Ch’ahom delivers a rich conceptual meditation on death and humanity’s attempts to process it on the furious metallic assault of Anthropic Rites of Sublimation.
Release date: September 18, 2026 | 20 Buck Spin | Instagram | Bandcamp
Life’s one certainty, above all, is that death is imminent. Nothing stands in total permanence, and though all of life flows towards death at different paces, it will all eventually end up there. How we as sentient beings respond to it, meanwhile, is one of the great uncertainties. Do we gild this knowledge with beliefs about what may lie beyond that veil? Do we embrace the void and live with the belief that this is all we get? Do we fight tooth and nail to find ways to prolong earthly existence, or at least to position ourselves at the top of the heap while life lingers?
Death is a lingering specter that drives much of how humanity behaves, and it’s also absolutely metal as hell. Entire metal subgenres have sprung up around the concept of death, and I’ll be damned if there has been a single metal band that didn’t make a conscious decision to dedicate at least multiple songs to just that topic. One of the more interesting takes on the theme that I’ve seen lately is the one Germany’s Ch’ahom has focused on for their sophomore full-length Anthropic Rites of Sublimation. Crafting a narrative of a fictional, Mesoamerican-inspired world wherein a great cavernous void mystically draws people to throw themselves in, Ch’ahom has set to craft songs describing cultures that emerge around the rim of the void and the practices they engage in, finding meaning in processing that pull into the abyss.
Not to be reductive, but it’s an extremely cool concept for the band to present, and a decent part of why I decided to review them for a second time (a personal first!). Their previous Knots of Abhorrence, which dropped on the venerable Sentient Ruin Laboratories, was a twisted firestorm of (heh) knotted black/death metal with a light psychedelic twinge and a penchant for ambient Mesoamerican interludes crafting one hell of an ambience. Anthropic Rites of Sublimation, their 20 Buck Spin debut, follows in that path with just the slightest bit of polish, a more concise approach to songwriting, and a tightening into a more pure old school death metal approach.
And when I say concise, I mean five songs and not even half an hour of metal, but damned if Ch’ahom isn’t making every moment count across Anthropic Rites of Sublimation‘s all too brief run. The first four songs are more direct scorchers, each denoting a different civilization within their concept and how they process the draw of the abyss they’ve set their cultures around. Woven through each of these songs is some haunting ambient texture and a payload of bestial, aggressive death metal with an intriguingly proggy approach. The drums are absolutely thunderous throughout, while the guitars and bass wind through a maelstrom of riffing that can either be barbarically bludgeoning or oddly cosmic and progressive by turns. I’d even go as far as saying that shreds of “Reign of Nohol” or “Priests of Lik’in” sounded like they could have come off the earlier, rougher works of Blood Incantation or the like.
And then there’s the (relative) monolith of “Insemination”, which dwarves the rest of the album’s tracks and shows Ch’ahom really spreading their wings for a dive into the abyss. It’s a marvelously textured work, balancing several of Ch’ahom‘s characteristic atmospheric breaks with twisted riffing, chirping harmonics, and a frenetic drive to an end that feels admittedly a bit sudden. But then, given the theme of death’s inexorable draw, it is genuinely fitting for the album to end unexpectedly and quicker than anticipated.
It probably goes without saying that I would most definitely consider Anthropic Rites of Sublimation a very clear whole-album experience above a collection of songs. Individual tracks don’t have much in the way of earworms and even tend to flow into one another without much in the way of separation. Between concept and approach, it’s an album that works best left to wash over you in all its deathly splendor, contemplating its cavernous cover art and crushed beneath the beefy, rugged production. Ch’ahom‘s metaphorical meditation on death and how we as a species grapple with it is twisted, nasty, and hostile in much the same way death itself is, but there’s a beauty to be found in pondering Anthropic Rites of Sublimation‘s tangled corridors. As a great metal musician once said, ‘Only death is real’. And Ch’ahom knows just how to make it feel all the more real.
