Review by Felix on January 8, 2026.

I like the Netherlands. It is definitely a beautiful country with good football players (and some dubious substances, anyway, that’s another story). But climate change is a massive threat to the Netherlands. Around a quarter of this country lies below sea level, but almost half of it is less than one meter above sea level, making the Netherlands extremely vulnerable to flooding. If the water comes, the Dutch will have to save their essential things immediately and flee. Grim Times, the second full-length of Indulgence, will probably not be among these things.

The dudes play a somewhat uninspired, as if mocking the pretty great artwork, not really dystopian form of groove/thrash metal with hardcore vibes every now and then. Enthusiasm does not show up while I listen to the eight songs with a playtime of 34 minutes. Too uniform, too lifeless, too much mid-paced rhythms – this is how the album drags on and on. Some main riffs are solid to good, for example, the one of 'Denial', but these little highlights go hand in hand with absolutely mediocre sequences like the strange chorus of 'Cowards Lement'. Why is it strange? The dudes sing “run now, run as fast as you can now”, but the music is as agile as the corpse of a person who died three weeks ago. No, not true – the corpse is definitely less sleepy than this chorus.

But let’s try to concentrate on the positive aspects of the full-length. The opener, which is also the title track, has at least a hint of dark stubbornness, and the more or less galloping riffing in 'Soul Of Greed' makes listeners like me, who are into tradition, sit up and take notice. Nevertheless, it often seems as if the quintet has put itself in too tight a corset from which there is no escape now. Despite a very small number of releases within the three decades of existence, I don’t think that the dudes lack talent or potential, but somehow they are not able to transform their skills into thrilling tracks. The flat and almost muddy production does not make things better. I wish I could write about powerful guitars, but the opposite is the case here. Leo’s vocals also do not make my day. No doubt at all, he hits the one note he knows very well. But that's about it. Well, he certainly doesn't have a monopoly on monotony when it comes to metal vocals, and maybe one can call his performance okay. But he delivers nothing that makes up for the partly boring instrumentation.

After all, I do not really know what this band and this album and its conventionally configured songs stand for. Perhaps I am just not an expert in this kind of thrash. I am not even sure whether one calls it thrash at all, while a specialist for this form of dark groove with more or less pissed-off singing would identify two, five, or more reasons to love this work. All I can say is that Bay Area thrash maniacs should be cautious with respect to Grim Times – and that I hope that climate change will not trigger very grim times for the Netherlands.

Rating: 5.5 out of 10