Album/EP

Humanity’s Last Breath – Ashen (Album Review)

Walladmin

Heavy Metal Wordsmith

Aug 2, 2023

7 min read

Humanity's Last Breath - Ashen
Released: August 4^th, 2023

Lineup:

Buster Odeholm // guitar
Filip Danielsson // vocals
Calle Thomer // guitar
Marcus Rosell // drums

Online:

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2023 marks my personal 40^th anniversary as a heavy music fanatic. A little over ten years after becoming a fan, I started writing about it professionally. One of the things I’ve loved about the genre is that it never stands still, it grows, develops and evolves strongly over time.

And it may seem obvious, but one of the main areas in which it evolves is that heavy music just gets heavier and heavier all the time.

Whether it’s via tunings, production techniques (in-studio and live) or simply the manner in which bands write and deliver their music (it’s an ‘attitude’ thing?), or a combination of all of these and other factors, heavy bands just seem to increase the pure aural heft of their sound over the years. And what we have here, I believe, is the next generation, the latest evolution, of heaviness.

Humanity’s Last Breath certainly bring the bulk and the musical carnage on this, their fourth full-length album.

Sure, there are bands that are more intense. There are bands that feature more sheer, in-your-face brutality. There are acts that create far more of a frenetic technical frenzy. There are artists that cram a bazillion more notes into their songs. With HLB, it’s actually the openness and relative simplicity of the grooves and the instrumentation that increase the aural heaviness of this band’s music (and don’t get me wrong, I love technically frenzied bands too). By allowing their sound to breathe (no pun intended) a little more than many of their contemporaries, it only serves to lend the sound more weight, the grooves more pound, and the overall effect more immersive.

HLB’s heaviness isn’t just crushing, it’s oppressive. It closes in on you from all sides. It opens up and swallows you whole.

In addition, unlike many straight-up brutal bands, this act knows how to bring the dynamics, the light and shade, as well. Of course, what this means is they know how to pull back to moments of unsettling ambience (which also adds depth and interest to the sound), so that when they go heavy again, it seems all the more heavy relative to what preceded it. They even set aside a track unto itself for said dark ambience (‘Burden’), and we even get some clean vocals late in the piece (‘Passage’), which make the dirty vocals around it seem even fatter and dirtier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zb1sWFDezA

I’ve talked a lot about the heaviness inherent in this record, but that’s not the only appeal here. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call them actual ‘prog’, HLB is certainly forward-thinking in approach and outlook. They’ve managed to fuse some real creativity into the arrangements and production here. This is best embodied by two of the tracks selected as singles – ‘Instill’, which surprisingly utilises what sounds like a children’s choir (which miraculously takes nothing away from the brutality of the piece, in fact, adds to it), and arguably the album’s best cut, ‘Labyrinthian’, which juxtaposes the extremities of their sound (head-crushing heaviness and ominous ambience) to best effect, via a highly imaginative and unusual arrangement.

Production-wise, this album is nothing short of a miracle. The manner in which every imaginable iota of heaviness has been extracted from just about every moment is truly something to behold. The team behind this is to be congratulated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QpSgqFs5oQ&pp=ygUWaHVtYW5pdHkncyBsYXN0IGJyZWF0aA%3D%3D

Listening to most brutal heavy albums has the effect of making the listener feel like they've been hit front-on by an aural freight train or Mack truck, or a massive road train powering through central Australia. Ashen is different. It makes you feel like you’ve been crushed from every imaginable angle, like maybe a fully submersed submarine when it reaches ‘crush-depth’. In the most enjoyable way of course.

This album is truly something else, something seismic, something very special indeed, and will be very much at the very pointy end of this humble writer’s top albums of 2023 at the end of the year.