Release Day Roundup: 8/29/25

Top Picks

Hexrot – Formless Ruin Of Oblivion (weird disso-death)

Familiarity makes the heart grow complacent. So it has come to be that the previously harrowing hordes of dissonant death metal bands who once constituted the most experimental and unsettling extreme metal avenues no longer hold much of an allure over me. Sure, a quality skronker comes along every now and then, but nowadays—unless you're Ulcerate or Goguts themselves–I'm probably not paying it much attention (and even then...). It's this context of desensitisation that makes Hexrot's already excellent Formless Ruin Of Oblivion even more compelling. Even amid this sea of indifference, this Massachusean two-piece stand apart with more considered and inventive compositions that manage to make this sort of sound unnerving again while also rekindling its sense of experimental excitement.

You'll also find a bit more to grab onto among this album's outlandish offerings than the average dissonant death metal record. The opening riff of "What Lies Veiled" is an obvious interpolation of Death’s "Symbolic", and there's a lot on this record that similarly recalls their compositions (especially in the bass lines), along with a more progressive palette that has Formless Ruin Of Oblivion perhaps sounding more like what dissonant death metal might sound like if it had evolved more directly out of Death, without Gorguts having such a heavy-handed intervention.

Although the album seems to draw to an appropriately grinding climax at the end of "Clandestine Haunt", it's true culmination lies in the final, sixteen-minute title-track that follows.* "Formless Ruin of Oblivion" is an ultimatum unto itself, traversing (and often transcending) dissonant, progressive death metal in all its forms, before building to a dredging, doom-turned-ambiently ethereal conclusion that cements Hexrot's place at the pinnacle (or perhaps depths) of dissonant death metal. Formless Ruin Of Oblivion might not for the faint of heart, but it has the potential to warm even the most hardened.

*The last four tracks on the Bandcamp page are actually their 2002 EP Gloomwrought, which also owns, and is a lot more overtly technical and even jazzy in its progressive tendencies, making this package an extremely good deal, IMO.

Trudger – Void Quest (progressive crust-sludge)

From my Premiere:

The quick sell is that these guys sound like a mix of Mastodon and Cult of Luna; the hard one is that Void Quest sounds a lot like what I and at least a few other Heavy Bloggers had hoped the last Dvne record had sounded more like. Trudger are aptly named, not only because Void Quest took eleven years to arrive, but also because of the unrelenting, stomp that characterises its sound. Having said that, this is a much more immediate offering than it's predecessor, clocking in at an efficient 35-minutes, with each of its spiraling compositions confined to a consistent and compact length. Whereas Dormiveglia was a postier, at times even droning affair, Void Quest s is a much more urgent and momentous release, whose essence and energy is perfectly captured in the Edmund Dulac painting of a knight being spurred into the "Valley of Shadow" by a "pilgrim shadow".