Band:	Amenra
Album:	De Toorn
Style:	Doom metal, Hardcore, Sludge metal
Release date:	March 28, 2025
A review by:	musclassia

01. Heden
02. De Toorn (Talisman)

When a band releases two records simultaneously instead of a combined album, it’s safe to assume that there’s a conceptual divide being explored across the two releases. In the case of Amenra, the band attempt to bring together the start and end of their journey to date, while setting a platform for the next era of their career.

The pair of EPs, De Toorn and With Fang And Claw, are described by various members of Amenra as a reflection on the band’s near-30-year history to date and their future path, a closure in preparation of a new beginning, and a moment of reckoning in preparation for resolution that will come with a future Mass VII. These are strong sentiments that certainly pique my interest as to what kind of significant change we can expect from future works that will differentiate it so firmly from what the Belgians have accomplished up to this point. For now, though, we can enjoy Amenra’s efforts in revisiting both the near and distant past.

Of the two EPs, De Toorn is a natural successor to the band’s most recent full album, 2021’s De Doorn; it channels the emotionality of that record, with grief and anger once again rendered with both sparseness and fire. At nearly twice the length of With Fang And Claw, De Toorn exhibits a lot of patience in its gradual and understated musical explorations, featuring two songs of comparable length with a lot of musical overlap.

The first of the pair is “Heden”, which seems to have been conceived during the De Doorn album cycle, described by Lennart Bossu as “[setting] the tone for the rest of De Doorn and De Toorn”. The opening minutes are effectively dark ambient music, with the faintest of drones laying atop distant drum beats steadily driving the song forward in a processional manner. The most gradual incorporation of faint, ominous guitar tones and spoken word gives the smallest hint of progression, but the song lingers in empty gloom for a long amount of time, only really starting to layer up the guitar motifs from around the 5-minute mark onwards. Muted drums and clean singing emerge when entering the final third of the song, but it’s nearly 10 minutes before all the tension is unleashed with signature walls of lumbering distortion and Colin Van Eeckhout’s unmistakable pained shrieks, acting as a grand exhale that is then built upon with the emergence of subtle guitar melodic motifs and more singing before everything is over.

“De Toorn (Talisman)” is slightly more substantial in its quieter first half, particularly courtesy of the dual clean guitars working nicely in tandem with one another. More substantial drum beats, while still faint in the mix, propel the opening minutes along with a bit more purpose, at one point even accelerating before calming things down again. As with “Heden”, it’s over two-thirds of the way into the song before spoken word and clean guitars are replaced by screams, roars and heavy distortion, yet in this instance, the guitar tone in the heavy climax is less furious, still retaining a degree of subtlety that ultimately distinguishes this song from its companion on the EP.

De Toorn is very much what one has grown to expect from Amenra in the 2020s; arguably it may have benefited from being fused with With Fang And Claw, as the extent of the similarity in approach between the pair of tracks does leave the record crying out for something to provide a slightly different character. While I enjoy the dynamic extremes that the band provide, I hope the future-era With Fang And Claw and their impending Mass VII do not come to rely so much on the stripped-down passages in their composition, as while the sound is appreciable on De Toorn, there is a lack of evolution or innovative structuring to make such sequences compelling enough to be the prevailing sound across a full album. Instead, I hope this retrospective exercise helps the band to recognize the merits of all the tools in their arsenal, and allow those tools to work even more synergistically with one another.