Terzij de Horde – Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone (Review)

Terzij de Horde are a black metal band from the Netherlands and this is their third album.

Whether it’s 2015’s Self or 2022’s In One of These, I Am Your Enemy, Terzij de Horde being the intensity. Now they’re back, sooner than expected, with the 43-minute Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone, and it absolutely rages.

Terzij de Horde play a mix of black metal and hardcore, and they do so with brutal finesse. The music is visceral and vital, despite its coldly beating heart of darkness.

Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone is a modern black metal assault on the senses, taking in second wave ice, hardcore vigour, screamo intensity, grindcore ferocity, and post-blackened texture. Within this, if you’re able to survive the sheer scale of the band’s dense attack, there’s nuance, subtlety, and textured layers. You won’t initially notice as the music is busy abrading you into nothingness, but it’s there, and reveals a wealth of interest once you become accustomed to the band’s unforgiving attack.

The music carries weighty atmosphere born of fury, and the songs’ scathing assault is harsh and relentless. There is no mercy here, just damage-dealing music, with serrated riffs and fierce vocals. It’s channelled chaos, a whirlwind of violence and emotive aggression. Terzij de Horde don’t play nice, they play nasty, and the music is as savage as it is unfriendly.

And yet, this is not music to admire at a distance, calmly weathering its devastating storm. No, the songs invite you in close, tempting, luring, insisting, dragging you in, until you’re part of the mayhem. Terzij de Horde play black metal forged by feeling and unleashed with the power of a natural disaster, and they want you to be part of it, to experience it fully, to feel it deeply. There is no escape, there’s only an immersion that comes from music that pulls you down with it, far into its catastrophic depths. This apocalypse is welcome somehow, despite heralding the end of everything, simply because Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone is so bloody good.

Fans of bands such as Acceptance, Black Birch, Dödsrit, Frail Body, Krallice, Still, This Gift Is a Curse, Ultha, Underdark, Wiegedood, and Yellow Eyes should be all over this like a plague.