Currently riding on a wave of acclaim and anticipation inspired by the brave and ignoble prescience of their 2013 album The Formulas Of Death, Tribulation are one of the hottest properties in the metal underground right now, and deservedly so.
As with each of their releases to date, The Children Of The Night takes the Swedes ever further away from their death metal roots, abandoning flagrant extremity in favour of a more straightforward, vintage hard rock sound, albeit one still driven by vocalist Johannes Andersson’s barbaric rasp.
On a superficial level, this could easily fall into the ‘Oh no, not another occult rock band!’ category, but while there are occasional similarities to, for instance, the last In Solitude album, Tribulation’s self-contained aesthetic looks to the addictive creepiness of old-school horror and the unnerving shadows cast by vexed spirituality in the modern age, all of which conspire to make these songs an expression of authentic torment, rather than anything more theatrical or nostalgic.
More importantly, perhaps, songs like In The Dreams Of The Dead deftly blend the primal oomph of dirty rock’n’roll with the jarring impact of early thrash, resulting in a profoundly satisfying ceremony of pitch-black rituals with startling commercial potential./o:p
