Album Review : Spectral Wound - A Diabolic Thirst (2021)
Few records made consensus like Spectral Wound’s A Diabolic Thirst in 2021. The overwhelming positive reaction surprised me for many reasons: a) black metal is a musically and politically divisive genre by nature b) they have a beer-themed song on it and outside of Immortal, black metal and self-awareness don’t have a great track record together and c) they’re from my hometown and I didn’t even know them. How is that even fucking possible? But the hype is real: this album is a fucking kick in the balls.
Spectral Wound aren’t reinventing the wheel on A Diabolic Thirst. They’re just really, really good at turning it. Effortlessly good. I’m sure there’s over a hundred bands who tried to write this exact record over the last twenty years and failed. A Diabolic Thirst is very much a black metal record in its purest form: blast beats, a shitload of tremolo picking, speed, aggression, atmosphere. There’s also a formidable relentlessness to it. There guys are trying to kick your ass for a whole forty minutes. They go gloriously hard.
Spectral Wound’s precision mastery of the form is not a hinderance to their originality, but it expressed itself in more subtle details and nuances that makes otherwise pretty straightforward songs memorable. On Impérial Saison Noire, guitartist Patrick McDowall’s usage of tremolo picking (an aspect of black metal I find overused and cliché) layers the song and complements the emotion in Jonah Campbell’s conventionally great vocal. They’re not just following the recipe. There’s ideas and storytelling here.
Frigid and Spellbound is drummer Illusory’s moment. He diverges just enough from the blast beat-heavy formula to properly frame them as the emotional climaxes they should be. Metal in general has a problem with its musicians wanting to show they’re good musicians rather than writing good songs, but it’s not a problem on A Diabolical Thirst. The members of Spectral Wound are just servants of pure, unadulterated brutality. There’s a humility to their play that makes amount to more than the sum of its pieces.
My favourite song on the record is by far the fourth track Mausoleal Drift. The intro is SO ripped off from Slayer’s song Season in the Abyss, but it’s what makes it so great. They take a beloved shared memory for all metal fans and take it somewhere new. It’s a lengthy, multifaceted, doomier piece where the riff writing really shines through. It’s not any less brutal, though. The sheer amount of space the music takes is absolutely crushing. It feels like you’re running for your life through an underground crypt for nine minutes.
I don’t know what else to say. Songs like Soul Destroying Black Debauchery and Fair Lucifer, Sad Relic are more straightforward, but nonetheless shine through their intensity and songwriting. I was a little less into the closing song Diabolical Immanence, but it’s not bad at all either. It has more of a blackened punk vibe than the others, which is something Quebec black metal is known for. It is very much not unlike late era Darkthrone, except with better production. A love the lengthy and chaotic into to it.
Spectral Wound’s A Diabolic Thirst is everything you’ve been told about it and more. It’s commanding, original (playful at times even) and 100% committed to kicking your ass, which is more than you can say about most black metal releases of the last ten years. What it doesn’t have in paradigm shifting originality, it makes up in intensity and mastery of the form. If you like black metal, you will like this record even if you’re self-conscious about admitting it in public. Because it’s hard to do it better than these guys.
