heavy-metal-darkness: Suffering | Things Seen But Always Hidden

Thursday, November 6, 2025

Suffering | Things Seen But Always Hidden | Apocalyptic Witchcraft

Release Date: November 28th, 2025

Format: Digital/CD/Vinyl

Genre: Occult Black Metal

Country: United Kingdom

Formed in 2012 in the industrial shadows of the West Midlands, Suffering has steadily become one of the UK’s more cryptic presences in the underground. The band’s early work, including their debut “11” and the later EPs “Temen-Ni-Gru (11:11)” and “Symphonies: Diabolis”, carved a grim identity marked by feverish atmosphere and a fascination with metaphysical decay. Their signing with Apocalyptic Witchcraft feels almost inevitable, given the label’s reputation for unearthing darkly ambitious acts operating beyond the usual extremity. Now Suffering returns with “Things Seen But Always Hidden”, an album that lures the listener into a dark corridor of dread, temptation and revelation.

The opening “The House With The Red Door” serves as the first descent into the album’s narrative of self-dissolution. Suffering uses pacing as a weapon, moving from brooding shadows to sudden aggression. There’s a suffocating tension throughout, created by riffs that grind against each other like gears turning in a rusted clock, and by vocals that sound closer to an invocation than performance. “Enthralled” and “The Chamber Of Breathtaking Delights” extend that atmosphere into something ceremonial, with the guitars spiraling between trance and chaos, while drums hammer like some ancient engine pulling everything into the abyss.

The middle section, through “Consorting With The Devil” and “Apocrypha Through The Keyhole”, deepens the descent. The music grows increasingly oppressive, but not in volume or speed, through persistence and tone. The guitars buzz and coil, the bass drags low through the mix, and the vocals echo like a curse whispered from behind a locked door. “Hell On Earth New Eden” twists that energy into something almost defiant, a march through ruin where melody flickers like the last light of reason. Then comes “Behind The Green Door”, a closer that stretches nearly ten minutes, wrapping the listener in a trance-like repetition of menace and sorrow. It’s the sound of collapse, monolithic, consuming, final.

“Things Seen But Always Hidden” is not an album that invites comfort or easy entry. It speaks in riddles, written in decay, and drenched in the bitterness of revelation. Suffering crafts their music with an understanding of how terror and fascination can intertwine, and the result is an experience that doesn’t shock through noise alone, but through the grim patience with which it unfolds. A work of focused darkness, “Things Seen But Always Hidden” strengthens Suffering’s position as a band unafraid to explore the unseen, the forbidden and the quietly terrifying. It may not offer salvation, but it does offer something far more enduring, a glimpse into the abyss that refuses to fade once witnessed.

Score: 7.0