ALBUM PREMIERE: Profane Burial - 'Desolate Echoes Of Turmoil'

Norway's Profane Burial have quietly carved out a little distinctive niche for themselves over the years, fusing the icy bite of black metal with sweeping orchestration and a cinematic sense of scale. Now, we all know how “symphonic black metal” that isn’t Emperor has been a bit of a cheesefest over the years, but fortunately there are still a few glorious exceptions, and these guys are surely one of them. On their third album, ‘Desolate Echoes Of Turmoil’, the trio pushes that vision even further, balancing their usual technical precision with genuine emotional weight across six expansive compositions. The “symphonic” aspect is present, sure, but you could also throw the term “prog” at it instead and it would work just as well - and that characteristic doesn’t take long to announce itself, as the moody opening 30 seconds of ‘Den Fortaptes Krønike’, the first song, could well have been lifted from an Opeth record. I’ll stop just short of calling the album “jazzy” or, beelzebub forbid!, “groovy”, just so I don’t give the wrong idea to some of the more sonically conservative among you before you even press play on the thing, but I’ll secretly think that about it anyway. In the end, it’s fucking black metal, okay? Large scale and evocative, yes, but black metal all the same, and made by people - André Aaslie, Kjetil Ytterhus and Bjørn Dugstad Rønnow - who are/were in Borknagar and Funeral and Khôra and other awesome bands. The result is as immersive as it is punishing. It rewards full attention from beginning to end.

Excited? Well, In normal conditions, you’d still have to wait until next Friday to give it a proper spin, but because we’re awesome here at TDM, we’re just giving it to you exclusively a full three days in advance of the release date so you can repeat-listen the hell out of it. And trust me, you will.

‘Desolate Echoes Of Turmoil’ is out on July 24th via These Hands Melt.
You can find Profane Burial on Bandcamp (where you can purchase the album too), Instagram and Facebook.

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