speed.

Memento Mori is a highly enjoyable slab of murderous blackened aggression that walks the line between old and new with a sneer of contempt. Marduk are always a pleasure to listen to, and Memento Mori is just a really good record. It’s less strewn with catchiness than some of the band’s albums, (although it certainly has its moments), but benefits from repeated spins to truly open up the album’s depths to be appreciated in full. Once you do, it latches on to you like a clawed hook through the ribcage.

Very highly recommended for any fan of unforgiving, sinister, ferocious black metal.