[Album Review]: IMMOLATION (US) - ‘Descent’.
Writer: Brady Irwin
Refer to bottom of article for artist/label links.
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Peace, Love and TGIDMF (Thank God It’s Death-Metal Friday) - Brady.
I: Immolation (New York, US) - Descent
Cover art by Eliran Kantor - see end of review for artist links.
Release Date: Friday, 10th April 2026
Label: Nuclear Blast Records
Genre: Death Metal (Dissonant/Technical/Death-Doom)
Production: Zack Ohren (Mixing, Mastering, Production), Justin Passamonte (Guitar/Bass/Vocal Engineering), Noah Buchanan (Drum Engineering)
Art: Eliran Kantor (Cover); Santiago Jaramillo (Booklet/Liner Art)
(SEE HERE for Inner-Strength Check Podcast: Episode 72 to watch/listen to our very recent [Interview] with Bob Vigna (Guitars).
It’s not required prior to reading the album review below, but it’s a great discussion and provides important context from the artists’ perspective. Thanks once again to Bob and the Nuclear Blast team for facilitating this great chat with a death metal vanguard!)
‘Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.’
I’m committing Australian cultural heresy slightly here, but extracting this line from our Ode of Remembrance to ANZAC servicepersons who have fallen in battle feels doubly relevant to the present review. After spending as long as an intense, envelope-pushing and influential death metal act, New York’s doomiest and gnarliest veterans have weathered countless of their own cultural, financial and professional storms. Storms that have washed aside countless local, Statewide, US and international extreme metal bands, the relentless onslaught of time, late-stage capitalism and the like serving as an ongoing risk-factor in keeping and maintaining a functional extreme-metal outfit.
That we’re now on album twelve is considerable enough, particularly when you’re a band that has stayed together to make listener-unfriendly tunes literally as long as a millenial like myself has been alive (37 years). I can’t imagine doing anything for that length of time, let alone consistently churning out molten slabs of forward-thinking, discordant death metal.
And yet, here we are in 2026 as all else seems to crumble and decay around us sociopolitically, economically, fiscally, an ongoing shattering of peace that seems only intent on further, absurd escalation by the day. Descent indeed, huh?
I’m not here to provide soapbox commentary on the state of things, though. I’m here to comment on artistic material that helps myself and many others experience catharsis, creative output and sensory enjoyment/relief, at a time where smartphones beckon with an unyielding tide of grimness, straight to our hip pocket.
Despite their increasingly confused and politically-charged surrounds and, than bust out some laurel-resting activity like an ambient B-sides EP or a diversion into I don’t know, 70’s prog, Descent begins with an all-too-familiar, brief doomy refrain that is quickly ensnared in the complex, winding tendrils of our veteran noisemakers.
‘These Vengeful Winds’ does exactly as described, the no-BS opener rapidly moving from a quiescent and brief, spooky introduction into a tumbling, jagged firestorm of riffage. The patented deliberation through technical wonkiness employed by guitar-masterminds Bob Vigna and Alex Bouks is equal parts serpentine, jagged and tightly-wound, coiling and unfurling around the relentlessly precise motion of vocalist/bassist Ross Dolan and the completely-maniacal drumming of one Steve Shalaty. There’s an employment of doomy riffage here which isn’t uncharacteristically Immolation, but the use of negative space on the opening track in particular serves to induce reeling gut-punches as the band retracts, strikes and repeats like a pit of pissed-off cobras.
Much like recovering from the waves of disaster-media flowing into our ears, the band give little concern or pause for any listeners’ need for a minute to recover. No sooner does the initial battery subside that second track ‘The Ephemeral Curse’ screeches from the speakers like a ghastly apparition, mid-exorcism. On that note - I’ve always admired Immolation for eschewing the more shock-jock ‘God Bad, Satan Good’ flavour of lyrical expression. Dolan’s thematic aim at religious hypocrisy and the worse devils of our nature has always, to me at least, carried a philosophical tone that is more bemused-agnostic than angry-atheist.
Thus, with the envenomed spittle of a cornered predator he roars atop the secondary cascade, hurling a mixture of grumbling, baritone dog-barks with piercing, guttural high-register shrieks. Like I said, age hasn’t condemned this bloke, and his service to the death metal cause remains consistent. The seemingly unlimited wellspring of tangentiality offered by Bob’s spindly, chaotic lead-work serves only to further cement a feel of insanity and incredulousness, punctuated by sweeping breakdown riffs that hit like claw hammers made of polonium.
It’s not until the aptly-titled ‘God’s Last Breath’ that we see more than sporadic flirtation with the doomier mid-tempo pacing the band are known for employing with extra malevolence. The sparseness here is relative, though, and the track trundles towards the listener with a consistent and menacing plod throughout. With repetitive and primarily low-ended growling refrains to the equally booming thunk of subterranean bass and drum-kicks, it truly does conjure up imagery of fallen behemoths, of demigods laid waste before their time. Takes a bit of skill and finesse to expound such doomy feels within the confines of four minutes, but the Immo lads know their stuff.
With a death metal scene only just picking up some of the tricks these New Yorkers have been laying as scene-cobblestone, there’s a sense that the band aren’t entirely phased with trying to out-prog, out-play or otherwise anxiously prove their worth as genre kings. With enough time, experience and creative ponderance, the proofs’ often in the pudding. ‘Adversary’ is exemplary of just that, a gnashing, rabid and frantic number kept in a constant state of death metal hyper-arousal, sporadic black-metal-coded arpeggiation and relentlessly upbeat drumming giving this brief number an air of imposing savagery. All up, it’s a blackened death metal assault brandished through dissonant structure, stopping on a dime turn with little warning to the listener.
