Phrenelith – Ashen Womb (Review)

This is the third album from Phrenelith, a death metal band from Denmark.

Following on from 2021’s Chimaera comes the 39-minute monstrosity Ashen Womb. This is absolutely hideous stuff, from a band that apparently just keep on improving. Phrenelith have unleashed something truly malefic here.

Ashen Womb offers up a malignant death metal sound that is rotten to the core. It is a nightmarescape of harrowing darkness and merciless brutality. The music is hostile and raw, infused with sinister atmosphere that gnaws at the mind, and endowed with a bleak heaviness utterly devoid of hope.

Ashen Womb is absolutely toxic, in the best of ways. It’s death metal that marries grim brutality with unholy atmosphere to potent effect. The riffs and the melodies are both used very effectively by Phrenelith, fusing them into something greater than the sum of its parts.

The guitars are possessed horrors grown fat from the despair of innocents. They form a dense wall of virulent terror that close in on the listener with iniquitous vibrancy. Pulsing with immoral life, they shape the music into exemplars of vicious ferocity and gloom-filled worldbuilding. Sombre, otherworldly melodies infect the daemonic riffs and rhythms like streaks of sickness, festering around the plague-ridden wounds that act as corrupted structures for the tracks. Malevolent, hungry, and terrifying, the songs devour the light with unseemly eagerness, only to vomit forth the sort of horrific acidic bile that swamps everything with caustic tar. Ashen Womb is probably the best Phrenelith have ever sounded.

This is an impressive slab of horrible death metal.

Essential listening for fans of Autophagy, Cerebral Rot, Contaminated, Corpsessed, Cruciamentum, Immolation, Incantation, Phobophilic, Sulphurous, etc.