It’s been about three and a half years since the last time we checked in on these Danes, shall we see what they’ve been up to lately?

LLNN – Unmaker (Pelagic Records, 24 September 2021)

As you may recall, in a recent post it was mentioned that this website has been doing websitey things for over ten years now. And as you may or may not be aware, when you write about music, people love to send you more music to write about. At this point in 2021, I’ve personally waded through over 1800 new releases year-to-date, with slightly under 300 remaining unheard. When all is said and done, somewhere around 100 of those would be a decent estimate of how many I will enjoy enough to save and either write about or add to my ever-increasing “to do” list of things to eventually write about.

All of this is simply to say, I hear a LOT of music by a LOT of bands. I have always thought of myself as someone with a decent memory for details, but even still, with this much information coming through my inbox and into my ears annually, it can be hard to keep track of it all. So when I see a new release by a band I’ve heard before — let’s use LLNN as an example — I may say to myself, “Oh, I recognize this name,” and possibly “I think this is someone I’ve enjoyed in the past,” and maybe even “I think I wrote about these people before.” I’m constantly looking up names, either on my gargantuan “to do” list, or within the search box of this website. And when I do find something, I might glance through whatever I may have written about the band before, as a quick reminder of what it was I liked about them when I heard them before.

Anyway, no amount of perusing my own old scribblings could have prepared me for the experience upon dropping the needle (metaphorically) on Unmaker. Opening (briefly) and closing with some science-fictiony synth parts (and making use of some rather epic symphonic backing materials throughout — more so than the band’s earlier stuff seemed to), otherwise the entirety of the album is quite possibly the heaviest blackened-sludge-hardcore I’ve heard in quite some time. Thinking about the breakdown-core music that was so wildly popular earlier this century, the point of which seemed to be the anticipation of the point where everything would slow down and all hell would break loose as the band suddenly got devastatingly heavy for a short while. Well, what LLNN have put together here is like if you strained out all those heavier-than-heavy bits and discarded everything else. Just a completely other-worldly experience, that cannot be recommended highly enough. But first, please take the necessary precautions against permanent hearing damage. Thank you.

You can stream or grab a name-your-price download of Unmaker by vising Bandcamp below; it’s also available in physical formats right here.
 

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