ALBUM REVIEW
CONCRETE GHOSTS – Echoes of The Dead World
A cold, heavy and bleak death doom experience.
Hailing from Finland, CONCRETE GHOSTS establish a dark atmosphere on their debut full-length, "Echoes of The Dead World", with lyrical themes centred on the gradual erosion of humanity within the structures it has built for itself. Formed in 2025, the band’s music brings the ponderous pace of death doom into contact with the icy guitar tones of black metal. Across its eight tracks, darkness extends beyond a thematic choice and becomes embedded in the music itself through repeated riffs, restrained melodic passages and the pressure exerted by the vocals.
Opening track 'Stillborn World' establishes the album’s direction with a lumbering gait shaped by thick bass and low-register guitars. Deep, guttural vocals settle naturally into this foundation, while the rhythmic approach relies less on rapid changes than on conveying the same oppressive weight in different ways. 'Tomb of Scars' begins with the sombre tones of clean guitars before making room for increasingly harsh vocals and the tension generated by its crawling riffs. The clean tones at the end bring this dark narrative to a close with an unexpected sense of calm. CONCRETE GHOSTS shape the character of their songs not through distortion alone, but also through the contrast between harsh and clean guitar tones.
'You Closed Your Eyes' and 'Among The Insects' bring the album’s melodic side further into focus. In the former, guitar melodies and clean tones emerge from between the heavy rhythms, but rather than offering relief, these passages deepen the music’s sense of unease. On 'Among The Insects', the introspective character of the clean vocals sits alongside the anger conveyed by the harsher delivery. This interplay broadens the song’s emotional range while preventing the album from becoming trapped in a single mood. Here, melody is not a way out of the darkness, but another expression of it.
'Concrete Skin' stands out for its more direct, aggressive guitar tones. However, the simplicity of some of its riffs makes the songwriting feel less detailed than elsewhere on the album. The prominent bass presence reinforces this stripped-back approach while preserving the track’s physical impact. 'Black Suns Hollow Lie' follows a similar pattern, built around heavy rhythms, with eerie guitar melodies, thick bass tones and vocals maintaining the same low-end pressure. 'A Hunger for Nothingness' stays the course. Evoking the contradiction between desire and absence, its cold, slow progression continues the album’s exploration of humanity’s gradual internal collapse.
Closing track 'In Remembrance' brings together elements from the preceding seven songs. E. Keränen’s increasingly impassioned vocals, pushed to their limits, combine with T. Honkanen’s sharp, icy guitar work to intensify the sense of helplessness. The track’s prolonged adherence to the same weighty pace is a structural choice that demands patience. Yet its extended repetitions reflect the album’s preoccupation with emptiness and exhaustion. The finale derives its impact not from opening up a new musical direction, but from tightening the atmosphere established earlier one final time.
"Echoes of The Dead World" is a debut that keeps melody in the background without excluding it entirely, combining the slow pace of atmospheric death doom with the coldness of black metal. Drawing on the melodic intensity of an earlier era, the band’s approach gives the music more emotional depth than unrelenting bleakness alone, particularly through the contrast between clean and harsh vocals. On the other hand, the simplicity of some riffs and the similar pacing of several tracks limit the album’s musical diversity. For now, CONCRETE GHOSTS’ identity within the genre rests less on radical innovation than on the cohesive aesthetic with which they employ familiar doom/death elements. Rather than building its darkness around a constant succession of new ideas, "Echoes of The Dead World" holds the listener within the same oppressive mood, making it the kind of album that fans of patient, bleak death doom will want to return to frequently as the colder days approach.
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