Band:	Amenra
Album:	With Fang And Claw
Style:	Doom metal, Hardcore, Sludge metal
Release date:	March 28, 2025
A review by:	musclassia

01. Forlorn
02. Salve Mater

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, With Fang And Claw is intended to hark back to the band’s early days; Mathieu Vandekerckhove states that it is meant to resurrect the essence of Mass I: Prayer I - VI, “embracing the primal force that defined [Amenra’s] beginnings”, and “recalling the unfiltered intensity of Mass I to Mass IIII”. While it has two songs just as De Toorn, their combined length of 14 minutes makes this EP almost half the length of its companion record. This is perhaps fitting, as the band’s average track lengths clearly increased from Mass III onwards compared with their initial releases.

The difference in approach between this record and De Toorn is apparent even in the quiet opening of “Forlorn”; even as it borders on ambience, the opening minute of the track feels more textured and ‘synthetic’, for lack of a better word, than the quiet stretches on the other EP. When the aggression does arrive, it is much sooner, the band wasting little time before shifting into a raw tremolo riff. ‘Black metal’ is a label that has been thrown at Amenra in the past, but has felt inapplicable more recently. The tremolo tone of this first surge of volume does highlight why such categorization was not entirely out of place. From that point, the song fluctuates frequently between heavy trudges and quieter periods of contrast; with each return to distortion, the tone gets progressively more intense, as bleakness gradually overcomes the song.

That darkness persists through into the beginning of “Salve Mater”, a raw and brooding crawl of a track with a supply of great riffs interchanging with one another within the heavily textured mix. With but a snippet of clean singing and guitar around the 4-minute mark, this is probably one of the most consistently heavy tracks I can remember Amenra releasing for a long time, and the weight of everything coming together in the final moments is almost overwhelming.

This return to their roots by the band has proved here to be a successful endeavour, as they demonstrate that their knack for writing compelling riffs in this style remains fully intact. The songs here, particularly “Salve Mater”, are strong enough that I doubt many would complain if Amenra bring elements of these early years over into their new era; however, I feel that, above anything, De Toorn and With Fang And Claw demonstrate that the band’s strengths lie more in the coalescence of their full range, rather than in isolating aspects of it. This early sound is a bit monochromatic (fitting, considering the band’s usual art style), while the subtlety across De Toorn is arguably excessive to the point of detraction; when these elements combine is when Amenra excel, so I hope subsequent releases from the group embrace the full range of whatever features the Belgians bring forth into their new beginning.