Band:	Hath
Album:	Of Rot And Ruin
Style:	Death metal
Release date:	April 2019

01. Usurpation
02. Currents
03. Rituals
04. To Atone
05. Withered
06. Worlds Within
07. Kindling
08. Accursed
09. Progeny

With an album cover like that, I had every right to mistake this for an OSDM release. Well if it was an OSDM release, I probably wouldn't have bothered to come back to it after 8 months.

Bits and pieces of OSDM may easily go undetected on Of Rot And Ruin, because the modern sound of Hath has pushed them to almost extinction on Of Rot And Ruin. Mostly take whatever you possibly can come up with when you think "modern death metal", remove whatever negative connotation those may still hold, cauterize into the bludgeon that is Hath's debut full length: Of Rot And Ruin.

Tech death a la Slugdge? It's got it. Prog death a la Opeth? It's got it, but a little less than their debut EP. Atmospheric death a la Sulphur Aeon. It's got it. Heck, at points I even thought I was listening to a deathcore album, though that may have to do with how similar the growls can get at times to something that has every possibility of turning into a "bree". So, at its most brutal and most technical, it can be something like a brutal technical deathcore thing. But that's the thing, it's not always like that. And that's this album's saving grace, it never sticks to one formula, no matter how well it does it.

It's all in the nuance, because for a lot of the moments I could say that it sounds like X or Y, but Hath approach these in such an almost elegant way that they somehow make the sound their own. What is at surface level just a usual modern death metal album has its clutches in so many styles and approaches, that I wish the album was just a tad shorter so I would never have to feel like there's too much of a good thing. It's surprisingly melodic, but never falling towards Gothenburgian sounds, but the choruses and occasional cleans still grab you and add a whole different layer, in addition to several clean or acoustic moments to show that they are still massive Opeth fans, but never do they sound like they're straight up aping them or anyone else.

The more I listen to Of Rot And Ruin the more I love that it's not the OSDM album I thought it was. I'm not gonna lie, I wish there was a bigger OSDM element to it, but one can only hope, and I certainly mostly hope that Hath can keep up with this, because they set the bar really high for a follow-up.