For over thirty years, Inferno has been leading us astray through its occult labyrinths, with the nightmares of the singer and sole original member, Adramelech, serving as a common thread from one album to the next… but do not expect any Ariane's thread here: no one will come to take you by the hand; we are here to lose ourselves in something far too vast to be grasped by our limited understanding! The Anthropic Sophisms is described by the label Debemur Morti Productions as “an ecstatic, perma-climatic trance without hope of resolution or a semblance of light”, and the band goes one step further by adding that “reason loses its footing, and yet something is happening, something unnameable, existing beyond language and beyond control”. They certainly know how to grab your attention!
Fission of the Soul sets the scene. The sound is heavy; the reverb adds to the sense of vastness and emptiness, whilst a few ghostly brass notes linger in the mist. The vocals, meanwhile, are in the background, dehumanised, as if to emphasise our insignificance. Whilst Inferno still delights in losing us in its cryptic labyrinth, the sound has become denser since the album Paradeigma (Phosphenes of Aphotic Eternity), released in 2021. The arrival of Matron Thorn (Ævangelist) on synths has certainly played a part in this more industrial, even colder direction, where the electronic layers mark a definitive break from reality (the first third of With Raving Mouths They Utter Things Mirthless, Unadorned and Unperfumed, for example, reminds us of the terrifying rituals of Trepaneringsritualen). It’s more noise-oriented, too; the dissonant cacophony is at times like that of dead stars screaming in space (you know, where, in fact, no one will hear you scream…) and the repetitive rhythms are as alienating as merciless machines that grind us down without giving a second thought to our pathetic existence.
We’re well acquainted with the ingredients of this relentless cosmic grandiloquence (and we’re delighted, incidentally, to see that Inferno and Emptiness are releasing their new albums on the same day!). We're regularly reminded of the hypnotic power of Blut Aus Nord – that distinctly Lovecraftian, dreamlike power of suggestion amidst the sonic chaos. The menace is sinister and oppressive, verging on a blend of doom and industrial for a good quarter of an hour before the end of Dekranos Katexochen (Mých smrtí je bezpočet, mých nemocí mnoho), which ultimately plunges us into the depths of a possessed blast beat. Inferno constructs its tracks as one might build a cathedral, taking all the time necessary to convey that sense of grandeur. The Anthropic Sophisms is a ruined cathedral of cyclopean proportions, lost beyond the boundaries of space and time, drifting into nothingness—a place where our cries will merely echo off walls older than eternity, walls that couldn’t care less about our torments... This mystical touch, where every element serves to chant or invoke, also reminds us that, yes, black metal is indeed a religious form of music.
The layers build upon one another to form a shapeshifting alchemical monster, somewhere between funeral processions and feverish cavalcades. Four tracks, around forty minutes, a whirlwind of darkness that is both brimming with ideas and sonic brilliance, yet as crushing as an immutable monolith: spending time with Inferno will help you grow tentacles. The Anthropic Sophisms is an album that makes you feel tiny, that makes you shrink in the face of the infinite absurdity of our existence, or quite simply one to chant in the darkness in the hope that some obscure, forgotten and nameless deities might finally put an end to this farce.
