In Passing Ascension sounds like death metal discovering that gravity can bend. Suffering Hour’s debut full-length is dense, violent and physically grounded, yet its most distinctive guitar phrases seem to curve away from the earth beneath them. Riffs do not simply descend or accelerate. They twist, hover and return from unexpected angles, producing the sensation that the listener is being pulled through a structure whose dimensions keep changing. The Minnesota trio called this their take on cosmic blackened death metal, but the cosmic quality is built into the movement of the songs rather than added as science-fiction decoration.
“Insufferable Scorn” functions as a short opening portal. Bent guitar tones rise from a murky foundation while the rhythm section establishes pressure without revealing the album’s full speed. When “For the Putridity of Man” erupts, the record’s technical control becomes immediately apparent. Fast death-metal attack, thick low-end force and a violently warped whammy-bar passage coexist without turning the song into unrelated demonstrations. Every strange event remains attached to the central riffing.
The lyrics treat humanity with open contempt, but the music is more interesting than simple misanthropy. Anger becomes architecture. DgS’s vocals hang over the guitar rather than dominating it, appearing as another layer of pressure inside the arrangement. The words do not interrupt the riffs to explain their meaning. They seem to emerge from the same contaminated atmosphere, brief verbal shapes forming inside a larger instrumental storm.
“Devouring Shapeless Void” begins with a more direct thrashing impulse, preserving traces of the band’s earlier history before the compositions grew increasingly dissonant and atmospheric. That forward motion soon begins folding inward. A riff made for immediate physical impact becomes surrounded by blackened harmony and irregular transitions. Suffering Hour repeatedly demonstrates that accessibility and strangeness do not have to occupy separate songs. A memorable headbanging passage can exist inside a structure that refuses to behave predictably.
“The Abrasive Black Dust” is where the album’s identity becomes fully visible. Its central mantra sounds both ancient and extraterrestrial, a repeated phrase eroding the space around it while lead guitar flickers above the rhythm like damaged light. The title is tactile: dust enters every opening, while abrasion describes gradual wearing. Repetition and accumulation slowly alter the listener’s sense of scale.
“Withering Microcosmos” interrupts the longer songs with a compact instrumental passage. The title joins collapse and immensity inside a tiny frame, suggesting a private universe shrinking or dying. Its placement gives the album a moment to inhale without offering comfort. A short, strange interval makes the following attack feel as though it has arrived from farther away.
“Through Vessels of Arcane Power” returns with one of the record’s clearest combinations of muscular death metal and poisonous melody. The trio format matters enormously. With only one guitarist, bass and drums cannot disappear behind doubled rhythm tracks. IsN’s drumming gives every contortion a physical skeleton, while DgS’s bass helps the guitar maintain mass even when YhA’s lines detach from conventional harmony. The musicians sound larger than three people because each occupies a distinct structural function.
That economy keeps the album from becoming ornamental. Dissonant metal can confuse complexity with depth, adding more layers whenever an idea has not become convincing. Suffering Hour introduces a strong riff, studies the pressure inside it and alters its surroundings. Technical skill becomes useful because it allows the band to maintain clarity while the apparent geometry changes. The songs are intricate, but their intricacy remains directed toward atmosphere and impact.
“Procession to Obscure Infinity” is the album’s longest and most ambitious composition. Its title suggests ceremonial movement toward something that cannot be understood or reached, and the music advances accordingly. Slower passages create an immense corridor before faster sections begin tearing through it. The song does not feel long because it contains excessive material. It feels long because recurring ideas are allowed to acquire history. Each return carries the memory of where the riff has already travelled.
This is not frantic escape into infinity but organized movement toward it, conducted with ritual patience. Death metal, black metal and thrash become less useful as separate labels here. What remains is a shared interest in transcendence through extremity. Speed, distortion and repetition push perception beyond ordinary proportions until violence begins producing a strange spaciousness.
“Empty Avowals” closes the album by bringing its philosophical concerns into focus. A spoken passage near the end supplied the album’s title, connecting ascension with DgS’s fascination regarding death, earthly worthlessness and the possibility of existence beyond the body. The record offers no religious certainty. Its strength lies in making uncertainty physical, suspending the listener between disgust with earthly life and curiosity about whatever may exist outside it.
Alexander Brown’s cover gives that uncertainty a suitable visual body. A human figure appears caught within a vast organic or cosmic mechanism, surrounded by forms that could be roots, nerves, celestial matter or decomposition. The image reflects the album’s central contradiction: ascent occurs through filth, mortality and physical collapse rather than through clean separation from them.
The album took roughly three years to write, record and refine, beginning while its principal composer was still a teenager. That long construction is audible in the sequencing. The tracks form a deliberate passage from opening invocation through increasingly unstable chambers toward the final spoken meditation. Even the two short pieces function as hinges, controlling pressure and making the full album more immersive than any isolated song.
Blood Harvest issued In Passing Ascension in 2017 after the band sent its press material to numerous labels and found someone who understood what it was attempting. Suffering Hour sounds rooted in underground death metal’s dirt and physicality while refusing to treat tradition as a closed map. The album absorbs suffocating death metal, black-metal hypnosis, thrash propulsion and progressive disorientation, then bends those forces into its own orbit.
What makes In Passing Ascension endure is the fluency with which the trio moves between those conditions. Strange riffs still hit like riffs. Atmosphere does not excuse weak structure. Complexity never removes the body from the experience. The album feels meticulously assembled yet dangerously unstable, a machine opening a wormhole while still functioning as death metal.
Suffering Hour ultimately treats ascension as a passing state rather than a permanent achievement. One rises briefly through distortion, repetition and concentration, glimpses a larger and more terrifying structure, then returns to the same mortal ground with altered senses. The album supplies no escape from decay. It discovers that decay itself may contain doors.
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