Portuguese machine gun Black Cilice started pounding against humanity around 2009 with their first release Demo 1. Thirteen years later, their latest blacked attack Esoteric Atavism is unleashed. Raw and muddy black metal, from the swamps of hell!. The meaning of Atavism is ‘a tendency to revert to something ancient or ancestral’- so most fitting for grim BM.

The album features a charged aesthetic, delivered with old-school sound and muddy production, two factors that helped enormously the outcome. It’s a homage to the classic BM with a contemporary approach.  Pounding riffology, abysmal drums, vitriolic vocals, extremely bleak atmosphere and a tendency to remain unbroken from the modern trend of cleanness..

As an album Esoteric Atavism is characterized by the acidic, rich sound with high gain, and the absence of anything close to a fine touch. Despite the overall high-frequency spikes, the sound is keeping all of its mass untouched. It remains heavy and at the same time eerie, distorted and chainsaw-like.

Black Cilice sound is set on to be rawer and more electrified sound. Their music is full of dynamics, but these are concealed within streams of thick sonic rivers. Everything within the album is overflowing with mercilessly grim-ness, with terrorizing outbursts appearing ever so often.  If you get tuned into the thick raw sound, one can easily unearth spectacular melodic passages with asthenic colouring, and a whole microcosm of sonic details. It’s a crafted BM roller coaster – that shifts between slow-paced moments and frantic blast beats.

Throughout the album the band steady marches along its chosen grim path, with no contradiction and no compromise. We find archetypical and ecstatic black metal elements, rooted deep in the rejection of anything but the primordial. Esoteric Atavism features six tracks of caustic filth and mesmerizing blackness, buried underneath mouldy and heavy black soil.