Seven long years after the release of their sophomore album, Contragenesis, Ignivomous return with their third full-length album Hieroglossia. Released in conspiracy with NWN! Productions, Hieroglossia unveils eight tracks of organic, primal death metal — the kind the band has become synonymous with in its 13-year existence within the death metal underground.
Borne out of the members desire to see a resurgence of a heavier, more dissonant style of death metal, Ignivomous were among the first wave of bands to reignite interest in the genre in the first decade of this century. Hieroglossia preserves the core membership of the band present throughout its tenure — Sean Hinds (guitar), Chris Broadway (drums) and Jael Edwards (vocals) — and presents the recording debut of Lewis Fischer on guitar (Altars) and Chris Jordon (Inverloch, Eskhaton) on bass, both of whom have cemented the band’s live assault for the previous few years in a campaign of high-profile shows in their native Australia. This lineup in its current form has secured and built upon the band’s unrelentingly legacy, oozing raw, sinister death metal pushed a step further into the void, creating an album which synthesizes the bands influences with a definitive and individual vision. While projecting a murky and atmospheric take on the Death Metal template, Heiroglossia avoids sacrificing the primacy of the riff for reverb-drenched formlessness or song writing in favour of dissonance for its own sake.
Thematically, Heiroglossia continues Ignivomous’ investigation into topics of Philosophical pessimism, influenced by the works of Thomas Ligotti and E.M. Cioran, and Gnostic concepts of the fallen and hostile nature of the material world, presented throughout with a literary sensibility which should be accustomed to those familiar with their previous output.