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Seeing ICDD go from this demo to their 2022 album is such a wild revelation; this demo is basically no different than the myriad of garbage demos out there that would go unnoticed by literally everyone but the people responsible for said music. While the songwriting is quite basic, everything about the song is quite terrible. Ranging from the raw black metal levels of production to the awful vocals and guitar melodies, it sounds like this demo would be just something that would make the creators disband out of shame, but instead Hull and Yuhki would decide to press on and evolve from this demo into one of the best symphonic metal bands in the modern era.

But not everything about the vocals is pure garbage; Yuhki's vocal style here would foreshadow what kind of vocal monster he would be, and the cleans here already set him apart from most metal vocalists. I guess everyone has to begin somewhere, right? All this while the drums play the same repeated beats over and over again like a recording on a loop, and the guitar melodies are annoying at best and infuriating at worst. The production only serves to worsen things, as whatever was annoying about the instruments just got more annoying under that black metal filter.

Please avoid this demo and listen to literally anything else the band has to offer. I genuinely have nothing positive to say about this demo outside of the vocals. Hell, I would not bother reviewing this if it were not for the fact that I want to see every release here get at least one review. The band even remade the song into something actually listenable in the mid-2010s, so at least they knew this demo was terrible.

If only other bands could pull a dramatic rise to the top from such an abyssal low like this...