Terminalist - The Great Acceleration (2021) Hi-Res

Copenhagen based Terminalist are about to launch their debut album upon the world. The four-piece have managed to combine a real old-school heavy metal vibe with some forward thinking approaches on The Great Acceleration, and it sounds pretty damn good to us.

The first thing to get excited about with The Great Acceleration is the outstanding artwork by the incredibly talented Ryan T. Hancock. The visuals align closely with the themes of the album, as the band take on the traditional sci-fi theory of humans having to relocate to elsewhere in the universe as we rapidly destroy our own planet. The cover art depicts spacecraft about to enter some sort of space vortex and Terminalist may just be on the event horizon of something very special here too.

Once you have finished admiring the cover art and cracked the music open, there are a lot more layers to Terminalist to be discovered.

From the band logo, the band image and indeed the aforementioned artwork; Terminalist scream ‘Thrash!’. While that may be on the money, once you delve deep into The Great Acceleration, it becomes very hard to pigeonhole the band into just one genre.

An obvious parallel to draw with Terminalist is with legendary Canadian sci-fi thrashers, Voivod. The band tread a similar path with space themes and the slightly proggy take on thrash metal. If anything, Terminalist take the progressive element even further. There’s a hell of a lot more to Terminalist than Voivod worship however. Lead singer (and guitarist) Emil Hansen delivers his vocals in a deep and gravelly death growl, which is reminiscent of how brilliantly Enforced have already mixed up death and thrash to great effect this year.

In addition to the proggy-death-thrash, the band also incorporate some black metal atmospherics and blast beats into their sound which really means that you can’t place this band into one neat and tidy genre.