Genre: Experimental Death Metal, Blackened Doom, Industrial

There is a version of this band’s seventh album that is one of the best extreme metal records of the decade, and it is buried inside the version that actually came out. The difference is about fifteen minutes. Altarage Cogwheel runs one hour and fourteen minutes across seven tracks, four of which pass the ten-minute mark, making it the longest and by the label’s own description the most imposing work of a career that began in 2015.

The Bilbao trio have spent a decade building a strain of atmospheric, abstract death metal that reshaped what the genre thought it could sound like and spawned, by Sentient Ruin’s account, countless imitators. Their previous record, 2023’s Worst Case Scenario, was widely read as a band reaching the limits of returns on noxious aggression while underfeeding the drone and industrial instincts that made the 2022 live document Sol Corrupto so strange. Cogwheel collects those experimental currents and the aggression into a single double LP.

What Altarage’s Cogwheel Does With Its Length

The shift is one of perspective before it is one of sound. Where earlier Altarage records depicted something cosmic and indifferent, Cogwheel’s mandate is human, depicting angst and the droning psyche of existential suffering, choking in what one reviewer described as the ever-churning miasma of a growing planetary ash-heap. That is a narrower target than the band has previously aimed at, and the narrowing is what justifies the runtime.

“Wielder” is the clearest evidence the method works. It opens on rhythmic hooks that Wonderbox Metal likened to planets colliding and closes in drone malevolence, and the drone is not filler appended to a finished song. It is where the song was going. “1988” is a brooding industrial hellscape that would be a textbook skip on almost any other death metal record and here earns its place, largely because the preceding track has already taught you to wait rather than expect. “Ichor” runs just under fifteen minutes and pushes into territory the band has not previously occupied, apparently including clean vocals for the first time in their catalogue, which No Clean Singing flagged with genuine uncertainty about whether it had ever happened before.

That track is where the album should end. No Clean Singing said so directly, calling closer “Industrial Offering” slightly superfluous and noting that by the time you reach it the wider picture of the record has become difficult to hold. Listener responses on Bandcamp split along the same line, with one calling the ambient stretches simply not fun and missing the shorter outbursts of the first two albums, and another calling the record monumental and indispensable.

Whether the Excess Is the Point

Here is the defence, and it is not weak. Wonderbox Metal argued that despite its length Cogwheel succeeds in nearly everything it attempts, that the songwriting is richer and the atmospheres deeper than before, and that passages which would be filler in other hands add value in these. An album about existential exhaustion that exhausts the listener is not obviously failing at its brief. Endurance is the subject.

The counterargument is simpler. A record can be about tedium without being tedious, and the fifteen-minute ambient stretches ask for a commitment the band has not entirely earned across seventy-four minutes. Four tracks over ten minutes is a structural decision that leaves no room for the listener to recover between them, and the sequencing offers no shorter piece anywhere in the back half to break the pressure.

Both readings are available and the album does not resolve them, which is either its central weakness or its most honest quality depending on how much patience you brought. What is not arguable is that Altarage have returned to being the terrifying force they were before Worst Case Scenario softened the edges. Cogwheel is demanding on purpose. Nothing that has meaning is easy, as No Clean Singing put it, borrowing from elsewhere. The question is whether difficulty and length are the same thing, and this record keeps answering yes when the better answer was no.

Buy the album from Bandcamp or Listen to the full album playlist below.