I used to cover a lot more death metal than I currently do, and a lot of that may have to do with how it seemed like there was a genuine renaissance of death metal about five years ago, a lot of it centered around a death metal that took cues from doom metal and where the production and the atmosphere it created played as important a role as the songwriting itself. I don't know if that was genuinely a wave, spearheaded by the popularity of some labels like 20 Bucks Spin or Everlasting Spew, or whether that just happened to coincide with my growing interest and eventual saturation in regards to this sound. I do know, however, that it was that saturation that led me to be more conservative in regards to the death metal that I do cover.
Fossilization might have made it to my queue based more on name recognition alone, myself having covered their debut, as well as the band with shared members (odd as it is that we got two Fossilization since the last Jupiterian), but also there are plenty of bands where I don't feel as compelled to keep covering despite having covered them in the past. While there's certainly some shared history at play, Advent Of Wounds stands on its own legs as a representative of that thick-atmosphere doomy death metal I was talking about, especially so in 2026 when that sound feels less like the day's flavour compared to how it felt like five years ago.
And I can't say that Advent Of Wounds delivers anything new on any front, so perhaps I could call it a creatively safe album, but it's also one where all the design choices around it work in its favour as a sound representative. From the cover art whose image evokes a tactile feeling that's the equivalent of how this album's atmosphere sounds like, to said atmosphere being so neatly crafted by how the production makes the block of guitar/bass distortion and blasts feel dense while allowing enough space for the gutturals and overarching guitar melodies, and the thing that I like most about Advent Of Wounds as a result is how it strikes the balance between being murky without covering all of its elements in an unrecognizable murk.
Production aside, the songwriting may not be as instantly striking as the sound itself, but while far from being called just serviceable, it's best quality is the fact that it doesn't feel stagnant, with enough pace shifts and melody switches to not feel formulaic, and it does pull some left-field turns regardless, like the war drum/horns intro to "Servo". And for an album whose 36 minutes runtime hits a sweet spot of not asking too much for your time, I'm gonna return the favour by not asking anything crazy but entertaining murky death metal in return. And that's what Advent Of Wounds delivers. Bottom line is: it's good for what it is.
