Bandcamp The name is a red herring: New Mexican Doom Cult are from Gävle, Sweden, and Ziggurat trades desert dust for Mesopotamian myth, a ritual concept album of ancient gods and star-wisdom wrapped in occult stoner doom. What sets it apart from the crowded field it lands in is the voice. The clean, theatrical vocals sit front and centre throughout, characterful and impeccably intoned, and they give the record a sense of ceremony that a lot of riff-first doom never bothers with.
The album is at its best when it lets the band play like a band. “Cloudrider” is the highlight, an organic, uncompressed piece of traditional heavy metal with analog warmth, a gnarly, present bass and real quiet-loud contrast, the kind of live-feeling recording that most modern doom sands away. “Metatron” swings the other way and works too, a surgically clean, transparent prog-metal cut where every element has its own space, and “Return to Babylon” rides a stoic epic-doom groove with room to breathe. Between the heavy tracks the band lean hard into atmosphere, the near-five-minute sacral ambient build of “Sungod” conjuring a genuinely cinematic dread before the metal arrives.
The catch is consistency, and specifically the production. For every organic, breathing track there is one that gets pushed into a flat, low-mid-heavy wall: “The Church of Starry Wisdom” compresses its main section into a fatiguing slab with the vocals stranded dry on top, and the eruptive finales of “Sungod” and “I Stand Alone” collapse into mush, choirs and guitars fighting for the same crowded midrange until the separation vanishes. The record swings between transparent and congested from track to track, and a steadier hand on the master would have done a lot for it.
Ziggurat is a varied, ambitious, genuinely characterful occult-doom record that ranges from trad heavy metal to drone-ambient without losing its ceremonial thread, and that voice ties the whole strange trip together. The uneven production keeps it from the top rank, but there is real personality here, and a band willing to build a doom album around Babylonian gods and actually commit to the atmosphere is a band worth following. For anyone who likes their doom theatrical and a little occult, this rewards the trip.
Standout tracks: Cloudrider, Metatron, Return to Babylon
