Aversio Humanitatis Unfurl Scorching Black Metal On Captivating New Album

On their new album Behold The Silent Dwellers, the Madrid-based black metal band Aversio Humanitatis have delivered a scorching slab of pulsating black metal that feels like it hangs onto listeners and drags them through the album’s experience. Listening might be compared to whitewater rafting in the dark, with only enough light in the sky to let those along for the ride see just how precarious that the path ahead really is.

The music on Behold The Silent Dwellers features a significant helping of invitingly familiar black metal elements, from the oppressively intense riffing to the foreboding, immersive atmosphere that swirls around in the cracks of the record. Aversio Humanitatis perform the music with a scathing intensity that feels like it bends towards hardcore and/or death metal sometimes. The sounds of the instruments on this record feel like those of a hailstorm in which every hit brings a ball of fire to the earth — the tones feel big and beastly, and there’s little escape.

The first song begins with a familiarly-toned onslaught of laceratingly fierce tremolo riffing and furious blast beats ringing out on the drums — it’s like a tsunami of sound. Once that first wave washes through, the song gets into riffing that’s a bit more directly piercing. The music, while remaining physically ferocious and heavy as ever, feels like it’s leaping off the guitars and lunging towards listeners, as if the album musically encapsulates the dissolution of the bonds of mental stability. Poignant dynamics run through the ferociously heavy music on this song and elsewhere, which helps the album pack a really personal-feeling punch.

Track two, meanwhile, features some more prominent riffing that’s been extricated from the blast beat barrages that defined much of the opening song, but the melodies that emerge on the guitar carry the same deeply unnerving sense of a powerful hurricane of instability that defines many of the rest of the elements of the record. As the album proceeds and gets into track three and beyond, the power of the melodies gets swept up into a psychologically gripping listening experience thanks to the wild power with which the band perform. And there’s always plenty of musical intrigue, too — the album richly intertwines a sense of musical wonder with a grim onslaught of apocalyptic proportions.

5/5 Stars

Check out the music below! Behold The Silent Dwellers from Aversio Humanitatis is available now via Debemur Morti Productions