Written by Alex
- King
- Coldest of Cold
- Melodic Black Metal/Death
- Melbourne, Australia
- November 22, 2019
- EVP Recordings
- 8.6/10
This is my first encounter with King and it was a hell of a great experience. This band does black metal in one of my favourite ways and the album they’ve put out here is of great quality from front to back. As far as I can find, this album is their second full length and it certainly marks a promising future for the band.
To give you an idea of what this band sounds like, they can pretty concisely be quantified as melodic black metal with some death metal influence. They give me a strong Satyricon vibe but it’s not so derivative that I can write it off as purely Satyricon worship either. They certainly have their flare that presents itself in the death metal inflection and guitar tone. They use a fairly clean, undistorted guitar tone that plays well with the overall smoothly produced sound the album has. Despite this clean guitar tone, they still manage to maintain that cold sound that you would want from a black metal album. King has achieved a lot of catchy riffs and excellent drum and bass work on this album that I’m very impressed with.
To tie in the guitars with the vocals, the vocals also have this cold sound to them. It helps all the elements of the album flow flawlessly together. I am a big fan of not only the sound of the vocals but how they were mixed as well. The vocal tone is more a mid-tone with some higher and lower tones combined. This mid-tone makes for something easy to get into. On top of that, the mix has made them very pronounced and you can understand most of the lyrics which is nice.
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There’s a no-frills approach to the songwriting that makes the whole album ridiculously fun to listen too. While the songwriting is very straightforward and to the point, I never found myself becoming bored with it. They’ve even put in a few acoustic sections that top off the songs perfectly and give the album that bit of sonic room it needs.
My conclusion is that King has fully knocked this album out of the park. While the very clean production may be off-putting for some black metal fans, I find it not to be. I massively look forward to their future output now.
8.6/10
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