Like all bands that meld metal’s numerous disparate incarnations, Vancouver’s Atræ Bilis are not easily pigeonholed. Death metal, atmospheric dissonance, tech brutality and much more are all thrown into the Atræ Bilis meat grinder coalescing beautifully and disturbingly into their own signature fusion like a perfectly functioning innovative machine. On new album Aumicide, the follow up to the band’s full length 2021 debut Apexapien, Atræ Bilis have taken axiomatic strides in expanding the scope of their elegantly perplexing melange of incinerating invocations. Sounding both crushingly concrete and slickly organic, the band amputates all boundaries, injecting cyberdyne slams, serrated inscrutability and unfettered new magnitudes of vocal abuse. Conceptually as committed as it is musically, Aumicide tells of a test specimen subject to experiments in faith removal by intromitting simulations of Hell to sever the self from the multiverse, resulting in the genesis of a new era; an egregore engineered by an absolute godlessness. Produced, engineered, mixed and mastered by Christian Donaldson of Cryptopsy, the massive production on Aumicide utterly pulverizes, elevating the Canadian power to uncharted extremities of deadly heaviness. This manifestation results in one of the most singularly ambitious underground releases of 2024, propelling the often backward-looking death metal genre unflinchingly into a far more terrifying future.
