You know you’re essentially out of work as a reviewer when the press release that accompanies an album you’ve been given to review sums it up in three words:

FULL SPECTRUM BEDLAM.

And that, in a nutshell, is what you find with Descent‘s new album, Order of Chaos. The middle and upper classes of Victorian London used to pay to go and view the inmates of the Bethlehem Mental Institution (Bedlam) by way of sport; now via the gift of recorded music, you can do the same sort of thing from the comfort of your own living room. You can thrill to the unhinged madness of Dragged, for instance, with it’s absolutely brutal chugging and vocals dredged from the bottom of a vat of tar; or you can feel the convulsions of fear ripple through your limp, useless carcass as it is subsumed by the gargantuan riff assault of Resolve. The choice, such as it is, is yours…

In all seriousness, though, this is an absolute brute of a record. Once you decide to press play, there’s no escape from the madness, as every single track pushes you remorselessly into the corner of whatever space you happen to be listening in. The guitars of Brendan Auld and Josh Kane don’t so much explode from the speakers as rupture them irreparably, with the resultant ooze crashing down on you and squeezing the breath out of your innards. Selecting the ‘best’ track from this sort of punishment is pointless, obviously, but the lead work that rounds out Gathering, backed by another set of those chugs and some hellish crossfire courtesy of drummer Kingsley Sugden, is a piece of mental-scarring-as-enjoyment that will stay with me deep into 2022…

Suitably, and, probably, inevitably, the tracks which follow Gathering are named Fester and Filth, and again I really couldn’t put it better myself. The former, especially, is an absolute triumph and in this reviewer’s opinion represents the best that this band has yet come up with; Anthony Oliver‘s vocals here are absolutely terrifying, managing to purvey new levels of menace and transcending the usual slightly comic-book approach many vocalists take with this style of singing. Evil incarnate? Possibly not, but bloody close…

Even bassist Jim Dandy gets in on the act with some low frequency mangling on final track Despotic; And, despite the fact that 2021 hasn’t even finished yet, it looks like the death metal bar has been set pretty high for 2022 by Descent…

Order of Chaos releases on January 14th.