Veilburner are a black/death metal band from the US and this is their seventh album.
A new Veilburner album is always an exciting prospect. I’ve been a fan since 2016’s The Obscene Rite, but it was 2022’s VLBRNR that really saw them reach their true potential in my eyes. Now we have The Duality of Decapitation and Wisdom‘s 49 minutes upon us, and I’m ready to fall into Veilburner’s well-realised world once more. And, this time, it’s stranger than ever.
In the same vein as Monolithe‘s 2018 record Nebula Septem, The Duality of Decapitation and Wisdom contains seven tracks, all of which are seven minutes long. Musically though, Veilburner are a much different entity to Monolithe’s brand of progressive doom. The Duality of Decapitation and Wisdom once again presents as an idiosyncratic hybrid extreme metal album, only this time around Veilburner have pushed themselves even further into uncharted waters. Comprised of avant-garde black and death metal building blocks, these new songs wrap dissonance, atmosphere, and more insidious hooks than you’d expect into fearsome unconventional structures that dominate the landscape.
This is an album bursting at the seams with unusual sounds, eerie atmospheres, shapeshifting rhythms, esoteric moods, and warped hostility. Each song is like a portal to another world, one where extreme metal is just like ours, only…different. Tags such as progressive, psychedelic, experimental, etc. are all relevant for the music, but sometimes it just sounds awesomely unhinged. Curiously though, even at its wildest and most untamed, there’s still a thread of control keeping things in check just enough to stop it from truly running amok. The songwriting is strong in this regard, (and in many others), allowing the listener unfettered access to Veilburner’s unconventional world, while still providing them with a few safety rungs to grab hold of as they they fall through down deep through the tracklist at very high speeds.
The new Veilburner album is chaos incarnate and madness-inducing, yet manages to retain enough coherence to satisfy and reward. It twists and corrupts all it touches with its slithering, self-devouring presence, all the while working its way into your brain with the ease of an unwanted thought. Veilburner know what they are doing, and there is method behind the mayhem. The Duality of Decapitation and Wisdom is not an experience that many will cherish, but if you are a hardened wanderer in the various extreme metal underworlds, then it has such sights to show you, if only you would see.
Wonderbox Metal 