Rise Towards God

Our half of our split with Putrescine. Langdon Hickman's writeup below 👇

This split is, like all split LPs before it, a tale of dialectics.

Putrescine leans heavily on death metal’s progressive roots as exemplified by Morbid Angel and The Chasm. Like those groups, Putrescine balances a sense of keening melody, low-end chromaticism and a touch of the weirding fringe of the genre, closer to Voivod than standard tech-wizardry. Each of their releases, major or minor, is a further refinement of their acumen, and this material is no exception.

Their three songs found here showcase an emotionally seamless blend of their outer-weirdness prog elements and meat-and-potatoes death metal riffing, integrating the shock of those exploratory prog passages into the death metal that surrounds them. They represent a group that views every release as a defining statement, regardless of length or format — extremely refreshing in a rockist solo LP-oriented world.

Kosmogyr blends the post-rock and post-hardcore driven world of contemporary black metal a la Møl, Oathbreaker, and Violet Cold with the cinematic music of Hans Zimmer and grace notes of death metal as well. For Kosmogyr, this new material represents not a perpetual refinement but a return — it’s their first release since before the pandemic.

Initially formed in Shanghai between two friends in the city’s extreme metal and punk scene, Kosmogyr has since developed into a fully international project, with both members now living in different continents. Their music is intuitive and emotionally driven, with a natural progressive sheen.

The progressive component of Kosmogyr twists in their music’s songwriting and development, while the heightened post-hardcore elements give motion and energy. Imagine if Mono teamed up with Undeath, or if Coheed and Cambria developed a surprising interest in contemporary extreme metal, and you’ll have an idea of what you can expect from Kosmogyr’s three songs on this collaboration.

On "Desolate Tides," the presence of these two bands together is born of both friendship and musical communication. The change in Kosmogyr’s vocal approach arcs their material closer to the death metal of Putrescine, while Putrescine's more emotionally coherent songwriting tilts toward the taut sense of emotional logic underpinning Kosmogyr's melodic and harmonic choices.

This collaboration is clearly thought out but not overthought, emotionally sound without being histrionic or forced. Neither group took the easy way out for this split LP — these are not cast-off songs yet to find a home, but which together form a truly cohesive whole.

• Langdon Hickman