Review: Anarchÿ - Sentïence - The Progressive Subway

Style: Thrash metal, Progressive metal (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Voivod, Coroner, Vektor
Review by: Francesco
Country: USA
Release date: 20 October, 2022

Anarchÿ comes out swinging with their full-length debut Sentïence. There is little and less to find fault with in this release and Anarchÿ outdo themselves at every turn. With a blurring of genre boundaries and blending of musical influences, this album steps outside of the oft-rigid structures of thrash and metal, and coupled with lyrical themes touching upon the human experience and other enigmatic subjects, the whole package becomes an engrossing and mystical listen.

One thing this album does really well is playing with its song lengths. The majority of Sentïence is contained in songs that vary in duration from the Napalm Death inspired, seconds-long “Ë”, to the more conventional 7-minute length of “The Greatest Curse” – and on the album, you’ll find various elements that include a quasi-baroque synthesized string piece, hand percussion, and a couple of short, instrumental shred tracks. But it is the 32-minute odyssey “The Spectrum of Human Emotion” that becomes the album’s highlight, comprising enough movements to make your head spin. The half-hour composition, a rock opera interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, is chock-full of twisting thrash metal riffs that accompany the song’s unconventional structure as it detours effortlessly into off-genre adventures, evolving into soft, finger-picked acoustic guitar passages; dissonant jazz chord resolutions; a cappella harsh vocal phrases; and even a cleanly sung denouement perhaps evocative of Bowie.

If there’s a downside to a release that incorporates this many moving parts, it’s only that it may not leave much room for expansion and elaboration. Clocking in at the nearly 1-hour mark, more than half the album plays out in their one epic, the aforementioned “The Spectrum”. What experimentation is present in that track is largely absent from the rest of the album outside of a snippet here and there, as in the classical piano outro of “The Greatest Curse”, or the brief rasgueado intro to “Waylaid”, but the rest of the track listing manages well to retain its progressive metal fashion with less genre-bending whimsy, opting instead for complex riffing and composition.

Anarchÿ shift frequently on this release from the more irregular and avant-garde to the straight-forward fast-tempo shred with as much influence from Megadeth as Vektor. Intense, exciting, and eccentric, Sentïence packs about as much into a thrash album as humanly possible. This is a must for any fan of technical, progressive thrash metal.

Recommended tracks: The Spectrum of Human Emotion, D.E.S.T.R.O.Y., The Greatest Curse
You may also like: Toxik, VENUS, Vorbid
Final verdict: 10/10