Band:	Tribulation
Album:	Hamartia
Style:	Gothic metal
Release date:	April 07, 2023
A review by:	RaduP

01. Hamartia
02. Axis Mundi
03. Hemoclysm
04. Vengeance (The Pact) [Blue Öyster Cult cover]

Changing one of your main songwriters is a pretty big step. Sometimes you need to test the waters on something more bite-sized.

Tribulation's path for the past nearly twenty years has been a blast to follow, even if I personally have only been part of the last ten. Tales of how they started out as a thrash metal band called Hazard, then shifted to OSDM under their current name, then created a weird injection of black metal and prog rock in 2013's watershed The Formulas Of Death, something that only gave glimpses of the morbidly gothic path they would take from then on; these tales will be recanted by metal reviewers for about as long as Tribulation will keep releasing albums and as long as the bands they influence will work with them as namedrops. They are even one of the few band I interviewed more than once. Regardless, what's specific about this review is that a great change has happened in the band's lineup, with Jonathan Hultén's departure.

Not only was Jonathan Hultén a member since the very early days, but also one of the main songwriters alongside Adam Zaars. As Hultén is doing pretty well as a solo artist, he's been replaced by Joseph Tholl in Tribulation, something which makes a lot of sense since Tholl has been a performing member on Hazard's first release, and he's also played with Adam in Enforcer, so this reconfiguration is still pretty organic. Zaars also mentioned how the songwriting for Hamartia, while still focusing on each of the two main songwriters writing their own songs, was the most collaborative in nature since 2015's Children Of The Night.

It's weird putting effort into covering this EP before its release date, when three of the four tracks have already been made available, and "Hemoclysm" is the only track that's gonna be a surprise for readers. Well, "surprise" is a bit too much said, since the most surprising of the bunch is actually the Blue Öyster Cult cover that closes the album and that feels like the most fun Tribulation have had on record, complete with proggy grooves, clean backing vocals, and some attempts at less macabre singing, while still showing why it makes so much sense for Tribulation to choose Blue Öyster Cult as a band to cover.

Outside of that cover, the material is slightly darker than the relatively lighter Where The Gloom Becomes Sound and it's corresponding The Dhampir single/EP, but without stepping much outside the gothic/heavy but just reintroducing a bit more of the doom/black touches to the sound. You'd even be excused for not thinking it's that gothic, until you hear those pianos in "Hemoclysm" that just reek of haunted castle evocations. The title track especially is littered with melodic solos, and a concept around the old Greek word that give the song and album its title, something that roughly means "sin".

Even if the band is not really treading new ground, Hamartia is more than successful in its endeavor of putting the new songwriting team to a smaller test before the actual full-length, and now that's something I'm even more hyped for.