Album Review: AmongRuins – 'Advent of Chaos'

There are records that win you over because they "do everything right", and then there are those that win you over because, while remaining faithful foot soldiers of the genre they preach, they find a way to throw you a little curveball at just the right moment. Advent of Chaos belongs squarely in the second category. It's a record that knows its tradition, but also has the attitude and the eye for the here and now and the contemporary scene. The album comes courtesy of Theogonia Records (Facebook, Instagram).

Right from the start it's clear that AmongRuins have put work into the flow

It's not just "heavy tracks one after the other", but a build-up that takes you from full-blooded assault to more atmospheric/dark peaks, before returning to something we might call light for the finale.

Frozen to the Core opens with sturdy riffing, melodies that lock into the aggression and that sense of the "epic" without ever getting long-winded. It's the track that welcomes you in and says "here we are", in a way that's direct, clean and above all purely musical. Straight after, Advent of Chaos — musically the diametric opposite of its title — brings a cooler sound, a sound with clean vocals that offer a sense, an oasis, of calm amid the heavy, tension-filled riffs.

Red Divine is the slap in the face!

More thrashy nerve, a more direct target, ideal for live shows with intensity and dynamics. It doesn't pretend to be anything else — it's built for intensity, for a good pummelling, and it works. With Into the Flame and a guest appearance from Christianna (Elysion), things shift a little. Here AmongRuins play with more modern lines: chugging, core-ish breathing spaces, breakdown aesthetics, without any of it distorting the fundamental melodic death metal backbone holding the record up. A Symphony of Loss brings back the fast melodic form — neck-breaking tempo, clean and melodic guitar ideas, pure, well-crafted death metal.

And then comes Open Wounds with George Prokopiou (Mother of Millions), and the mood changes abruptly — like the temperature dropping in the room. Slower, more doom-shaped, heavier emotionally. If up to that point the record could be called extroverted, here we get a turn inward. It leaves room for the notes, for the silences, for the weight, and AmongRuins hand us a genuinely heavy track.

Second to last, Chained works nicely as the "breather" after all that sonic and emotional bulk that came before. Rougher, more thrashy, with a groove that gets you moving again and a slightly American flavour to the grooves this time. And at the end, Night Mother comes to tie it all together and close the record, with nostalgia, love and old-school Swedish melodic death metal, though always filtered through the contemporary lens of AmongRuins.