HATE: Rugia (DEATH METAL): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Whether they play black (Besatt) or death (Vader of course) metal, the Poles have never really been known for their sweetness. Tender preliminaries or atmospheric developments don't interest them much in general, preferring blitzkriegs. In this respect, Hate remains one of the most accomplished representatives of this Polish-style aggression, and has been for thirty years!

Of the historical formation, there is obviously not much left, except for the stainless Adam Buszko, its singer and guitarist. But he was able, by recruiting the second guitarist Domin in 2017 and recently a new rhythmic pair (Tiermes on bass and Nar-Sil behind the drums), to inoculate a salutary influx of new blood to his death metal whose technical precision in the service of a warlike power has never exempted him from a dark cruelty. Corollary of a regenerated crew, "Rugia" arrives at the speed of a galloping horse and impresses. Less by a surgical brutality which is always present and which the Polish will never abandon anyway, than by an unprecedented appetite for creeping and unhealthy tempos.

So, of course, it's hard hitting, as usual, with an orgy of double bass drums and murderous riffs ('Resurgence') in a real concentrate of hate. It lasts less than forty minutes, punctuated by nine bites that are as tense as they are robust. Hate doesn't make a lie of its name and the amateurs of brutality won't be disappointed by this twelfth delivery. But the fact is that the Poles have never tightened the handbrake so much either, sometimes perforating their projections with a suffocating slowness. Never either the border with black metal has seemed so thin in a whole eaten up by a negativity both morbid and venomous.

It is thus not rare to identify in this album heavy crevasses at the bottom of which macerate black atmospheres like a possessed soul. 'Exiles Of Pantheon' is thus sabred by vicious penetrations, 'Rugia' is even adorned with astonishingly melodic finery in a charcoal vein, while 'Sun Of Extinction' spreads a twilight mist. This does not prevent them from a torrential hardness and even less an abysmal darkness sculpted by the voice of the unmovable leader who holds firmly the controls of a band never stingy of a punctilious violence.

With this "Rugia" as bubbling as mortiferous, Hate merges death and black metal and shows an insolent shape for such a veteran which, like good wine, improves with time. - Official website

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RUGIA

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DEATH METAL