Album Review: Dirge – Dirge (Immersive Sounds)

Since their formation in 2014, Dirge have become one of Mumbai’s most talked-about post-metal bands. Using their time post-pandemic to write and record a follow-up to 2018’s Ah Puch, the band’s forthcoming self-titled album – scheduled for release on March 10th, 2023, via Immersive Sounds – finds the quintet taking a sonic journey of discovery. Dirge looking inward while simultaneously reflecting our world at large.

Explains bassist Harshad Bhagwat:

The album is an attempt to evoke emotions that lie at the core of discomfort. The soundscapes have been designed to suit the ethos of each song and the lyrics are inspired from real life experiences of anger, guilt, sorrow, and fear. We want to take the listener on a journey of self-actualisation through this album, as our aim is to create a sense of catharsis through the experience.

A contender for the most captivating record released this year, Dirge are one of the most exciting bands within the post-metal world and this self-titled record might very well be the album that properly puts them on the map. Especially as it’s a perfect example of genre-blending.

Featuring four tracks, each an eccentric and electrifying showcase of post, blended with doom, psych, sludge and metal. Dirge exhaust the senses with their output, but not just because of how genre-defying the album is. It’s exhausting because it captures exactly what Dirge are going for. The emotions that are dredged up, from anxiety, to fear, to frustration, anger, and sadness. It’s both worrisome and liberating, the initial discomfort felt, transitioning into determination and desire.

An incredible feat when you consider that all of this comes through an album made up of heavy, severe, vicious, temperamental, and impudent metal. Every track twisting and turning in unexpected ways, layered with heart-wrenching and emotional melody. There’s not a moment where Dirge isn’t making you feel something. Be it the desire to head-bang yourself into oblivion or just sway in their soft and gentle breeze.

This is Dirge’s moment and for all the gloom and doom it brings, it’s a radiant and ravishing experience from beginning to end. Four tracks that average around ten minutes in length each, is still not enough. It leaves you begging for more, unwilling to snap the mind out of the fugue state it creates.

Dirge – Dirge Track Listing:

1. Condemned
2. Malignant
3. Grief
4. Hollow

Links

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