Intelligent, brutal, and economical death metal finds new highs with the sophomore effort from New York’s THÆTAS.
Release date: June 26, 2026 | Profound Lore | Facebook | Instagram | Bandcamp
Hi, it has been a while. I haven’t sat down to work on a review of an album for a long time. Today, that changes. There have been plenty of records of the last year that I have enjoyed thoroughly but I haven’t had the headspace to pull words together to explain how I felt about them, but THÆTAS and their infinite spiraling depths of wildly intelligent brutal death metal have stirred the senses and the desire to once again put pen to paper.
We have waited around six years for this band to follow up their impressive debut LP Shrines to Infinity, and after more than half a decade and a label switch we finally have new songs to mull over from this New York technical, dissonant, brutal death metal act. And yeah genre descriptors are more often than not just buzzword salad to pique interest, the reality is that THÆTAS have managed to put down the right combination of riffs, atmosphere, and intelligent songwriting to fit that bill. Pulling threads from different musical identities is by no means a new thing, however, it’s the balancing of these ideas that go further in defining a band’s sound these days and that is where this band and this album shines.
There are plenty of tricks an artist or band can employ to draw in their listeners. Sometimes it’s through subversion, and sometimes it’s through executing a familiar idea in a way so precise that it seems like they wrote the book on it. THÆTAS has a mix of these (and more) on The Irredeemable Age. If you hit play on this record expecting avant-garde jazzy metal riffs, you’ll find them. If you expect guttural vocals and insanely downtuned guitars, welp, guess what? That’s all over this thing, too. Slam riffs though? Absolutely, take a seat, they’ll be right with you. But even after all of that, you’ve still not heard a band quite like THÆTAS. Though The Irredeemable Age eases us in at the start with “DHUKHA” with some bass lines, great production – thanks to Colin Marston the literal GOAT – this record quickly swirls into a bespoke chimera of extreme metal that makes comparisons to Imperial Triumphant more readily than Suffocation. At least for now.
As one song moves to the next during my many listens to this record, what makes it so goddamn digestible is its economy. While there’s no direct comparison to grindcore here directly, these songs value density. With a runtime of just over thirty minutes, most of these songs hover around the three-minute mark and I’m actually wildly attracted to that. Handing the listener a song like “Summers of Hate” with the vocal lines lurching side to side, the percussive riffs amply the articulate drumming and before you know it, you’re on to the next song. I have listened to this album many, many times and it never gets old, and I think for a sound as dense and heavy as THÆTAS, that’s a really sweet spot in which to find yourself.
As we all probably know by now, extreme metal isn’t really about dynamics all that often or really shaking things up, it’s often more about variations on a theme. The same is mostly true for The Irredeemable Age, but hear me out – THÆTAS have variated the hell outta this theme. While the atmosphere is pretty damn consistent from the first note until the last, each song employs little moments or ideas that have made me say to myself, ‘Oh yeah, this is the one with the little jazzy drum bits‘, ‘This is the one with the cool echoing vocals’, or ‘The breakdown riffs in this one go hard’ and so on and so forth. I don’t know if it took the full five or so years since the last album to nail that or how intentional it is but it really helps this album feel like a faceted yet complete package. Jazzed-out technical brutal death metal would seldom be called ‘easy listening’ music but by god this album is easy to listen to, bravo THÆTAS. This music is so damn smart but it makes me want to act so damn dumb, and that’s my highest endorsement.
