Bandcamp Crimson Coven put out a demo last year and called it 0 - The Genesis. This is I - The Forge. A band that numbers its releases from zero before it has an album out is telling you it intends to be around for a while, and on the evidence here that is not unearned.
They formed in Spain in 2023, they are on Cruz del Sur, the members go by single initials, and their own Bandcamp tags include “new wave of british heavy metal”, which is a cheerfully strange thing for a Spanish band in 2026 to call itself. The sleeve is red line art on kraft paper: an anvil with a Medusa medallion set into it, three crowned skulls below, serpents around the columns. Nothing about the presentation is ironic and nothing about it is new, which is the point.
The intro is not filler
Thirty-five seconds, no guitars, no bass, no drums. Synth drone, sub bass, hammer strikes on metal, and a voice. It is also, by a wide margin, the most dynamic thing on the record, opening more than twice the range of any actual song here, and it sits several hundred hertz below everything that follows with a low middle half again as thick.
That matters because most metal intros are a wash of strings that could be deleted without loss. This one establishes a specific room, a specific weight, and a specific piece of imagery, and then the band walk into it.
What follows is deliberately level
The eight songs hold remarkably still. They sit within three hundred hertz of each other tonally, their peaks cluster inside a decibel and a half, and none of them opens much more than the others. On a doom record that would be a complaint. On epic heavy metal it is closer to the brief: this is music built on repeated choruses and sustained conviction, and a record that kept dropping to nothing would be undermining its own posture every few minutes.
Within that frame the writing holds up. “Unleash The Kraken” is the longest thing here at over seven minutes and the darkest of the eight, which is the right way around for a closer. “The Birth of the Serpents” has the most movement of the proper songs. “Crowns of Greed” carries the most midrange of anything here, which is where the vocal and the lead lines live, and it is the one that pushes them furthest forward.
The reservation
The record never goes back to what the intro promised. Thirty-five seconds of hammers and drone set up a scale that the album then declines to revisit, and by the second half you notice that the most atmospheric moment on a forty-five minute record was over before minute one. The band clearly know how to build that kind of space. They use it once, as a door, and then shut it.
So
Recommended. This is an assured debut from a band who have decided exactly what they are and are not hedging about it, and if you have any time for epic heavy metal played without irony you will get on with it quickly. The caveat is a record that is extremely consistent at the cost of surprising you, and an intro that writes a cheque the eight songs do not cash. Start with “Unleash The Kraken”, then go back to the front and let the hammers do their work.
The intro and the album are two different recordings by every measure. “The Forge (intro)” opens 22.3 decibels between its quietest and loudest passage, where the eight songs run between 4.4 and 9.6. It sits at 1899 hertz against 2322 to 2611 for everything else, carries 25.2 percent of its energy in the low midrange against 15.1 to 16.6, and averages minus 16.0 decibels against minus 11.8 to minus 13.0. Across the songs themselves the record is tightly controlled: tonal centres span only 289 hertz, peaks sit between 11.9 and 13.4 decibels above average, and the treble share holds between 15.9 and 18.8 percent. “Unleash The Kraken” is the darkest of the eight at 2322 hertz and also the longest at over seven minutes, while the self-titled second track holds the narrowest dynamic range on the record at 4.4 decibels. Nothing here is flattened, the master simply has very little it needs to accommodate.
Standout tracks: Unleash The Kraken, The Birth of the Serpents, Crowns of Greed
