Final Exhalation.
My friends 2021 it seems will go the same way as last year, not wanting to kill any hope that you have, but it has not started well. We rely on the artists releasing new material and offering online livestream events to quench our musical thirst. Our friends from Sweden appropriately named Humanity’s Last Breath will throw their hat into the arena later this month so prepare for a spell in the immersion chamber with this weighty composition. A damning and desolate landscape is commiserated as the band focus on all things hideous and hellish that plagues our world. The imagery is stark, explicit and quite graphic, seriously not for the faint- hearted; it is a challenging watch as we wonder what depths we are willing to sink to as humans. There is no ‘kind’ in humankind, it is blood, see it flow freely and taint the driven snow. We are a mere death dance away from our own demise, our time on this planet reduced to being a ‘Glutton’, witness our ‘Descent’ into an ‘Earthless’ space, neither time nor ‘Tide’ waits, our ‘Spectre’ mirrors our capabilities to ‘Dehumanise’. I save this last ‘Dönsdans’ for you, my pretty, let it corrupt your soul as we sway to the Vildhjarta vibes and Black Tongue brutality on offer, gnarly, grisly and abysmally good. The track list is like reading an inventory of unholy commandments, our weathered bodies desiccated by the elements, battered and bruised by the throbbing bass and guitar, pulsating percussive reverberations that won’t let you catch your breath. Jammed with ritualistic, almost pagan Wicker Man styles scenarios, the fear consumes you but you can’t turn away from the screen. This is an appropriate time to reshuffle your internal organs, a bit like rearranging the furniture for the benefit of our health and minds. We end this maniacal display of all that is wrong with humanity with ‘Vittring’ and we see the derangement and deviation in all its psychotic glory, lessons should be learned, but alas we cannot be trusted with such a responsibility. Heed the warnings from our friends HLB; I for one will use this as a benchmark for this year’s festival of savagery.
Tap your fingers in time to the dull hum of death, take humanity’s last breath.
Humanity’s Last Breath – Välde out on February 12th via Unique Leader.