Metal and faces have always been natural enemies, haven’t they? Since the genre’s outset, the best sign of a band’s quality seems to be the damage it can do to the average visage. Face-ripping riffs. Face-melting solos. Sometimes they’re smashed by hammers, other times they’re opened for surgery. They’ve even just been kept secret entirely! True nemeses since the beginning, and that tradition continues with today’s topic, Defacement. After a great debut in 2017, the Dutch band made a bigger splash with their self-titled 2021 album. Adorned with a hell of a striking cover featuring a painting of head with its entire front sheared off, the album’s contents were ugly, brutal, and yet complex and artistically impressive. Come 2024, and the band has gained a guitarist and presented us with a follow-up in Duality. So how does this new album, uh… face up to its predecessor, and the anti-face community as a whole?
The short answer? Really damned well. Duality, to my ears, stands as a step up from their already excellent sophomore album, and is moreover some of the best metal I’ve heard all year. Admittedly, their approach hasn’t really changed substantially. You’re still getting a cacophonous blend of savage, dissonant death/black metal drenched in atmosphere and peppered with tense quieter interludes, and Defacement remains masterful at working within that framework. Their riffs are punishing, the queasy Gorguts-esque leads are still disorienting, and the drum work remains an organized avalanche of intensity. But vitally, tweaks have been made to their formula that make their sound feel more expansive, experimental, and most surprisingly, approachable.
Be not afraid, of course, they haven’t shifted over towards the more commercial style of metal the title Duality may have you thinking. The band hasn’t adopted cleaner singing, matching outfits and masks, and multiple drummers. Rather, Defacement has made a concerted effort to season their brutality with a recurring presence of cathartic melody. They have dabbled in that in the past, of course, but on Duality they’ve consciously expanded on those all too fleeting moments of relative prettiness that occasionally poked through the din in the past. What were once little sprouts of light in their suffocating morass have blossomed into full sequences that are not just jarringly pleasant, but positively beautiful. And moreover, these emotionally resonant peaks aren’t just managed by one trick added to the band’s repertoire. They’re handled different ways in every song, sometimes via a moving guitar solo, or maybe a shoegazey dreamscape, or even choral underpinnings, creating a diversity of approach that many other bands in the dissonant metal spheres would kill to master.
Of course, blending dissonance with moments of shining clarity isn’t totally new, but the way Defacement weaves their elements together feels uniquely effective here. Take the first main track, “Burden”. The band leads off by taking several minutes bludgeoning listeners with brutal death metal riffs, more blackened clashing chords, and Ulcerate-esque gnarls of atmospheric chords. Suddenly, out of the tumult, one of the guitarists launches into a melodic solo that sounds like it could have come from a Fallujah song. An odd calmness settles in for a moment, like the eye of a hurricane, before the band returns to the sickly atmosphere that preceded it. The song continues along as a brutal whirlwind beyond that, bringing riff after riff with shifting pace, bouncing the needle back and forth between the frenetic black metal and groovier death metal poles with a couple shades of doom tossed in for good measure.
All the main tracks on the album come across this way to varying degrees, and yet none of them feel interchangeable. Defacement‘s loose, jazzy approach to composition makes for tracks that flow organically from thought to thought, and every one of them manages a broad emotional spectrum for their style. “Barrier” is probably the most furious song of the bunch, barreling along at a breakneck pace over blasting drums and riffs that split the difference between Portal and Morbid Angel for most of its (relatively) short runtime, sans a post-rock inflected slowdown around halfway through.
Further in, “Scabulous” leans more on the black metal side of things with higher tremolo riffs and a cascade of clanging notes that would do Thantifaxath or Dodecahedron proud, with a deviation into more consonant progressions later that reminded me of a lot of shoegaze in some indefinable way. Also noteworthy are intro and interstitial tracks, all with face-related names! They’re interesting diversions into quirkier synthesizer experimentation that manage to maintain the thickly claustrophobic atmosphere while giving listeners some breathing room between all the metal songs. They effectively assure that the album doesn’t ever feel too overwhelming, and even if they’re never a highlight, they don’t rob the album of any momentum or cohesive mood the way this approach has for me in the past.
And then there’s that glorious title track. The song “Duality” is an absolute monolith, synthesizing everything great about the album into a final 16-minute opus. The black and death riffs fight for dominance across shifting tempos while the drums thunder along like the most violent of storms. Multiple guitar solos spill forth chaotically, until a sudden shift into a prettier tremolo lead heralds an unexpectedly gorgeous final quarter. The guitars take on a cleaner, resonant tone and ring out moving progressions over radiant, moving choral synth pads at a more languid pace backed by emotive solos, ending the album with the kind of haunting beauty one would expect more from the most bittersweet death/doom. Even at its titanic length, the song almost feels like it passes by in no time and could even run longer without outstaying its welcome. It’s astounding, even after the excellence of the whole album prior, and leaves Duality off on a note that will stick with listeners long after the ending drone cuts off. Borderline perfection, and the band deserve to be especially proud of their work on “Duality”.
Of course, the performances on the album are unimpeachable across the board. Guitarists Khalil Azagthoth and Tadzio conjure up an absolute maelstrom of riffs, and the solos are always gripping be they wild atonal shredding or more paced out, melodic leads. The drumming, courtesy of Mark Bestia, is an absolute masterclass throughout. His blasts are intense and precise, while the slower moments benefit enormously from his loose jazziness in a way that easily recalls greats such as Imperial Triumphant, or indeed, Ulcerate once more. Regrettably, Forsaken Ahmed’s bass is sometimes a little lost in the mix, but the moments where he cuts through the mix are roundly rock solid. His vocals, by comparison, are ever present, oppressive, and often extremely deep. I will admit, even after 15 years as an extreme metal fanboy, my first sample of the album via the title track’s single release had me wondering if I was hearing a human voice or some sort of subterranean ambient drone for several minutes. Embarrassing amateur mistake, but eh, I’ll blame it on car speakers! Add to this a dense but easily decipherable production that easily outstrips its murky predecessor (the album just sounds massive) and that awesome cover art, and Defacement has crafted an album that is just awesome in every regard.
I’m not totally certain if I’m ready to call Duality the best metal album I’ve heard in 2024 so far just yet. There have been some amazing albums so far, many of which I need to revisit. And it only seems like things will heat up further as the back half of the year sets in. But what I can definitely say is that Defacement has created a new monolith in dissonant extreme metal that I will not stop listening to anytime soon. As exhausting as this specific subgenre can be, I just am not getting tired of listening to this album, and it stands boldly alongside the new works from Ulcerate and Ceremony of Silence in bringing me firmly back into the dissonant metal fold. Leaning hard on the promise inherent in its name, Duality is both crushingly heavy and chill-inducingly beautiful in varying measures. Often oppressively dark, sometimes radiantly beautiful, but always expertly crafted, it’s well worth many, many spins from any seasoned metalhead.
