How can the sentence “death metal has been having an amazing decade” and the sentence” there is something stale about death metal” both be true? Perhaps it’s because that the absolute deluge of death metal releases means that there are some truly excellent albums being made but also that the aesthetic, approach to production, and overall “flavor” of death metal are being inundated into acceptable norms. Regardless of why exactly it’s happening, it feels to me like I hunger more and more for death metal which breaks the mold, both in sound but also, and maybe primarily, in approach to the genre. Thank the heavens for Protosequence then, who manage to make death metal that is engaging and interesting musically but also approach it from a fresh perspective.
I mean, just look at the cover art for their upcoming full length album, Bestiary, which we are proud to stream here in full ahead of its April 5th release. It’s so chromatic and evocative! End in the fact that this chromaticism bleeds through into their music and you’ve got yourself a theme. Bestiary pushes the deathcore-tinged progressive and technical death metal of Protosequence to its limit, favoring a breathing, “open” style of production that really makes the music shine. Whether in sweep, guttural, blast-beat, riff, or otherwise, Bestiary sounds alive, complicated death metal that’s not afraid to let all of its instruments shine. By the by, I fucking love the bass on this thing; just tune into the second track, “Baroness Part 1” to see what I mean. Those licks rule and they resound alongside the rest of the music in such a balanced way, a real joy to listen to.
Finalizing this approach is the statement from the band around this release, which I will include here below. It’s a breath of fresh air in a genre that is full of bloated and phony criticisms of society, frankly pathetic declarations of martial strength, or weird and stilted poetry to existence or whatever. Instead, the spirit of Protosequence’s death metal shines through their words: forward, energetic, empathic, and self-secure. If you sleep on this album, you are making a massive mistake – I’ve been on the Protosequence train for a while now but this is their best release yet. Make sure to grab it before it drops on April 5th. With that, here is Protosequence and Bestiary, in full. Death metal forever.
“Bestiary marks our first full length effort after nearly 10 years as a band, and a record that we are all very proud of. We could say all the new-album tropes of “our most mature record yet” and “painting a canvas of dichotomous sound through melody and dissonance” but that’s lame. We’re just 4 friends making music that we like and having fun while doing it. Check it out if you like technical metal that isn’t over-produced and edited/quantized to shit. It’s real, and it’s fun, and we think you’ll like it. But if you don’t, we had fun making it and that’s all that matters to us”
Eden Kupermintz
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