Artist: Adorior
Country: United Kingdom
Label: Dark Descent Records / Sepulchral Voice Records
Formats: LP / CD
Year: 2024
Adorior’s ‘Bleed On My Teeth’ already came out in autumn last year, so I am arriving to the party a bit late. Well, not really, actually. I got the record right when it came out, but I really needed some time to let this long-awaited album sink in properly. And, after all, the band took almost two full decades to come up with a follow-up to 2005’s ‘Author Of Incest’, so taking a few months extra doesn’t make much of a difference anyway.
It doesn’t happen very often that a band really takes twenty years to come up with a new record, at least not without the band breaking up and reuniting in between. Adorior, already started in 1994, never called its quits or were on an official hiatus, yet still they were silent as the grave for the largest part of those two decades – interrupted only by the release of the split LP with Terrorama via Nuclear War Now! Productions in 2010. It came to a point that I, and many with me, even gave up hoping for a new record ever to surface.
But, here we are. Indeed, twenty years later, we finally have ‘Bleed On My Teeth’ in our hands. Based on the underground success of especially the amazing ‘Author Of Incest’ the band became slowly one of the scene’s most esteemed Extreme Metal bands from after the turn of the century. The sparse moments when the band made their appearance on stage or festivals proved their status; which clearly is not based on nothing. The flip side of such things is that expectations increase significantly, so consequently, with each postponement of the release of a new record, that can make the threshold for the band greater, which in turn makes the fan base restless and expectations even higher. A vicious cycle.
But, we can rest assured. The band did not succumb to self-imposed pressure, if there was any to begin with, of course. In fact, ‘Bleed On My Teeth’ is a record that holds basically everything that you’d hope for from an Adorior album. Of course, in such a long period of time, some things have changed. Yet, the most vital parts of the Adorior formula remained untouched. Their blend of Black- and Death Metal with lots of furious Thrashy riffs is still as energetic and vigorous as ever, making ‘Bleed On My Teeth’ another strong pillar in the Adorior discography.
Compared to the older recordings, however, ‘Bleed On My Teeth’ sounds quite a bit “better”. Meaning that ‘Author Of Incest’ is quite a tad wilder and rawer in nature, but has an overall darker atmosphere too. The slightly updated (or cleaner) sound of this newest record allows it to sound sharper and the riffs are more prominent. While the more chaotic recordings of the past have their charm and it made me think of ‘Author Of Incest’ as one of the best records in its genre of those, in the otherwise rather tame 00’s, you can definitely make a case that the band “matured” in a very convincing way. They left nothing behind of what made them such a particularly great band, but instead seems to have reshuffled every element and added some progressed musicianship on top. Melissa “Jaded Lungs” Gray has not sacrificed anything in terms of intensity either, and her vocals remain a real treat, a more than welcome change between her generally roaring male counterparts. While Adorior does not necessarily fit into the Bestial/War Metal straitjacket, with its ferocious outbursts and chaos-driven frenzy, it does graze up against it musically – Melissa’s vocals are truly a breath of fresh air.
The further balancing of the Adorior blueprint makes ‘Bleed On My Teeth’ a thoroughly enjoyable record. The album convinced me from the first seconds, the opening ‘Begrime Judas’ is definitely one of the best Adorior tracks to date, but I needed a few more weeks to see if I would change my mind. Was my enthusiasm perhaps more based on the band’s return? That question I can now wholeheartedly answer with a solid “no!”. ‘Bleed On My Teeth’ is just everything that I could wish for, in fact I think I value this record as much as I do ‘Author Of Incest’.
