This is the fourth album from Canadian death metal act Phobocosm.
2023’s Foreordained made a good impression on me, so when ominous portents heralded the arrival of Gateway, I was ready. Across 35 minutes Phobocosm unleash a dark and dismal death metal dénouement that apparently closes their current chapter, making ready for a future one.
Gateway is crushing and brutal, but it’s also a record that’s just as much about the overall malevolent experience as it is about gruesome heaviness, more so in many ways. The songs are cloaked in ominous atmospheres and macabre darkness. Phobocosm’s death metal is greater than simply a collection of riffs; this is death metal as an otherworldly invasion force.
Gateway contains seven songs that deliver an immersive mood-focused death metal feast for the listener to either enjoy or endure, depending on taste. Out of the seven, three are instrumentals, but these are still an integral part to the album’s flow. They focus the band’s atmospheric proclivities into structured bouts of worldbuilding, while around them the primary songs rage and burn with spectral grandeur and shadowy intensity.
This is an oppressive assault on the senses. It’s a claustrophobic onslaught of heaviness that weighs you down until you can take no more. The pressure is overwhelming, but Phobocosm keep applying it. Gateway is relentless in its application of the malefic dark arts to death metal’s ugly aggression, resulting in a version of the style that’s shrouded in doom-drenched nightmares and malignant auras.
As an end to this chapter of Phobocosm, Gateway is aptly named, but it’s a very strong record in its own right. In fact, it’s one of the stronger death metal releases to appear from the underworld of late – fully formed, and ready to corrupt and destroy everything around it.
Essential listening.
Wonderbox Metal 