On The Anthropic Sophisms (On The Heights Of Despair), the Czech eldtritch gods known as Inferno reach a new peak of nightmarish artistic excellence.
Release date: July 17, 2026 | Debemur Morti Productions | Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube
Black metal’s fixation with the stars and the cosmos can be traced all the way back to the early days of the genre’s infamous second wave. Songs like Emperor’s “Cosmic Keys to My Creations and Times” and releases like Arcturus’s Constellation, demonstrate how corpse paint-wearing teenagers across Norway and the rest of Europe sought to distance themselves from the rudimentary evil posturings of black metal’s first wave by going bigger and bolder: drawing inspiration from the past, the esoteric tradition, and the universe itself.
Tracing their roots all the way back to 1995, Czechia’s Inferno is very much a part of that second wave, and their long, rich recording history demonstrates just how close they followed so many of its trends and life cycles – but also how much further than their brethren they’ve ventured since, culminated in the nightmarish clusterfuck that is their latest album, The Anthropic Sophisms (On The Heights Of Despair); a record that takes black metal’s cosmos obsession and folds it inwards, beyond the threshold of sense and meaning. This is truly satanic art, out of this world and beyond comprehension.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with how we got here. Having started as your run-of-the-mill Darkthrone clone (albeit a pretty decent one), Inferno have gradually shed and re-shed their collective skin, embracing in the process their Czech metal affinity towards all things quirky. Like their countrymen Master’s Hammer, Root, and !T.O.O.H.! did before them, Inferno have grown into a sound all their own, a sound they have been developing piece by piece since 2017’s hazy, suffocating masterpiece, Gnosis Kardias (Of Transcension and Involution).
That record showcased a considerable evolution to the band’s sound: still absolutely black metal, but more dense, suffocating, and complex. The standards of black metal are all present – the blastbeats, the shrieked vocals, the grim and esoteric subject matter – but the songs resemble sound pieces more than traditional songs, and the guitar work lends a trippy psychedelic quality to the overall atmosphere. These two elements took center stage on their next album, Paradeigma (Phosphenes of Aphotic Eternity), which took a few paces further away from traditional black metal, and they are now the key component of their latest release.
You see, it’s hard to call Inferno anything but black metal; the spirit, the essence, is still very much there. Hell, all you have to do is look at the band portrait at the head of this review to see what they’re all about. But sonically, The Anthropic Sophisms (On The Heights Of Despair) is a different beast altogether. The band has dove so deep into their new sound, and pushed the envelope so far that I can honestly say that this record doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve ever heard. Sure, I can make some vague comparisons: there’s more than a dash of Oransi Pazzuzu here (perhaps the most obvious comparison, though the similarities are mostly at a surface level), a splash of Portal and The Great Old Ones there, even a little Godflesh sprinkled in for good measure; but those comparisons don’t even begin to scratch the surface.
No, in many ways, the real signposts for this album lie outside of extreme metal, in free jazz, dub techno, and krautrock. It is a truly psychedelic album, one that I would describe as closer to a harrowing acid trip than any other musical experience. Yes, it’s heavy, dark, and menacing. Yes, it is very much a black metal record, texturally if not sonically. And yes, fans of the other artists I’ve mentioned will surely find a lot to vibe with here. But thinking about this record like I do about other records – dissecting the songwriting, zooming in on certain moments, exploring individual performances – honestly, these efforts hit a wall when it comes to this one. Not because it’s not possible, or because it’s particularly hard, but because it feels like missing the point. With this album, Inferno offers an experience, a journey, a trip – in the fullest sense of the word. And this is how this record, I feel, should be treated.
Still, I am a music critic (or so I tell myself when I look in the mirror), and I do want you to give this album a listen, so I will do my best to describe and analyze it as a musical artefact. To these ears, The Anthropic Sophisms (On The Heights Of Despair) is both idiosyncratic and captivating. It doesn’t really sound like anything else, because it manages to fuse its disparate sonic elements into a unique, cohesive whole. Inferno opted for a more doomy to mid-tempo approach to the four songs that make up the album, all of which are on the longer side, with two pushing beyond the 10 minute mark. The songs themselves are slowly developing, constantly churning, and difficult to penetrate. Instead of building on momentum or memorable parts, they subsume the listener, overwhelming you with their suffocating, dense sound. Think cosmic horror in audio form, Lovecraftian sounds whose tentacles stretch out and spread all over the mix.
It’s not all one impenetrable wall of sound, though. Repeated listens reveal the layers that make up the record’s landscape: how the vocals hover in the middle of the mix, operating as part of the whole rather than sticking out at the forefront; the creative guitar leads and discombobulated riffs; the use of jagged synth throbs to flesh out and expand the songs; and the rich, masterful, complex-yet-sturdy drum work that keeps everything motoring along and in unison. And, among all the swirling lysergic miasma, the album’s highlight and centerpiece: “With Raving Mouths They Utter Things Mirthless, Unadorned and Unperfumed”, a slow build-up of cacophonic madness, starting out quietly and gradually adding a heavy dose of electronics, before culminating in blastbeats, sharp riffs, and the most proper black metal moments of the entire record. If you only have time to sample one song here, make sure it’s this one.
So, is The Anthropic Sophisms (On The Heights Of Despair) a good record? I’m not sure that’s the right question, because I’m not sure that measuring it through aspects like enjoyable or memorable is an adequate approach. Is it a recommended record? To that the answer is an unequivocal yes. Reaching what I feel is the ultimate conclusion of their creative arc, Inferno spawned an album that must be experienced, lived through, and journeyed with. It is challenging and almost impenetrable, but that’s what makes it so worthy of your time. In a sea of immediate dopamine hits, this record stands out, defiantly, like a mountain to be summited. It is a rare feat to achieve these days, and I applaud Inferno for giving me and my brain such a hard time throughout its 40 minutes.
