This enigmatic-looking disc is the latest and greatest from Polish crush-architect Madis Jalakas under the banner of his (more-or-less) solo endeavor Thunraz. The guy is a goddamn machine.

At the tail end of 2024, there was one album that started sprouting out of last-minute "best of year" lists all over the underground metal. And for good reason: Thunraz's sixth album Incineration Day , self-released on the band's own Bandcamp page with none of the initial fanfare that releases on bigger metal labels enjoy, ended up infecting nearly every skull that came within earshot of it. Definitely the case with mine. And especially if you were particularly into the more left-field, industrial-damaged death metal spectrum. Indeed, the Estonian band had been at this for years, a painstaking sculpting of a signature dissonant, angular strain of death / industrial metal with a number of albums and EPs going back to 2018 , but it's hard to argue that Incineration is Thunraz's best to date. A marked leap in evolution and power. More focused in sound and intent, colossal in heaviness, and radiating this unique dystopian vision that pulsates through the somewhat brief (but absolutely to-the-point) album. This seven-song slab of slavering-yet-somber experimental mecha-death is superbly executed. The combination of dissonant soundcraft, unorthodox guitar riffs, precision percussive brutality (which, honest-to-god hooks, and a peculiar, downright eerie melodic style is woven together by Jalakas, resulting in a deep-field experience, expanding a bit beyond the core "death metal" foundation. More than ever, the elements of electronic debris, doom-death crawl, jagged and "mathy" metallic HC a laCoalesce and Botch, soundtrack music, and hellish noise rock (think the most death-metal adjacent Today Is The Day stuff) that has all been squirming beneath the surface of Thunraz's sound over the past seven years are absorbed together into an integrated and distinctive whole. This shit is fucking killer.

There's something about Thunraz's sound, especially here on Incineration Day, that reminds me of some of the more sharply angled and caustic extreme metal that's come out of the Polish underground. The music feels as if it might share some kind of venomous DNA with progressive death/grind bands like Antigama, Nyia, Mothra. A kind of "Voivodian" discordance, a pointed, barbed angularity, staccato riffing, a cold, ruthless malevolence boosted with often complex (but hyper-heavy) songwriting. But with a crushing death metal core, Thunraz drives a dirtier, more dystopian route, wreathed in a bleaker end-time atmosphere, with an intricacy in musicianship and heavily layered guitars beneath the seemingly minimalist attack that further sets this music apart. While Jalakas handles all aspects of the band, here he's assisted by drummer Sean Rehmer, whose hammering storm of a performance brings a ferocity and intricacy to the band's bombastic ballistics, driven by locomotive double-kick thunder. Clanging, jagged guitars twist themselves into knots spiked with broken glass, wrapped around the mix of concrete-chewing down-tuned riffs, discordant chord structures, eerie melody, and droning machinelike ultra-crush. But there's also an unexpected amount of catchiness and straight-up groove that the musicians constantly lock into, as well. That riffing, as obtuse as it sometimes gets, also deftly drops into a massive hook and a huge, head-nodding power-riff at ideal moments. On top of that, when Jalakas moves from his guttural roar into a dramatic, almost chantlike baritone, it can evoke the likes of Jaz Coleman, so there's a subtle Killing Joke vibe alongside the shades of Nefilim's industrial goth-death a la Zoon that I pick up here and there. But just as prevalent is the ferocious heaviness of early 90s death metal, which is all over this stuff; that somewhat "industrial" feel mainly emerges in a just a couple of key spots, most notably the intensely droning, hypnotic slow-motion dirge of the closer “Spiritual Self-Surgery”, where an almost "tribalistic" drum performance anchors a devastating, primitive (but densely layered) ur-chord roar that evokes a blackened and blasted urban wasteland sprawling into the vanishing point on a nuked-out horizon line.

Here's hoping that Jalakas gets the rest and reprieve he needs to possibly return to Thunraz in the future, because this album really feels like the beginning of something new and more lethal from the musician. Seriously, for me, this is one of the heaviest and most satisfying releases of 2024.

The disc is a professionally-produced CDR, in ultra-minimal jewel-case packaging. A new cassette edition is coming out in the near future from Crucial Blast's analog chapel, so keep your peepers pried open for that, too .