Pain, the band tells us on the album’s title track, comes in colours. Red is rage, something that burns and consumes. Black is the void, the depression you carry silently because there are no words for it. Grey is chaos, the formless storm that never quite resolves. It’s a simple metaphor, but Colours of Pain, the latest record from German extreme metal outfit Bloodred, commits to it fully, and that commitment is what separates this from a genre exercise into something with genuine emotional weight.
The album opens with “Ashes,” five minutes that establish the record’s territory immediately: a churning guitar tone with enough low-end to feel genuinely physical, drums that crack without becoming mechanical, and vocals that move between a clean, almost melodic delivery and something considerably more violent. The song is about a person stripped of their illusions, a fallen king left with nothing but the ruins of his own dishonesty, and the arrangement matches the theme, relentless in its forward motion while the lyrics pick apart the wreckage. It’s a strong opening statement.
“Colours of Pain” follows, and it’s more introspective, the tempo pulling back just enough to let the riff breathe. The chorus has a directness to it that the rest of the album sometimes deliberately avoids, three colours, three kinds of suffering, stated plainly. “Mindvirus” is the longest of the faster tracks at five and a half minutes, and it’s where the record’s political edge sharpens. The central image, ideology spreading like a plague through society, lands partly because it avoids naming a specific target and partly because Þráinn Árni Baldvinsson of Icelandic folk-metal act Skálmöld contributes a guest solo that cuts through the song’s heaviness like a knife through static. It’s the album’s most startling moment.
The album’s midsection belongs to “Heretics” and “A New Dark Age.” The first is the shortest track at just over four minutes, and it uses that brevity well, a precise accusation of collective denial, the kind of song that doesn’t need to be any longer than it takes to make its point. “A New Dark Age” is the opposite: six minutes of slow-building dread, the longest track on the record and the one that gives the album its darkest corner. The guitars spiral, the drums hold a measured pace, and the whole thing feels like watching something collapse in slow motion.
“Death Machine,” “Winds of Oblivion,” and closer “Resist” bring the record home with varying levels of intensity. “Winds of Oblivion” is arguably the most emotionally exposed song here, its subject is loss and the erasure of memory, and the restraint in the arrangement keeps it from tipping into melodrama. “Resist,” by contrast, is the album’s most overtly anthemic moment, a song about women demanding their place against systems built to deny it, and it ends the record on something approaching defiance rather than despair.
Alexander Krull handled recording, mixing, and mastering at Mastersound Studio, with the guitar and bass tracked at the band’s own BLDRD Studios. The result is a mix that prioritises clarity without sacrificing weight, every instrument has room, and the vocals sit forward enough that the lyrical detail actually registers. Drummer Joris Nijenhuis returns and provides the kind of precise, textured playing that serves the songs rather than the showcase.
Colours of Pain is the work of a band who know what they want to say and have figured out how to say it.
Standout tracks: Mindvirus, A New Dark Age, Winds of Oblivion
