It's been two years since Primordial dropped How It Ends, and even though they haven't broken up (I saw them this year) they also haven't released anything since, so the prospect of that actually being a final album is a possible one. That makes sense for a band that has been around for more than three decades, but Nuvolascura, even taking the preceding project Vril into account has only just entered its second second decade of existence. Granted, somehow How This All Ends is an album title that doesn't feel as overtly finality inducing and since nothing I've found seems to indicate anything else in that direction it's probably just me reading too much into things.
One thing that is a bit odd though is that for a band that had such a consistent run in 2015-2020, both quality- and schedule-wise, they have been quite silent since, with the gap between the previous album and this one being almost half of their career. Morbid lyrics like "block oxygen flow to your brain, snake wrapped throat, gradual death" or "these days I avoid mirrors, stop myself from facing the destruction" working hand in hand with the knowledge that the album was started so late was due to cancer treatment does make the album's emotional core that much more resonant. Everything about the performance on How This All Ends screams "been though a lot".
Screamo (and this branch of emoviolence in particular) is one that relies on that emotional resonance and how the intensity and the melody work in tandem. With lyrics being pretty much indecipherable even with them being spelled out in the Bandcamp page, a lot of it comes down to the intensity of the performance, and vocalist Erica is incredible at delivering that kind of distilled despair. The instrumental side is well equipped to inject some melodic nuance, with most of the songs being in the 1-3 minutes range, with only two exceptions. Some noisy interlude-like moments along with a dash of chaos in the riffing does make the sound lean towards mathcore. Closer "Polar Destinies" stretches out to over 6 minutes, a lot by emoviolence standards, doing so without padding it with too much ambiance (aside from some overwhelming guitar feedback in its final moments), instead using post-rock and mathcore to extend the dynamics that the band already played with towards something more long form.
It would be pretty terrible if How This All Ends confirms my "reading too much into it" fears, considering how well this album displays the genre's ability to put a specific kind of intense raw emotion in musical form. The realness of its subject matter makes it so that any assessment of the album's quality feels more inconsequential compared to my hopes than anyone involved doesn't have to go through the pain at the roots of this record ever again.
