Seeking cosmic technical death metal for your earholes? Search no more. Mithras already solved the problem back in 2016 with On Strange Loops — a record that doesn’t just play like a collection of songs, but like a catastrophic deep-space event unfolding in real time. This album operates in orbital patterns. It propels itself forward through blazing streams of tremolo-picked chaos, then abruptly expands into vast atmospheric spaces where the riffs appear to float weightlessly before the subsequent gravitational collapse occurs.
Technical death metal occasionally becomes lost within its own mechanical complexity, emphasizing technique over emotional substance. This is not the case here. Mithras demonstrates a command of cosmic scale. Every element on this record conveys enormity, as though the band attempted to compose a soundtrack for stellar death and inadvertently documented stellar birth instead.
The history behind the band only adds to the strange aura surrounding them. Formed in the late 1990s by brothers Leon Macey and Chris Macey, Mithras spent years evolving from a brutal death metal act into something far more alien. One can hear traces of Morbid Angel in their musical DNA - particularly that sense of cosmic dread and spiraling riff architecture - but Mithras lean more heavily into atmosphere, melody, and outright psychedelic scale.
By the time drummer Rayner Coss joined the equation, the band had become remarkably fluid. Tight without sounding mechanical. Complex without appearing desperate to prove it. Then came an extended silence. Years passed. Many assumed the project had simply drifted off into the void. Instead, Mithras returned with On Strange Loops, sounding even more focused, more immersive, and more absurdly expansive than before.
The tracklist delivers moments that strike like sudden decompression. "When the Stars Align" explodes from the start, featuring lightning-fast percussion and brilliant lead guitars that sweep across the mix like solar flares. "Heretics" contorts itself into complex patterns while maintaining its drive - each riff change hits with deliberate force. Then there's "The Outer Dark," one of the album's massive highlights, where the band settles into this mesmerizing cosmic rhythm that feels truly transportive. Not just metaphorically transportive. Actually transportive. Close your eyes and the room vanishes. And "Odyssey's End"? Incredible. The emotional weight in that track catches you off guard. Under the pounding drums and sharp riffing runs this thread of sadness that gives the entire song a strangely human quality. It's progressive without becoming excessive. Heavy without sacrificing mood. A tough balance. Mithras make it seem easy.
The HD full dynamic range edition of On Strange Loops pushes the experience even further into obsession territory. Suddenly the album breathes differently. The drums crack instead of blur. Bass frequencies growl beneath the riffs like some buried machine awakening under ice. Tiny ambient details emerge from the background - echoes, layers, trailing harmonics - details that get crushed flat in lesser masters.
What really makes On Strange Loops special, though, is how alive it feels. Plenty of technical death metal albums impress for a week and evaporate from memory immediately after. Mithras created something stranger. This record lingers. It crawls back into your head at 2 AM. Certain melodies reappear days later like fragments of a half-remembered dream. The violence hits hard, absolutely, but so does the wonder. That's the difference. Beneath the blast beats and labyrinthine riffing lies a sense of awe that very few bands can convincingly capture. Cosmic death metal gets thrown around as a genre tag constantly, but Mithras actually sound cosmic - cold, radiant, terrifying, infinite.
On Strange Loops isn't just one of the best technical death metal albums of the 2010s. It feels more like a transmission from somewhere much farther away than that, designed especially for your Heavys. The kind of record that doesn't just reward repeat listens - it practically demands them, revealing new textures, hidden harmonies, and strange little rhythmic mutations every time you dive back in. Few bands can make technical precision feel this immersive, this emotional, this overwhelmingly vast.
Mithras achieved something rare here: an album that can crush you under impossible riff density one moment, then leave you suspended in pure cosmic awe the next. Long after the final notes fade, the atmosphere keeps hanging in the air like debris from an exploded starship, cold and luminous and impossible to shake.
The HD Full Dynamic Range edition of On Strange Loops can be found orbiting here.
