To be utterly stunned by the ferocity of a record is an all too rare occasion in this day and age. Yet from its very first note, HAR’s debut album Cursed Creation strikes like a bolt from the blue, mauling its listener and showing no mercy. With Cursed Creation, the Berlin-based five-piece of Israeli descent have reached a new peak, injecting a lethal dose of technical mastery and unadulterated hatred into their already established formula. After two promising EPs, and 2019’s devastating Anti-Shechinah demo, Cursed Creation marks the “culmination of the band’s constant search and redefinition of its own vision of intense and evil black/death metal”. “After our previous demo recording, we wanted to take certain elements already existing but to push the intensity to totally new heights of relentlessness,” reflects founding guitarist Daniel Atai. “This attitude really informed the writing process and forced us to push ourselves to where execution is much more unforgiving and demanding. “ The record comes clad in the artwork of visual excertionist Tim Grieco, who is no stranger to the band: “In both, this and the previous release, we were already quite locked on certain visual approach more focused on abstract representations of what we think the music expresses and going further away from the classic death metal themes and the usual figures associated with it. That’s why Tim Grieco’s ability to create multi-layered textures which are very intense and evil captured us from the very beginning. For this work, we wanted to portray something violent and distorted yet monochromatic and far from the usual imagery.”
