There’s a Jacob Böhme quote at the end of this record, sourced through Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: “It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.” Ultha put it there deliberately, and it functions as something close to a mission statement. This is not music that wallows. It moves.
The Cologne quintet, five members who have operated largely without a public profile, credited by initial only, wrote this record between the stillness of 2020 and the unravelling of 2021, and you can feel both in the material. All That Has Never Been True is their fourth album and their most sustained piece of work: seven tracks, none below three minutes, four of them stretching past the ten-minute mark, the whole thing running to just over an hour.
“Dispel” opens without ceremony. Within the first thirty seconds the screams arrive, high, torn, unmistakably in pain, and the guitars lock into a momentum that doesn’t let go. It’s five minutes that feel half that length, which is a harder trick than it sounds for music in this register. The second track, “Der Alte Feind (Jeder Tag Reißt Wunden)”, The Old Enemy (Every Day Tears Wounds), shifts the record into its longer form. Ten minutes of slow accretion, the riff carrying weight that builds incrementally until it feels genuinely oppressive. The German title is the only one of its kind on the record, and it sits like a deliberate scar.
“Bathed In Lightning, Bathed In Heat” is the album’s centrepiece and its most frequently cited track for good reason. Eleven minutes built around a central melodic figure that keeps returning, each time slightly altered, each time carrying more of the accumulated weight behind it. The lyrics speak of being born to endless night, of fear as an inherited condition, and the music earns those words rather than merely illustrating them. It doesn’t climax so much as dissolve, the ending arrives not as a release but as an exhaustion.
Track four, “He Knew And Did Not Know,” is the record’s lone instrumental, three minutes of transitional breathing space that works precisely because everything around it is so dense. Then “Carrion (To Walk Among The Spiders)” snaps back with more attack, a shorter, meaner song that sits in contrast to the album’s more expansive movements. “Haloes In Reverse” stretches again toward eleven minutes, the most melodically open track here, something approaching a horizon rather than a wall. The closing “Rats Gorged The Moon…And All Fell Silent” ends the record in almost twelve minutes of slow dissolution, a title that promises finality, and music that delivers it.
Recorded and mixed by A.Rosczyk at Goblin Sound Studio, the production gives the record a density that suits the material without becoming impenetrable. The guitars are present without smothering everything beneath them, and R.Schmidt’s vocals, alternating between shredded screams and something closer to spoken weight, sit in the mix as a voice rather than a texture.
Standout tracks: Bathed In Lightning, Bathed In Heat, Dispel, Haloes In Reverse
Ultha are not a comfortable band to spend time with, and All That Has Never Been True doesn’t ask you to be comfortable. It asks you to stay.
