This week’s ONE TO WATCH comes from a band whos music will constrict and asphyxiate you right from the get-go, with their relentless and devastating power. Hailing from Groningen, Netherlands, Onhou are intent on suffocating you amidst their doom-laden riffs, tormented vocals and harrowing, synthesised atmospherics. The mood here is bleak, and it will blacken any wilful soul that allows itself to buckle under its fury and wrath.
The track we are listening to is Ruins, and it’s the first track to be released off their forthcoming sophomore album, Monument, which is due for release on the 9th December through Lay Bare Recordings and Tartarus Records. It’s an unforgiving and uncomfortable slab of doom inspired metal that has an obsessive and compulsive quality about it that will have you coming back for more. Ruins opens up under a synthesised sky, with tremolo guitars filling the backdrop. As the riffs power through alongside the funereal pace of the drums, the mood changes instantly and an eerie darkness descends. Deep gutteral cries consume and devour your eardrums as the melody and power trudges forward with great intensity and vehemence. A vocal metamorphosis brings forth a black-metal cry that literally scratches and claws at your eyes, vicious and merciless. Reverb, distortion and more menacing synths cascade down on proceedings, dampening the pain and hurt momentarily, before the screams from the depths of hell resurface and suffocate under heaving guitars and punishing percussions, right to the death.
Ruins is a gruelling and monumental mass of heft that will destroy and pulverise the listener without mercy, but isn’t that the reason you’re here! Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for the album release in December, with the understanding that they haven’t already been clawed and gouged out from this beast of a track!