Morast - Fentanyl

Angry Metal Guy 70

I knew absolutely nothing of German blackened death-doom act Morast, but the promo description intrigued me and made me want to seize the means of review for their third album, Fentanyl. What I got for my troubles was the experience of being smashed into bloody jelly while simultaneously being suffocated by unspeakable evil and darkness. Fentanyl is a nihilistic nightmare of an album, crushingly heavy, unrelenting, and overloaded with oppressive atmospheres and existential dread. As caustic as the name implies, this hellish, dissonant soundscape borrows from acts like The Ruins of Beverast, Ulcerate, and vintage Behemoth, but it’s a unique monstrosity that wants to hurt you badly.

Opener “Of Furor and Ecstacy” wastes no time burning down your comfort zone with crawling, slithering abominations of sound as riffs lurch and ooze all over you before they start cracking bones to get at the marrow within. Ex-Nagelfar vocalist Zingultus roars and cackles insanely like someone possessed by a demonic entity, and his crazed, unsettling verbalizations recall Attila Csihar’s work on De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. The riffs from J. Slug are insanely raw, crushing, and dissonant, scouring and abrading your nerve endings even as they piledriver you into the muddy earth. This is the sound of the comfortable world around you coming apart at the seams. “Aratron” continues to hammer at your sanity with massively inexorable riffs that pulverize all before them. If a song could break the heaviness scale, this is it. You need to hear this to appreciate just how monolithic it feels. Little bits of bleak post-y term work eventually leak in to add grim adornments and darken the mood as Zingultus uses deep, baritone cleans to impart an unnerving ritualistic vibe to the horror show. It’s all done so well that it becomes unnaturally gripping and inescapable.

Over the short but uniformly savage 34-minute runtime, Fentanyl delivers one sadistic beatdown after another. There’s a certain one-note flavor to the torture parade but within the meatgrinder, you’ll encounter a subtle variety of blades. “Walls Come Closer” is less dizzyingly chaotic, focusing on a grinding doom plod with vaguely melodic lines floating outside the abrasive riffs. “A Thousand and More” adopts the same formula but ratchets everything up for a grand flattening of reality via ginormous riffs and twisted vocals. Colossal closer “On Pyre” primes the pump with droning, disso leads, and sprinkles Behemoth-esque bits of grandiose bombast throughout its nearly 8-minute slog. It’s a wild ride but it could stand some trimming as things get a touch monotonous towards the end. Bloat exists on other cuts as well, but here it’s the most noticeable. The relative brevity of the album is a blessing, as much more of this kind of material would truly be too much to bear. The production is dense, oppressive, and suffocating, creating a genuine sense of claustrophobia. Unfortunately, there are weird glitches in the sound at times where the volume drops abruptly before eventually resetting. I’m hoping it’s a promo issue rather than an album problem because that would be a shame.

The fiends behind Fentanyl are well-traveled vets with lots of time in the trenches. J. Slug’s riffs and “harmonies” are the reason the album delivers such a massive impact. The man creates absolute horrors on his fretboard, triggering real feelings of anxiety, dread, and terror. Adding to the discomfort, Zingultus goes all in vocally, blending black and death tropes to destabilize the mind. He often sounds deranged and fanatical, lending the material an extra sense of volatility. Some of his lines sound pathologically insane, and he even verges on vomiting sounds on a few occasions during this vocal tour de force. Leonardo Bardelle absolutely smashes his kit into assdust but offers rare moments of calm restraint that make the harder moments all the more shocking and disruptive. A great performance by all involved.

Fentanyl is not an album to relax with on a quiet winter evening or to nod along to on your daily commute. This is the sound of a descent into Hell. You will be tested, tortured, and terrorized in equal measure. I got a lot more than I bargained for on this one, and Morast left a deep impression on my brain stem. Fentanyl falls just shy of greatness, but you should schedule a time to be brutalized by this thing ASAP. You know you deserve it for that awful thing you did.



Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Ván Records
Websites: facebook.com/officialmorast | instagram.com/morast_doom
Releases Worldwide: February 7th, 2025

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