In Metal Promo™️ lingo, particularly relentlessly heavy bands are often called “crushing” or “suffocating”. Hell, even the blurb on Teitanblood‘s own Bandcamp page says their 2025 release From the Visceral Abyss “forges a suffocating atmosphere”.

I don’t think that’s the case.

No, I’m not being a contratian. No, I’m not engagement bating. Let me explain.

“Crushing” and “suffocating” are localized affairs. You are crushed. While one can be crushed by something gigantic, the only scale of the relevant action here is as big as the victim. Same with suffocation. They’re both claustrophobic. Personal.

Teitanblood instead offer something grander and uncaringly huge in scope on From the Visceral Abyss. Slicing winds strip your flesh as you look out over an ash covered wasteland, ruins of imperceptible age piercing the hostile terrain, stretching out into infinity.

Wait, don’t shoot just yet.

In a word, From the Visceral Abyss is big. While the band is as liberal with its use of blast beats and dissonant, atonal guitar playing as ever, there’s a sense of air between the instruments that I haven’t noticed in previous releases from the band. While the LP from France’s Norma Evangelium Diaboli spins on my turntable, the guitars sound distant, as if their cabinets are roaring several feet behind my main speakers. Drums ring out with plenty of reverb, while cascading across the stereo field (panned from drummer’s perspective, as god intended). Bubbling under all of this are the vocals, equally as distant and cold as well as additional layers of guitar– atonal solos and divebombs adding even more abrasive texture to the whole presentation.

The solos are buried in the mix across the whole album, which is honestly a welcome change from black/ death metal bands’ typical piercing, in-your-face placement. I revisited their 2014 masterpiece simply titled Death and the difference in scale was staggering. A decade ago, they were serving up vicious music no doubt, but it was a frenzied melee– they offered the listener no space to find respite from the music. No longer is Teitanblood a snarling beast mauling you through speaker cones, but an unflinching portal to a far less personal yet equally deadly realm. Unflinching. Cold. Almost Lovecraftian in it’s lack of empathy for you. They show confidence in their creative choices, their intuition well honed after over 20 years in the game.

Very briefly, stints of melody poke their head through the dizzying cacophony. These are welcome respites, offering something, anything for your mind to hold on to and make sense of. Sometimes they take the form of tremolo picked melodies lower on the fretboard, othertimes as jangly, arpeggiated chords ringing out. From the Visceral Abyss is definitely an album that needs multiple listens to fully reveal it’s secrets to those willing to receive them. Not to say it isn’t enjoyable on first spin, but if your first impression is anything more nuanced and coherent than “that was… damn”, I’d think you were lying.

While Side A absolutely rips, Side B is where things start to shift, keeping you on your toes. “Strangling Visions” barely swerves in and out of ’80s thrash and speed metal territory, never fully giving in to the genre switch up but flirting with a leather-clad chord progression(?!) under a particularly fist-pumping solo. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t Teitanblood going soft, this is the LaCroix of heavy metal influence. Somebody left the From the Visceral Abyss masters lying next to a 1987 Gibson Explorer overnight.

The near-fifteen-minute closer “Tomb Corpse Haruspex” opens with ominous chords reminding me so much of the lumbering intro to Mick Gordon‘s theme for “Nekravol: Part 1” from DOOM Eternal‘s untouchable soundtrack I nearly let muscle memory take over to ready an SSG-Balista quickswitch combo on some imagined controller. Not today, cybermancubus. The rest of the song, following suit with the first two-thirds of the album picks up energy– blasting, swirling, occasionally allowing a melody to surface, and just generally ripping– complete with a couple Conqueror style pick scrapes just for good measure. Trumpets blare in apocalyptic glory as the track reaches its conclusion, becoming swallowed up in impenetrable reverb, feedback, howling winds, an unintelligible monologue, and finally one last piercing bray.

I suppose despite my best intentions, even I cannot shake the curse of using Metal Lingo™️. It’s in my blood, well entrenched in my past. I’ll fetch the super shotgun.

From the Visceral Abyss is available everywhere and can be purchased on Bandcamp.