As we all know, history likes to repeat itself and it's not unusual for an artist's career to go through cyclical phases. Starting out in 2000 as an aggrotech project in tune with the times, Dawn of Ashes has mutated over the course of its twenty-five years of existence, passing through symphonic death metal before returning to a mix of industrial metal and black metal. The third album in the ‘Scars’ series, which began with Scars of the Broken in 2022, marks a new turning point in Kristof Bathory's career... or rather a U-turn: Dawn of Ashes announces a return to aggrotech with Infecting the Scars! Are you ready to get back to your cyber outfits of twenty years ago?
It's not out of the question that the genre, which has never disappeared, will experience a revival in the years to come due to nostalgia, between veterans (Unter Null and her unique sensibility, Aesthetic Perfection who returns to aggrotech after trying to get as far as possible from it while celebrating the 20th anniversary of its album Close to Human) and younger artists influenced by these veterans. However, very quickly, Infecting the Scars doesn't seem to be infected by this nostalgia. Always on the move, Bathory doesn't like stagnation and the first moments of the album confirm this: in 2025, Dawn of Ashes doesn't sound like it did in 2006. From the long introduction onwards, you can tell that Bathory has mastered the subtleties of track construction, and knows how to play with duration and textures to create sinister atmospheres. Dawn of Ashes benefits from Bathory's dark ambient experimentation, for the better.
Rather than a kind of eurodance with distortion, as the genre can sometimes be caricatured in its worst clichés, Infecting the Scars opts for a dirty, nasty approach where the artist's intention takes precedence over danceable formulas: the sinister title track takes the time to chill our blood, it's a warning and we're warming up. Dawn of Ashes is careful with its effects and retains that visceral touch, that sticky despair that gave its last albums their nightmarish flavour. So even when things speed up on Bone Saw, with Alien Vampires, you never lose sight of the icy atmospheres, the attention paid to the (negative, of course) emotions infused into the music, or the care with which the samples flesh out the music rather than serving as a routine introduction before throwing in big, warmed-up beats.
If the label aggrotech has attracted you until now, rest assured: the codes of the genre are nonetheless very much present. Dawn of Ashes promised and delivered: you'll find futuristic, theatrical synth strings, hellish ambiences, creepy minimalist melodies, aggressive boom-bap taken from hardcore techno and lyrics chanted with rage. The album is not short of hard-hitting moments (Hypertensive Crisis, Faith Desecration, etc) but never loses sight of its more melancholy, atmospheric or menacing parts (Masochism, intense and cinematic)... as, after all, the best know how to do. You'll dance but the sound remains dense, refined and thorough: the days of dull Suicide Commando and Hocico clones swarming MySpace are long gone!
There are several reasons to be satisfied with Infecting the Scars: not only does Dawn of Ashes refuse to stagnate while continuing to explore its universe and themes with coherence, but Bathory's project does so with intelligence. Dancing savagery, yes, but with panache, care and personality. Nostalgia? Yes, nostalgia. But without a backward-looking, frozen-in-time attitude. Have you ever thought that your current self would be better able to cope with certain past situations? Well, that's what Dawn of Ashes is proposing with Infecting the Scars. Rather than indulging in a lazy, illusory ‘it was better before’ attitude, Kristof Bathory blends the enthusiasm of youth with his current know-how to, well, make aggrotech great again!
