Band:	Anaal Nathrakh
Album:	A New Kind Of Horror
Style:	Black metal, Grindcore
Release date:	September 2018

01. The Road To?
02. Obscene As Cancer
03. The Reek Of Fear
04. Forward!
05. New Bethlehem/Mass Death Futures
06. The Apocalypse Is About You!
07. Vi Coactus
08. Mother Of Satan
09. The Horrid Strife
10. Are We Fit For Glory Yet? (The War To End Nothing)

Anaal Nathrakh's A New-ish Kind Of Horror comes from the same family as The Whole Of The Law and Desideratum: the traditional cesspit of black metal, grindcore, and industrial metal broken up by clean choruses, now littered with electronics, groove, and other increasingly disparate elements. The duo hasn't yet gone full-bore into this more avant-garde side yet, but the metal side remains wicked.

Dave Hunt tested out his King Diamond-style wails on the last album; now we hear him implementing this technique in full, his grisly falsetto a hideous mockery of cries of pain. The results are as hideous and discomfiting as what we should expect from Anaal Nathrakh. Even on the 'thrakh's tenth album, Hunt remains one of the hardest-working and most versatile vocalists in metal. This man will do anything with his voice to make your day terrible - listen for those Rainer Landfermann-style backing vocals in "The Apocalypse Is About You!", the gale-force roars in "Vi Coactus," and canine retching pretty much everywhere.

Likewise, the band as a unit has stuck to its philosophy of acquiring and utilizing any sound necessary to create evil; we hear the symphonic/classical elements of "New Bethlehem/Mass Death Futures," the high-caliber industrial chugging of "Forward!", and the supercharged but structurally classic-sounding black metal of "Mother Of Satan" and recognize that the musical language employed by this band is as limitless as its hatred for the sins of mankind. It's impossible to deny the versatility present - and, as Anaal Nathrakh's shortest album to date, A New Kind Of Horror concentrates its songwriting power effectively and feels like a more solid, more compact application of The Whole Of The Law's strongest elements.

Anaal Nathrakh's practice of keeping their lyrics close to the chest leaves us with song titles, liner notes, and the odd intelligible snippet of vocalization to work with when discerning the band's thematic interests. Typically, the most I can interpret is a general preoccupation with those ideas and subjects that are most humiliating and inimical to humanity, those that inspire the greatest fear and disgust. A New Kind Of Horror puts those concepts on parade in the context of World War I - and in history few greater examples could be found of the stupidity, wastefulness, and arrogant destructiveness that mankind is capable of than that "war to end nothing," which makes it a perfect target for the writhing mass of indescribable malevolence that you'll be witness to here.

Interspersed with observations of current apocalyptic behaviors and the broader scope of existential terror, these violent blizzards of blastbeats show us the ugliest side of war: the side of the war where whole platoons drown in oceans of mud and are lost beyond recovery, where unwitting draftees blister and retch in clouds of mustard gas that will slowly burn them away from the inside out for years to come, where entire landscapes are blasted from the earth by endless volleys of futile retaliation. Taking inspiration from some of the great war poets, such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, songs like "Forward!" and "The Reek Of Fear" introduce elements of the gradual mechanization Anaal Nathrakh has undergone over several albums and give us a picture of Death in the modern world, his cloak and scythe replaced by an industrial monolith of artillery. As someone who has always been interested in history and spent time studying this war, I feel an ability to connect with A New Kind Of Horror in a way that I don't always achieve with other Anaal Nathrakh material, and that only makes the terrible anger of this album all the more tangible - and likewise the horror of that war can infiltrate the present all the more deeply.

I was introduced to Anaal Nathrakh some time around the release of Passion; on hearing A New Kind Of Horror, I am struck with the same feeling that struck me then and that strikes me every time I hear an Anaal Nathrakh album for the first time: this band makes terrifying music. It's easy to be jaded by the rampant preoccupation with "dark" imagery and themes in this genre; metal was born evil and it'll die evil. Anaal Nathrakh, however, manages to tap into a vein unspoiled by the prying eyes of most other artists, a peculiar place of primal energy that will make screams of "FORWARD!" echo in your nightmares. This is scary music and they want you to be scared by it. But don't worry? it'll all be over by Christmas.