Band:	Pyrrhon
Album:	Exhaust
Style:	Technical death metal
Release date:	September 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. Not Going To Mars
02. First As Tragedy, Then As Farce
03. The Greatest City On Earth
04. Strange Pains
05. Out Of Gas
06. Luck Of The Draw
07. Concrete Charlie
08. Stress Fractures
09. Last Gasp
10. Hell Medicine

Pyrrhon's brand of technical dissonant death metal always had at least a bit of mathcore in it. With Exhaust they steer closer than ever towards it.

When I reviewed the band's previous record, 2020's Abscess Time, I noticed how the band's death metal sound was being overwhelmed by a lot more avant-garde and close to the free jazz inspired Behold The Arctopus or Imperial Triumphant, and even then I noticed the mathcore tendencies. Well, Exhaust pushes even further in that direction, not only by being even more out of the box, but also by being even more mathcore coded. Most of the time that results in an album that's an even more challenging listen than Abscess Time, but that's not necessarily as simple as that.

For one, Abscess Time was more than 50 minutes in runtime, meaning that it was quite endurance testing with how intense it was, even if my experience with it was being less exhausted by it than I expected to be. Exhaust, by comparison, is a few minutes short of the 40 minutes mark, making it a much leaner and concise listening experience. There's no song longer than 5 minutes, so all of it, while still being wild and unpredictable and chaotic, keeps things to the point and doesn't meander much. Even with all the dissonance and atonality that are part and parcel of these kind of chaotic death/hardcore albums, a lot of Exhaust does use structures (because calling them "riffs and melodies" might be a bit disingenuous) with some extended repetition instead of relying on an ever-changing nature. It is intense through its sheer denseness and it can create chaos even while repeating said structures.

There are also moments where the death / hardcore intensity is dialed back to create more dynamics. Noise rock has been a part of their sound for a while, but the clean vocals moments from "Out Of Gas" sound more reminiscent of Chat Pile than as just an influence in the soundscape. Atmospherics also get more fleshed out in songs like "Luck Of The Draw", which have an almost atmospheric black metal touch to them. The atonality and use of punkier clean vocals in "Concrete Charlie" does indicate the presence of the "core" side in "mathcore". And plenty more moments that feel like rug pulls. There is some sense that the more intense moments come in the front half, and the more dynamic sides coming in the latter half, though the album sounds unnervingly colossal in all sides, and a lot of it is due to the Colin Marston production.

At this point I can't confidently call Pyrrhon a death metal band anymore, it has metamorphosized into a creature of a much larger scope. Both in terms of intensity, dynamics, and ambition. And that's all within less than 40 minutes.