Enisum’s Captivating New Explosive Extreme Metal Album Intertwines Life And Death

Italy’s Enisum deliver a sonic monster of epic proportions on their newest full-length The Moth’s Illusion, out March 15 via Avantgarde Music. The extreme metal feels like a carefully constructed torture implement that ultimately turns out to be of our own making considering what the band share about their thinking behind the work. The concept of a moth’s illusion refers to the moths ‘- or our – effort to investigate what lies beyond the “light” – death – despite the insurmountable barrier to completing such a task. As we understand it, death isn’t reversible.

Still, we can bask in its glow, as the Italian Enisum do via their newest output. Expanding beyond a meditation on strictly human death – and although the outfit don’t confine themselves to imitating nature – repeatedly throughout their work, callbacks to the environment show up, like via the “Ballad Of Mursine” speaking of an Italian mountain and the epic visceral yet ethereal point the band strike with their work. At least at times, their music could be described as a sonic depiction of a mountain piercing through the clouds.

That’s not all though. They also reach down into the murky and even terrifying depths with their work, maintaining an important sense of ravenous brutality throughout The Moth’s Illusion, even as they indulge in lengthy atmospherics and clean vocals. This contrast and the ultimately broad sonic scope of the band’s work serves its purpose well, sharing a somehow at least somewhat physically tangible representation of shared conceptions of the “afterlife” as separated into heaven and hell.

Many treat the reality as much more complicated than those simple demarcations, and Enisum portray this complexity thanks to freely mingling their loftiest and most only barely metaphorically bloody passages. They feed into each other – left hanging by their flowing blast beat pummeling, the listener ends up more prone to be deeply unsettled and even emotionally toppled by their less abrasive work.

This time around, The Moth’s Illusion feels as though Enisum have dug deeply into the capabilities of “straightforward” black metal and even just metal in general in order to wield the patterns in a perhaps previously under developed, emotionally affecting yet brutal, potent and needed mixture.

5/5 Stars

Listen below via Bandcamp