Lorn - Arrayed Claws (2017)

Two years after the revelatory “Subconscious Metamorphosis” album, Italy's LORN are back with “Arrayed Claws”, probably their more psychotic and violent work to date. The album features 5 tracks that perfectly exemplify LORN's evolutionary path within the black metal field.

As it was with its predecessor, “Arrayed Claws” is an accumulation of ultra-electric and dissonant melodies standing out against colossal guitar-walls, often shattering into psychedelic, mind-expanding dark ambient codas. But where “Subconscious Metamorhposis” was a transcendental mental journey towards a superior illumination, LORN's new album looks more like a physical and desperate odyssey through the regions of Death, an “abstract trap” through which to sink into an unforgiving hell that corrupts the flesh and mutilates the spirit.

That's exactly what happens in “Toybodïm” and “Süt-aq-Köl”, two songs inspired by the Altaian mythology, two stages of a purification path. The first track takes its name from a black lake where the souls of the dead fall and become larvae; the second is a lake of milk where the spirits get purified, a placenta for the newborns. The transition between these two tracks and the towering atmospheric conclusion of “Aus Nebel Turm” leaves the listener beaten and dismayed, with the painful awareness of being only a grain of nothing, lost in the unending and mysterious fogs of Existence