Band:	Nott (USA)
Album:	Hiraeth
Style:	Death metal, Deathcore, Death doom metal
Release date:	August 2023

01. Torn
02. Stasis
03. Null
04. Rend
05. Stare
06. Writhe
07. Hiraeth

‘Hiraeth’, from the Welsh language, is likened to a mixture of longing, yearning, grief or nostalgia for the past. On their latest album, Nott (USA) do a fine job of capturing the ugliness and pain underpinning this emotion.

Once a one-man project of Tyler Campbell’s, Nott (USA) briefly turned into a 3-piece in 2019 when Campbell turned it into a live project. After several line-up changes, the band has now settled as a duo, with Julia Geaman performing drums and Campbell everything else. After taking stock during the pandemic, the pair have assembled Nott (USA)’s sophomore full-length, which comes courtesy of Silent Pendulum Records, and it is an impressive evolution for the band.

Hiraeth is a bit of a melting pot of a few different sounds; there is something of a foundation of semi-dissonant death metal, but additionally Nott (USA)’s deathcore past persists onto this record, while an extra doominess has been integrated. There’s also a real atmospheric focus to Hiraeth; I’d hesitate to claim post-metal is an applicable genre, but there are sonic extremes, and the muted beginning of “Writhe” isn’t wholly apart from sounds that the likes of Cult Of Luna have produced in the past. More than post-metal, this album perhaps can form part of the ‘post-death’ niche represented by the likes of Ulcerate and particularly Aeviterne.

The nearest the band get to Ulcerate-esque disso-death is the closing title track, which is an onslaught of double bass and blasts, contorted dissonant riffs and ominous guitar textures. It’s an impressive sonic assault (although this song does follow the example of previous ones on the tracklist in changing tack midway through for a borderline ambient interlude and slow, bludgeoning outro), but Hiraeth overall tends towards a slower, pounding approach. The remnants of deathcore in Nott (USA)’s DNA can be easily detected in “Stasis”, a gnarly wall of sound that alternates between borderline-breakdowns and actual breakdowns; Spotify tended to auto-play the new Humanity's Last Breath album after each time I finished Hiraeth, and a song such as “Stasis” is pretty close sonically to HLB.

The track that perhaps encompasses the widest breadth of what the band bring to Hiraeth is opening song “Torn”. This track has bleak, dense, groovy mid-tempo death metal riffs replete with Gojira-style pick scrapes, brief deathcore breakdown snippets, and a djenty weight at times to the thickest chugs. In contrast, it subsequently has a interlude passage lingering on the verge of silence; turn the volume right up and you might pick out an ambient droning backdrop that sounds like the reverberations within a vast chasm, but make sure to have ‘volume down’ at the ready for when a grim doomy death crawl suddenly explodes out of the speakers. “Torn” is a very good litmus test for whether you will enjoy the album as a whole, as it really encapsulates the bleakness of Hiraeth.

If there’s aspects of this album that temper my enthusiasm for it, I would say that the quiet moments are a bit too indistinct to really appreciate them as individual moments rather than just ‘prerequisite calm before the next storm’; they’re so stripped down that they lack real distinguishing features, aside from perhaps the lengthy opening of “Writhe”. I also think it’s a slight shame that “Hiraeth” is the only track in which Nott (USA) really let loose with disso-death carnage; there’s brief moments of up-tempo aggression amidst the slower grimness in other tracks, but the song that gets closest to a consistent upturn in speed, “Stare”, is still mostly oriented towards mid-tempo groove. Having mentioned Humanity's Last Breath already, I do begin to get a slight ‘blending together’ weariness at times with this record like I did with Ashen.

Still, with this record clocking in at under 38 minutes, there’s not enough time for this formula to turn stale, and it is a viscerally impressive formula: not one that I enjoy as much as the aforementioned post-death groups like Aeviterne and Ulcerate, but one that I think has the potential to become comparably impressive should Nott (USA) manage to make the riffs more memorable and the quiet passages more impactful.