ALBUM REVIEW
Ethereal Void - Primordial Dissonance
Groove, dissonance, and crushing death metal.
"Primordial Dissonance" is an album that refuses to leave death metal's weight solely to the mass of downtuned guitars, instead keeping that weight in constant motion through groove, dissonance, and rhythmic interruptions. The Canadian trio of Voiicide, Logan Mayhem, and Nemesis expands on the more direct approach of 2023's "Gods of a Dead World" here with a more layered understanding of riff construction. Even so, the album's real character emerges beyond technical showmanship, in the way the guitars and rhythm section establish a framework that feels both lurching and controlled at the same time.
The production is a key part of this approach. Rather than leaning into the broad, polished aesthetic of modern death metal, the guitar tone retains its thickness, particularly in the low-mid frequencies. As a result, the riffs function not merely as melodic or technical movements, but as physical rhythmic blocks. Voiicide's vocals likewise do not behave like a separate layer placed over this structure; the authoritative, deep growl supports the mechanical weight of the songs rather than smoothing out the moments when the guitars become more cutting. The result makes the connection to bands such as Gojira and Septicflesh understandable, without turning Ethereal Void's approach into a direct copy of those reference points.
The album's most obvious weapon is groove. "Moulded By Emptiness", "The Lifeless Black", "Chaos Transcendent", and especially "Writhe" increase their impact not by constantly raising the tempo, but by making the rhythmic accents heavier. Here, what matters is less the traditional death metal concept of intensity built around blast beats and more where a riff stops and where it starts again. The interruption of guitar phrases, the drums emphasizing those gaps, and the bass maintaining the low-frequency body turn the songs' headbanging potential into a more meaningful compositional choice than a simple "groove metal" label would suggest.
At the same time, the band does not confine the entire album to a single rhythmic template. "Primitive Voices I" and "Primitive Voices II" open into faster sections, while "Sequential Lifeblood" heightens that intensity with blast beats and more mobile death metal passages. The atmospheric approach at the beginning and end of "Primitive Voices III", meanwhile, shows that the album is not solely about riff density. These atmospheric sections, however, are not dominant enough to alter the music's fundamental compositional logic. They function more as transitional spaces surrounding the album's central body.
The real distinguishing element is the tribal and industrial rhythmic feel that emerges in certain sections. The pulse heard in "Atavistic Anarchy" and in intro/interlude pieces such as "Incipient Aeternam" and "Paleopraxia" gives the traditional death metal relationship between drums and guitars a slightly mechanical quality. What matters here is that the band does not simply sprinkle these textures over the music as decorative effects. Even so, this approach has not yet become a tool capable of redefining the album's compositions as a whole. Instead, it primarily reinforces the repetitive, percussive character already present in the guitars by giving it a different surface. Therefore, rather than claiming that "Primordial Dissonance" genuinely redraws the boundaries of the genre, it is more accurate to say that it expands the existing vocabulary of contemporary groove-driven death metal with more industrial and tribal nuances.
The guitar tone and rhythmic accents in the main riff of "Primitive Voices I" create such a direct point of reference that they recall Decapitated's more modern and heavier period. Sections that approach the groove-centered strain of Danish death metal represented by bands such as Illdisposed and Dawn of Demise also make the album's positioning clear. Ethereal Void's advantage, however, lies in placing these influences alongside dissonance rather than melting them into a single aesthetic template. This is where the title "Primordial Dissonance" takes on its full meaning: dissonance is not merely a tonal choice used to create a dark atmosphere, but an element that continually and subtly destabilizes the solidity of the heavy riffs.
The album's presentation as Ethereal Void's "most sophisticated" work also holds up to a degree from this perspective. Its sophistication lies not in the number of technical passages, but in the transitions it creates between heavy riffs and faster sections. The band does not pursue complexity for its own sake. Instead, it introduces small deviations into the structure while preserving the weight of the riffs. This approach feels like a natural continuation of the more direct direction taken on "Gods of a Dead World", but the limits of that development also become apparent here. Although the album executes its groove/dissonance combination with clear proficiency, it has not yet transformed that combination into a compositional language that is entirely its own.
For that reason, what makes "Primordial Dissonance" genuinely valuable within contemporary death metal is not a claim to novelty, but its ability to bring different traditions together within the same riff architecture without resorting to unnecessary showmanship. Gojira's rhythmic weight, modern death metal's tight production aesthetic, Decapitated's mechanical sharpness, and the physical emphasis of more traditional groove-oriented death metal all operate along the same axis here. Ethereal Void adds its own dissonant texture to these reference points, but has not yet separated all of these components enough to make them exclusively identifiable with the band itself.
"Primordial Dissonance" is therefore an album that demands the listener's attention not for elaborate displays of technicality, but for how its riffs are constructed and how its rhythm is directed. That is precisely where its value as a listening experience lies: familiar groove-driven death metal formulas are repeatedly approached from different angles through the weight of the guitar tone, rhythmic interruptions, dissonant transitions, and limited but functional atmospheric touches. Ethereal Void is not pushing the boundaries of the genre, but it remains engaged in exploring just how intensely and precisely it can move within those existing boundaries. That controlled tension is what defines "Primordial Dissonance".
