heavy-metal-darkness: Midnight Odyssey/Swords Of Dis/ÔRos Kaù/Serpent Ascending |From The Waters Of Death |I, Voidhanger Records

Sunday, March 8, 2026

Midnight Odyssey/Swords Of Dis/ÔRos Kaù/Serpent Ascending |From The Waters Of Death |I, Voidhanger Records

Release Date February 13^th, 2026
Format 2LP/Digital
Genre Black Metal, Death Metal, Doom Metal
Country Australia, United Kingdom, France, Finland

Four underground forces spent over two years hammering together "From The Waters Of Death - A Retelling Of The Epic Of Gilgamesh". This giant conceptual split tackles the oldest written story on earth. It tracks the tyrannical king of Uruk clashing with the wild beast-man Enkidu. The two beat each other senseless, become brothers in arms, and tear through mythical beasts until Enkidu dies. That loss sends a terrified Gilgamesh hunting for eternal life, ultimately discovering immortality strictly resides within the wisdom left behind for future generations. Translating a Mesopotamian myth into extreme metal requires serious ambition and a ridiculous amount of riffs.

Midnight Odyssey, Swords Of Dis, ÔRos Kaù, and Serpent Ascending share the burden of this massive sonic undertaking. The English doomsters in Swords Of Dis basically direct the entire assault, with vocalist Alice Corvinus spreading her unholy screams across the runtime to bind the different visions together. Jarno Nurmi delivers total death metal destruction through Serpent Ascending, while Guillaume Cazalet injects his twisted black and death metal madness via Ôros Kaù. Dis Pater caps it all off with his signature cosmic black metal approach in Midnight Odyssey. The transition between these distinct styles happens constantly, crashing huge doom passages straight into blistering blast beats.

Clocking in at over an hour and twenty minutes across just five tracks, "From The Waters Of Death" demands absolute attention. Blending black, death, and doom metal, the music gets incredibly punishing and dark. Because four separate entities handle different chapters of the story, the flow occasionally stumbles when switching gears between extreme speed and agonizingly slow doom sections. A few riffs drag longer than necessary during the twenty-minute compositions. Even with those minor pacing bumps, the sheer aggressive output keeps the listener hooked. The vocals sound totally rabid, matching the vicious guitars step for step.

To match the musical insanity, David Glomba handled the cover art and packed the booklet with cuneiform script and giant paintings. It is a visually stunning addition that demands a physical purchase. Extreme metal and ancient poetry combine into an absolute behemoth of an album here. The artists successfully carved the tragic story of a broken, grieving demigod into an unrelenting assault on the ears.

Score: 8.0 (SA 7.5 |OK 7.5 |SOD 9.0 |MO 8.5)