Band:	Haunter
Album:	Discarnate Ails
Style:	Black metal, Death metal
Release date:	May 2022

01. Overgrown With The Moss
02. Spiritual Illness
03. Chained At The Helm Of The Eschaton

Haunter are pretty great at doing blackened disso-death, but they're even better as a country backing band.

I first got to know Haunter through Apothecary's review of their previous album, 2019's Sacramental Death Qualia. At that point, Haunter had already had quite an evolution. Starting out as a screamo with some blackened tendencies on 2014's He Who Jumps Into The Void Owes No Explanation To Those Who Stand And Watch before morphing into black metal with a few of their early punky undertones on 2016's Thrinodίa, and finally the mix of sounds that they still currently explore. And also being part of Calico Bonnet, who I can't wait to finally make it to the full-album stage. Now Discarnate Ails isn't fundamentally different from it's predecessor, but there's still some shifts in sound going on.

The most obvious thing is that Discarnate Ails is a leaner album, a full 15 minutes shorter than its predecessor, sharing its runtime between three tracks ranging from 6 to 15 minutes. Long songs are already standard fare for Haunter, but the reliance on them here puts a lot more emphasis on their progressions and the dynamics in the tracks. As their sound already leans a bit more on the death side of things than their earlier black, a lot of the dissonant and progressive sides of their sound can be compared to either early Opeth or Ulcerate, mixed with something like the Deathspell Omega-worship of the early 2010s Icelandic black metal scene, thus a sound that's situated in a black/death/prog triangle.

A lot of sections have a very angular odd-ball feeling to them, coupled with some transitions that feel a bit haphazard, does make Discarnate Ails a bit of a challenging listen at times. The use of dissonance is not particularly new at this point, and disso-death is already becoming quite saturated, but there's still some creativity in how off-kilter its use here can get. And probably Haunter's winning combination is the fact that they tackle this disso-death sound a bit more from a prog death angle than a tech death angle, giving the maelstrom of riffs a more purposeful taste. The sprinkles of melodic solos and choirs do add some nice contrast to the chaos of their most furious release to date.

Big sound. Big songs. Small album.