Underdark are a post-black metal band from the UK and this is their third album.
2021’s Our Bodies Burned Bright on Re-Entry favourably introduced us to Underdark, and 2023’s Managed Decline crystalised their talents nicely. The potential of a band like Underdark is huge, which brings us to 43-minute new platter O Come Forth Annihilation. Will the Underdark upward trajectory continue? That’s the question.
Underdark’s post-blackened brew consists of a range of different flavours. All of them blend well with each other, making for an experience that’s tasty and satisfying. Elements from black metal, post-hardcore, screamo, post-rock, and sludge are all melted down into a post-black cocktail of satiating atmospheric extremity.
Underdark texture their music with keenly-felt emotion, and the listener benefits from this. The songs are imbued with feeling; underpinning anger and rage threaten to overwhelm everything, yet the band are skilled enough to offer variety in their delivery.
The music ranges between harsh and aggressive on the one hand, and dark moody atmosphere on the other. On one side of the spectrum there is a density to the band’s heaviness that’s destructive, while at the other end there’s a newfound sense of light and spaciousness, of vast vistas previously ignored, but that are now undergoing the process of exploration.
It’s all carefully crafted, and the songs make use of their various components freely and with wisdom. Tracks like Death of a Tool maker emphasise Underdark’s most vicious and scathing aspects, whereas other songs spread the stylistic load more evenly, (for example – closer Children of Men has some of the most prominent screamo-meets-post-rock vibes). As a nitpick, the intro is a separate track to The Hit Piece, despite it clearly being part of the song itself, which is very strange. Why on earth would you cut it into its own 47-second intro? Odd choices aside, Underdark don’t do much else wrong across O Come Forth Annihilation.
Underdark offer up a journey of both brutality and transcendence. It’s beauty via violence, as the band channel fury and ferocity into something that ultimately isn’t lacking completely in hope. The latter is there, it’s just buried amidst an ocean of disgust and contempt.
Well, it seems Underdark’s upward trajectory is unimpeeded. O Come Forth Annihilation, like every record they have released so far, is their best work yet.
Very highly recommended. For fans of Acceptance, Ba’al, Black Birch, Deafheaven, Hæresis, Mourir, Nidelgret, Oathbreaker, Svalbard, Terzij de Horde,Unmother, Wiegedood, etc.
