Artist: Anthropomantic
Country: Bulgaria
Label: Blasphemous Rumours Promotion
Formats: Cassette Tape / CDR
Year: 2025
Anthropomantic is the latest project of a 18-year old musician from Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Although ‘Blasphemous Decree’ is just the band’s debut album, it seems that Boyan Sotirov has had a couple of other bands and projects before, he must have been around thirteen years old when he started the oldest one. So it was ingrained in this young man from an early age. And, while you can have a few remarks on this project’s first offering, his earlier experience shows off.
The all-knowing Metal-Archives filed this under ‘Melodic Black Metal’, and although I know we have to label everything in order to know what to expect, this doesn’t exactly feel too appropriate. Certainly, there’s melody aplenty here, take a listen to this album’s title track for example, but especially due to the very loud vocal delivery of Sotirov, it feels that the ‘Melodic’ prefix just doesn’t cover the whole deal. To keep things simple, we might simply stick to calling this “just” Black Metal.
The musical foundation of this young one-man army is to be found in what overtime is being described as Swedish Black Metal in the same fashion of bands like Setherial, older Dark Funeral and Thy Primordial . It’s fast and with a certain sense of melody, yet with a lot more bite than bands like Misteltein or Abyssos for example. That meatier character largely comes from the production and mix. The overall rawer sound helps preventing Anthropomantic to be compared with the slightly more commercial bands in the genre and the mix offers quite a few interesting choices. The drums are for the most part tucked away deeper in the overall sound and, as said, the vocals are very much on top of everything. These loud vocals detract quite a bit from the very intense and interesting riffing, but at the same time add to a bit of to the overall experience that brings back memories from days long gone. In fact, it personally reminded me of demo tapes of such long forgotten bands like Immemoreal. Definitely an enjoyable listen, and, if you’re interested, the cassette tapes are still available for a mere 5 bucks.
