ASSUMPTION (ITA) – Hadean Tides (2022) 🇬🇧
Just over a couple of months ago, we got the release of the ASSUMPTION‘s second long-length. Entitled Hadean Tides – and available on CD and vinyl from Everlasting Spew Records – contains seven songs for a total of 55 minutes of ’90s-inspired death doom. Also, this is the first record that is not just the duo formed by David Lucido (BOTTOMLESS, GIUDA, SHRIEKING DEMONS…) and Giorgio Trombino (BOTTOMLESS, BECERUS, ELEVATORS TO THE GRATEFUL SKY…) composing, but also the rest of the members. Formed in 2011, their discography has a demo, an EP, and the amazing Absconditus from 2018.
In Hadean Tides, we can see the evolution of the Italian band fully polishing what they had already done in previous albums. Their compositions, in general, except for a four-minute-long song, are quite extensive and rich in riffs with the rawness of death and doom metal from the early ’90s but brought to 2022. The quality of the production is something to highlight, as well as the many guitar details and frills, something that makes the record far from becoming monotonous.
It has much denser and heavier moments but, also pulls much more direct guitar lines in some of the album’s tracks. I’m not a big fan of breaking it down song by song, but «Tryptych» being my favorite track on the album along with «Daughters Of The Lotus» or the 15-minute finale entitled «Black Trees Waving» are the ones that give the album personality and show the new virtues of the band as a whole.
Going into the lyrical themes, this album could well be about the mourning of death as a gateway to introspection and how it is a global process that can encompass all areas of the human being. The existential part of the depth between life and death. In this album, we can hear references to the mythical WINTER with the funeral of DISEMBOWELMENT or EVOKEN and not less important, the psychedelic vein of another well-known band like ESOTERIC.
This is definitely their most elaborate work to date, as it is more complex and in some ways breaks away from what they previously offered. Hadean Tides may be an album about the creation of our planet, but it sure sounds like they are trying to destroy it.
