Band:	Nightmarer
Album:	Deformity Adrift
Style:	Technical death metal
Release date:	May 2023

01. Brutalist Imperator
02. Baptismal Tomb
03. Throe Of Illicit Withdrawal
04. Tooms
05. Suffering Beyond Death
06. Taufbefehl
07. Hammer Of Desolation
08. Endstadium
09. Obliterated Shrine

Look, you probably heard a lot of dissonant death metal by now. Here's why you should still give Nightmarer its dues.

First, let's meet Nightmarer. It's far from a supergroup, but the lineup connections are still pretty intriguing. First you have drummer Paul Seidel of The Ocean and guitarist Simon Hawemann of War From A Harlots Mouth and owner of the Total Dissonance Worship label, and vocalist John Collett of ex-Gigan as founding members. Joining them are new guitarist Keith Merrow of Conquering Dystopia, and session bassist Brendan Sloan of Convulsing. So, all professionals with plenty of history of making really nasty metal. That would be reason number one, but Nightmarer are more than the sum of its parts.

Deformity Adrift is an album that doesn't waste your time. At barely over half an hour, and without any prolonged epics, it's an album that delivers the goods and that felt like it passed quite a lot of editing to get this lean, something I'd recommend to a bunch of other bands. However it doesn't feel like the band doesn't have the proper time to explore the ideas they're tackling. Despite its short runtime and relatively short songs, the atmospheric focus that they employ manages to make a very immersive sound in a pretty immediate fashion. Deformity Adrift is instantly crushing, but plays around with different ways of being crushing without breaking the momentum or sitting too much on a singular sound. And the best way they approach this is by injecting plenty of doom death into this dissonant caldron.

And what makes Deformity Adrift such an engaging listen is that Nightmarer manage to inject many parts of the album with a distinct personality. I'm not gonna dissect each song, but I can mention how from the way the crushing heaviness of "Baptismal Tomb" switches into eerie jazzy atmospherics before picking up again, to how the Valborg guests on "Taufbefehl" create uncanniness through the driving rhythm and slightly gothic touch to the atmosphere, to how the closer feels like death doom twisted into a chuggy form, all of it rewards the foreground listen. And one where the dissonance is actually used for more than creating a dense suffocating atmosphere. When it's huge it's huge. But it knows when to be huge.

Concise disso-death that's varied and dynamic, and one that knows how to effectively use it's dissonance and atmospheric focus. Just to show how much it can still be done with this sound.