Mining-obsessed German duo Dauþuz (‘Death’) has been on my radar for a while now. I initially heard them on their third album, Monvmentvm in 2019, and then in 2021, they crept onto my year-end list with Vom schwarzen Schmied.
I wondered how they would, like other specifically themed bands (i.e. Alestorm) how they would continue to deliver albums based on mining and digging consistently, especially on album number 5. Well, the trend continues as the album focuses on the dangerous and often tragic mining for Uranium in Eastern Europe through time.
However, the music is the same, despite the more modern setting; top-notch, slightly despondent atmospheric black metal, that, along with Acethaxis‘ Immense, is the best of 2024 in the genre.
Uranium continues the trend of long songs with 6 songs spanning 50 minutes with a focus on catchy 6/8 canters that deliver melodic black metal riffs with some melancholy, befitting the subject matter. There are plenty of pace shifts though with some somber marches, which often come with some wonderfully eclectic Germanic howls and clean croons.
All of these elements are on display in spades for the first two excellent, lengthy tracks, opener “Pechblende (Gedeih und Verderben)” and especially the close of the second track “Radonquell 1666”, which might be my personal favorite on the album.
The shorter “Wüst die Heimat” is a more fierce, blistering black metal track before the 10-minute “Ein Werkzeug des Todes” delivers shriller melodies and excellently unhinged vocal performance from Grimwald, with a stern mid-song march that can only be described as …’ Teutonic’.
The alternating short /long album enders “Wismut »Justiz«” and more somber “Uranfeuer 55” follow the album’s pretty rigid formula and style, and do sort of wane a little as my attention wanders. But still, an excellent album from one of the brightest gems in the excellent German black metal scene, that has hit that sweet spot of brilliant consistency in their discography.
