Review by Frost on November 28, 2021.

Sepulchral Rift is a band out of Sweden that formed in 2018. Their debut EP, which came out only a month ago, is a shining example of how to blend black and death metal right and create a real solid musical outing that reeks of pure sinister terror and brutality.

This EP consists of four tracks, two of which are shorter ambient intros that introduce each song. These tracks are about three minutes long a piece and, while they aren't particularly bad and they do provide a real unsettling atmosphere, they're not adding much besides adding to the length of the EP. I feel these would fit better in a future full-length if they manage to get that far. The meat and potatoes of this little EP are the two songs, both a whopping eight minutes in length, but the two men here know how to pace themselves and nothing on here feels boring, overdone, overly long, and there's not any repetitively boring or repetitively annoying parts.

The first song is 'Altar Of Funeral Incarceration' and it's a whopper of a song. It opens really strongly with these cavernous death metal riffs that are ripped right from the Ninth Circle Of Hell. Chugging, slow moving, crushing chords that rumble with that wonderfully familiar Swedeath chainsaw sound we know and love we know bands like Entombed and Dismember made popular and so many other bands used, but never managed to replicate. Sepulchral Rift don't so much replicate it as much as they make it their own as they eventually pick up speed halfway through and treat us to a black metal firestorm. While the guitars and drums steamroll through everything in sight, this part feels slightly weaker when put next to the slower chugging death metal sections its sandwiched between.

The second song feels much more like a black metal song. 'Invoking The Eclipse Of Shekinah' starts off way different from the last song, beginning with a distant tremolo picked minor scale that evokes the aura of a proper black metal song much more than the previous song; and it continues in that way as the drumming is consistently faster and the bass is buried behind the guitars, which is pretty typical for black metal. The death metal parts of this song and the last one benefit the bass as it's much easier to make out the low end coming through as he's playing. Once more, separating the two from each other, about one half of this song is black metal while the other half is death metal. On this song, I'd say the opposite is true as opposed to the previous song: the black metal sound is victorious.

Not much to say about this short little EP. I really like it. It's a little inconsistent with the ambient intros that break up the pace and the first song really working more as a pure death metal song but, beyond those little nitpicks, I've got no major problems with this. Check it out and give the NNP (Nihilistic Noise Propaganda) label a look see. They're a new label that could use all the help in these trying times like we all do.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10