Deserted Realms

The Desecresy production line shows no sign of stopping. ‘Deserted Realms’ is the eighth LP from this outlier in the latter day death metal landscape, and the fourth under the sole stewardship of Tommi Grönqvist. Having quickly developed a singular niche, Desecresy displayed a rare momentum across their considerable body of work, with the topography of quality remaining consistently elevated throughout. The blend of crushing Bolt Thrower marches with eerie, fragmented guitar leads lifted from the uncanny world of Finnish death metal has served this entity well, seeing them expose death metal to conversations with ambient, industrial, and electronica in ways their contemporaries are simply unable to match.

But thirteen years and eight albums in, questions are bound to arise as to the mileage left in such a formula. Changes in equipment or production have had only limited success in refreshing the package. But with the release of 2022’s ‘Unveil in the Abyss’ and now 2023’s ‘Deserted Realms’, it’s clear that Grönqvist is a committed incrementalist, playing the long game in broadening his the expressive range.

In this sense, I suppose there’s something to be said for rewarding fan patience. Many artists with comparably well established styles would be wont to blow their load too quickly on an embarrassment of experimental riches, trusting their fans to go along with whatever gauche left-field direction they drag their artistry into. Desecresy take a different approach, with each of the more recent albums only modestly adding to the dialogue, yet when taken together over a span of albums it amounts to a respectable arc of artistic development.

The seeds of Desecresy’s shortcomings were sown within the very virtues of their early releases, namely an economy of ideas. The tracks were short, only rarely containing more than a handful of ideas. This worked for a time owing to the utter novelty of the approach, made all the more compelling by just how basic it was. The refreshing confidence with which they executed this vision only enhanced this picture of miniaturisation. But over time one cannot help but crave variation.

Luckily enough for us, such variation is precisely what is on offer on ‘Deserted Realms’. The formula remains unchanged. A foundation of rock solid, chugging, militarist guitar riffing places this firmly in Demigod-seen-through-the-lens-of-Bolt-Thrower territory. Atop this baseline of immersive textural fauna are placed simple, haunting guitar harmonies swirling in cyclical repetitions that slowly build into minimalist motion, lending all a ghostly, meditative aura. This is essentially a way to express the artistic import of ambient/electronica through metallic means.

But here we see Desecresy extend these elements over the horizon, running with themes across relatively lengthy tracks, creating space for development sections and recapitulations that lend these pieces a sense of journey and motion. This is not simply a static hint, a cordoned off vignette of compelling but limited intrigue. These are now living, breathing sonic organisms with a life of their own. There’s a conversation going on between each element, there are stakes, dynamics, drama, and tangents.

Much like biological evolution, each step in Desecresy’s progression is difficult to discern from the last. But each step compounds on the last until suddenly we arrive at a new species. ‘Deserted Realms’ is not yet a categorically different entity to the debut ‘Arches of Entropy’, but the current trajectory of this artist would indicate greater changes are afoot.

Originally published at Hate Meditations