The Dormant Darkness sounds like one of those albums a guy makes when he's more obsessed with heavy music than just about anything else. As soon as the record starts, Buried Realm comes out swinging with riffs that spiral in every direction without losing their edge. Some of you won’t be ready for the spiraling tremolo assault as the shredding begins.
Hold tight.
Within mere seconds, "Bloodline Artifice" smashes the door down, hitting you with crushing harmonies and organized chaos; it’s almost overwhelming as it sucks the air right out of the room. In the third track, "Human Code," a more frigid melodic line is thrown into the mix, which keeps the album from just being another unrelenting tech-death barrage. Sure, it's brutal as hell, but it also has an air of atmosphere about it, not just aimless velocity. Guitars growl, drums go berserk, and somehow, it all stays in place.
Josh Dummer has always approached Buried Realm as something beyond your standard death metal band, and that approach continues to be reflected in the music here. There are influences of melodic death metal, blackened atmospheres, and even fleeting moments of progressive dynamics, but nothing appears jarring or unwarranted.
Tracks like "Jaws of the Abyss" and “Ophidian Dreams” may be the most aggressive tracks on the record, with absurdly crawling riffs and vocals coming so deep that they can be truly disturbing—then the album takes an ominous turn into shimmering lead work that almost sounds mournful before everything falls back in line again. Those subtle moments matter. They keep the album feeling vital rather than fifty minutes of technical masturbation.
And to be honest, that is what works about The Dormant Darkness. It knows when to bring the hammer and when to let the tension build. A lot of modern extreme metal has forgotten that. Here, songs like "Where The Armless Phantoms Glide Part II" drag out just enough to create breathing room before the next barrage comes through. The title track in particular is great because it gives into the atmosphere rather than trying to outrun everything around it.
And you start picking up on strange little details on repeated spins too—hidden harmonies, stacked guitar parts, strange time jumps that shouldn't work but still do. Chaotic in a way that makes sense. Human. Real. Dangerous.
The highest praise I can give this album is that it actually has a lingering effect after listening to it. So many technical death metal albums are cool for a day and then vanish from memory, but this one stays with you. There's something sincerely bleak beneath the technicality and brutality, like the entire album is rotting in real time. Not contrived evil. Not cartoon villainry. Just fatigue, desolation, implosion.
Buried Realm managed to craft an album that sounds earth-shakingly large without sounding clinical and emotional without losing its bite, which is no small feat, and The Dormant Darkness is firmly in that territory.
Go here to unearth its majesty
