Inferno are a black metal band from Czechia and this is their ninth album.
2013’s Omniabsence Filled By His Greatness, 2017’a Gnosis Kardias (of Transcension and Involution), and 2021’s Paradeigma (Phosphenes of Aphotic Eternity) were all strong releases of an esoteric nature. With four new songs that expand across 41 amorphous minutes, Inferno have arrived once more with The Anthropic Sophisms (On the Heights of Despair) to show the world their inscrutable vision for blackened darkness.
And oh, what a terrifying vision it is. The Anthropic Sophisms (On the Heights of Despair) offers the listener a daunting, impenetrable, unsolvable nightmare, yet it’s deeply alluring nonetheless.
The Anthropic Sophisms (On the Heights of Despair) delivers avant-garde black metal of a rarefied sort. The record’s ominous presence has a ritualistic air, but also freely flows from obscure origins. The music feels alive, but in an otherworldly malevolent way. The songs are broad soundscapes, rife with tense atmospheres and textured intensity. They offer singular experiences that bleakly enthral, absorbing the listener in a vast uncaring universe. This is black metal warped into something eldritch, scarred by electronic infection, deformed by industrial corruption, riven by psychedelic disease, and degraded by insidious synthwork.
The album slithers forth with an arcane dissonance, layered and intricate, that glitters with lightless magnificence. It’s a journey into cosmic darkness, one that’s blackened to the core, but also expands beyond this. There is a twisting majesty to The Anthropic Sophisms (On the Heights of Despair), an epic unfolding catastrophe of existential proportion. Richly expressive, the music unsettles as it captivates, a celestial obsession that promises ruin.
Inferno’s black metal art is rendered in transcendental colours that defy rational analysis. It exists, it envelopes, it is. The Anthropic Sophisms (On the Heights of Despair) is a masterpiece of world-devouring blackened art, a stellar apocalypse given shapeless form by a band that evoke atmospheric dread like few others. For bold explorers of the unknown, dare you miss this opportunity to lose yourself so completely in something so disconcertingly well-realised?
Essential.
Wonderbox Metal 