Entheos - Dark Future album review

If Entheos’s debut album, The Infinite Nothing, suggested they were poised to morph from a promising project into tech metal titans, Dark Future confirms it. The American four-piece certainly have the required riff chops, but they’re now demanding much more from themselves. Ablaze with crushing grooves, chugging blastbeats and intricate polyrhythms, both The World Without Us and Melancholia hurtle towards you at 200mph. That said, these feral moments are interspersed with swathes of ambient elegance alongside haunting electronics, as on Resonance, providing cerebral escapism. The exploratory movements of Black Static (I) and the prog-tinged White Noise (II) confound and combust eardrums in equal measure. Meanwhile, the distorted vocal rasps, monstrous hooks and mechanised gut-punches of Suspended Animation and Sunshift (II) make it abundantly clear that the future is anything but dark for this quartet.