Bandcamp Most debut EPs arrive as a single lump of intent. This one arrives with a seam down the middle of it, and the seam runs exactly between the two songs Morbid Intent chose to put out ahead of the release.
The band formed in Oulu and describe themselves without hedging: classic Göteborg-style melodic death metal with a splash of modern extreme metal aggression. That is an accurate description and it is also the whole press angle, so it is worth saying what the five tracks actually do.
The song that introduced them is the tightest thing on the record
“Ashen Veil” came out on 22 May, five months before the EP. “Vitriol Shards” followed in September. Between those two dates something opened up.
The distance between the quietest and loudest passages on “Ashen Veil” is four and a half decibels, the narrowest on the EP by a clear margin. “Vitriol Shards” runs thirteen. The widest track here is neither of them, it is “The Manipulation Doctrine” at nearly eighteen decibels, and that one was never a single at all.
So the record moves away from the song that introduced it. Whether that is growth across five months or simply a mastering decision made per track, the result is that anyone who judged this band by their first single heard the least representative thing on the release.
Seventy one seconds that belong to a different record
“The Night Draws Near” is an intro and it behaves like one, but the degree of separation is unusual. Its spectral centre sits at 1169 Hz. Every other track on the EP sits between 2779 and 3091. It puts thirty one percent of its energy below 250 Hz where the rest of the record puts fifteen or sixteen, and it keeps under eight percent above 5 kHz where the others run above twenty.
In plain terms: the opening minute is dark, bass-weighted and almost without treble, and then the record switches on. It is the most deliberate thing on the release and the only moment with a sound of its own.
The cost of being this consistent
After that intro, the four remaining tracks are nearly interchangeable on paper. Their spectral centres fall inside a 312 Hz window, their midrange content inside one and a half percentage points, their treble inside two and a half. The guitars are doubled wide and heavily saturated, the bass sits under the kick without much attack of its own, and the drums are clearly sample-supported, with a kick built around a hard click.
That consistency is real craft and it is also the main limitation. Seventeen minutes pass in one texture, and the two tracks that break out do it through arrangement rather than tone: “The Manipulation Doctrine” drops into an atmospheric gap before the heaviest passage on the EP returns, and “Vitriol Shards” opens a clean section about three minutes in. Both moments land. There are only two of them.
Where it leaves me
Recommended. Juha Väyrynen’s vocals carry the thing, two registers used as layers rather than alternatives, dry and far enough forward to stay intelligible, which in this genre is a choice and not an accident. Eemeli Bodde’s mix is more open than most records filed next to it, and the numbers back that up rather than contradict it.
The reservation is scope. This is eighteen minutes that prove the band can play and can build a song, and it does not yet prove they sound like anybody but themselves on a good day. The next one has to find a second texture. Start with “The Manipulation Doctrine”, which is the most complete thing here, then go back and hear how much flatter “Ashen Veil” is than what came after it.
The EP is not loud, which is worth stating because the genre invites the opposite assumption. Average levels run between seventeen and nineteen decibels below full scale, and peak-to-average sits between eleven and fourteen across all five tracks. There is headroom here that comparable releases give away.
“The Manipulation Doctrine” is the widest track by some distance and also the one with the most peak above its own average, which is audible as a real drop and a real return rather than as a level change. “Ashen Veil” is the opposite case, four and a half decibels from softest to loudest, and that flatness is the single clearest difference between the EP’s earliest song and its newest.
The intro stands apart on every axis measured. Lowest spectral centre, most bass, least treble, and the only track on the record whose midrange does not dominate.
