Boy, Seek & Strike is snatching up all the newer, younger orchestral/blackened/symphonic deathcore acts, aren’t they? Existentialist, To Obey A Tyrant, Ruins of Perception, When Plagues Collide, and the big one, Immortal Disfigurement, etc, adding to the established likes of Assemble the Chariots and Downfall of Mankind.
The UK’s Existentialist has been around for a couple of years with a self-released album under their belt from 2023, The Heretic (which actually has one of my favorite songs in the genre, “The Abyssal Embrace”). And while some of the marketing (and certainly some of the band’s imagery and costumes) label them as ‘black metal’, that is a bit of a misnomer, as Existentialist falls squarely in the Blackened deathcore genre, though like very similar sounding label and country mates To Obey A Tyrant, they do have much more of a Black Metal lean, especially the symphonic elements.
This introductory EP for the label is 4 songs and 30 minutes, but the last song is a 12-minute orchestral-only number called “Garden of Bones” and while I typically enjoy bands like Assemble the Chariots or Hate Within dropping an orchestral-only version of albums, a single song that takes up almost half an EPs runtime, is a bit wasteful.
That said, the first three songs follow what The Heretic delivered. A far more blackened take on the genre, that, as I mentioned earlier, sounds like To Obey A Tyrant, who I heard first, so I’m not sure which band was ‘first’ to deliver this sound in the UK scene. They could, however, be the same band, with the exception that Existentialist has a slightly weaker drum sound and orchestration, though still both elements are solid.
Still, the three tracks “Death Before Dawn”, “Wretchedness ov Existence”, and the very good, 7+ minute EP centerpiece “Wraithchild” do everything well and fit in this year’s bumper crop of the style pretty solidly, though not as elite as some of their peers, and I give the nod in this bout of UK bands to To Obey a Tyrant (though I think the recent Vile Sycophant EP might be the best of the three).