Some measure of compensation is provided shortly thereafter; ‘Attrition’ relents momentarily for a simplistic thudding of toms, double-kicks and a more focused tremolo backing as Dolan chants with a more drawled and withdrawn delivery. Wailing feedback, harmonics and punchy drum and bass fills serve as tangy spice for garnishment, same with aberrant twists and turns between both guitarists. After a brief flourish of death metal brutality, the tracks’ descent (pun very much intended) into the second half is a moment I found a little lacklustre. Namely, the isolated and minimalist lead hanging above repetitive yet complex riffing a little anti-climactic. Not to say it’s a bad track overall, mind - anything but. Plus really, it’s minor and momentary gripes in comparison to not only the track itself, but the album wholesale.
Check out ‘Attrition’ music video, via the official Nuclear Blast Records Youtube Channel:
… and HERE for the audio-only single stream.
‘Bend Towards The Dark’ does a goddamned fine job of pulling me out of any encroaching cynicism, however. Bursting out of the gates like a racing hound that just had a chili pepper crammed in its’ rear, there’s a dynamic interplay between both cavernous and watertight in terms of riffage, rhythm and vocal refrains. Jagged chords sing out in isolation off the end of palm-muted chugs in off-beat timing, circling back for a slamming riff juxtaposed with some off-kilter lead trills before upping the anthemic factor massively. The martial pacing of Dolan’s chants against a constantly busy, chaotic instrumental background helps keep things claustrophobic, punctuated by some brief blackened-style tremolo before demolishing us with a truly imperialistic march of death-metal brutality… and like that, the track dissipates like the vapours of a demon from Japanese folklore. Just… just straight-up gone! It’s jarring, intentional and works well.
‘Host’ utilises this interruption to slither in with more of that dripping, harmonic-addled lead/rhythm guitar flurry, Steve’s drumming returning to that kick-heavy, consistent rumble underpinned by Ross’ meaty bass-lines. It’s at that point in my album-listening (of which I did quite a bit, ‘cause this album kicks arse) I notice a thematic and stylistic shift, too. Whilst not overtly touted as a concept-album, the palatial and grandiose mood evoked by this song gives off a mental image of brave adventurers busting into the ancient, baroque and subtly-sinister accoutrement of a grand arch-villain. We’ve descended so far on our musical journey that we’re now entreated less to gnashing hordes of wild fiends, and more to timeless malevolent forces whom care little for the trifles of musical trends, news cycles and heck, mortality itself. The flashy yet tasteful soloing as the tempo intensifies works well against the dual-vocal snarling and screeching, once again cutting itself off abruptly with little fanfare to conclude.
‘False Ascent’ takes the warriors’ hope and dashes it against the instruments of torture, of sinister machinations and moribund intent. We’re listening to an extreme-metal album, so naturally the rapid ascent (more puns, sigh) into next-level furiousness and viscous, discordant yet technical riffing is heartily welcomed by Yours Truly. There’s a sense of spiralling towards a climactic, perhaps even wholesome sort of end, but in true Immo form - hopes of whimsy are dashed and crushed under the treads of some tank-like machine-chimera, a beastly conflagration of riffs that whirr, clank and fizz like an infernal contraption towards the tracks’ closure.
‘Banished’ gives us perhaps the longest period of respite on the whole album, if unsettlingly so. A brief instrumental interlude, it’s not exactly the whimsical, lilting type of number you might on, say, an Opeth album. Nay, if anything, the underlying discordance is made bare from being bereft of vocals, only serving to increase dread. Really, these guys write albums with a use of atmospheric tension that cannot be understated. No epic 12-minutes sojourns into cosmic death metal, no in-your-face metaphorical slant, just a brooding and sinister tension.
Tension which once again uncoils for the last time in album closer ‘Descent’. Titular in nature, its’ scope is as with any good metal-album finisher - that is, encompassing all that has unfolded prior. There’s spurts of some of those schizotypal, paranoid and jagged-edged riffing/lead-work yet, a desperation at the hero’s entrapment in darkness made manifest. As if to signify a cue to completely lose, the rhythm section is equally snag-ridden, punctuating air with the whomp of an arpeggiated bass face-punch, or the cracking of crash and snare. Dolan employs his full range here, swelling and rising with that all-too-familiar death-metal swing, but with a renewed ferocity that sees the album skulk off away from itself in a moribund, defeatest tail-end of riff following a climactic crescendo.
And there you have it. Another Immolation album down, and there’s elements of familiarity and disconcerting newness amidst it all. With every second band these days looking to pull an Artificial Brain, Demilich or Cryptic Shift, attempting to musically fumble far into the nebulae beyond, these New York veterans pull off yet another technically-proficient yet maddeningly off-kilter affair.
Proving the pendulum of time to be a brutal mechanism in and of itself, Descent proves for the twelfth time that malicious songwriting intent isn’t always about flashiness or hyperblasting, even if both are readily present throughout.
If you’ve had your fill of the we’re-Bloodbath-or-maybe-Jungle-Rot-I-guess bands swarming Bandcamp, Youtube and other platforms, or indeed if you’ve reached saturation point with supposed ‘cavernous OSDM’ re-interpretations?
Do yourself a favour and experience the truly discomforting and harrowing avenues of death metal. Be led to your aural descent into true madness, with Vigna, Bouks, Dolan and Shalaty as your psychiatrically-unhinged sherpas. Just don’t expect to bathe in the warmth of victory and pomp once you’ve laid down that bedroll in the deepest, most doom-laden depths of metal’s abyssal planes.
IMMOLATION is:
Ross Dolan | Bass/Vocals
Robert Vigna | Guitar
Steve Shalaty | Drums
Alex Bouks | Guitar
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