Style: Death metal (harsh vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Decapitated, Behemoth, Mgła, Ulcerate
Country: Poland
Release date: 18 April 2025
More than just about anything in music, I love a well-paced, dynamic album with seamless shifts across tempos and textures—moving fluidly between crushing and gentle, intense and restrained, dark and light. I consistently reach for the type of album that feels like a journey, a vast sonic landscape to explore at one’s own pace, taking the time to soak in its many different layers. When the record ends, there’s a feeling of fulfillment, like you’ve traversed a full range of winding valleys and jagged ridges and safely reached your destination.
With the aptly named Tooth and Nail, Dormant Ordeal offer the exact opposite: an absolutely relentless, inescapable barrage of blackened death metal. This isn’t a jaunt through an inviting aural panorama; you’re cowering in your bunker as everything around you is obliterated. Each time you try to move from cover, another wave of ruthless artillery blasts sends you back to shelter. Tooth and Nail isn’t a wondrous adventure, it’s an oppressive onslaught. So why, then, do I enjoy this album so damn much?
Dormant Ordeal have wrought a distinguishable brand of death metal that draws from several styles and fully adopts none. Their riffs have technical flair but eschew the fretboard heroics typical of tech death; dissonance is wielded with a light touch, accenting but not defining the band’s sound; and melody is a commodity to be rationed for the moments that require it. The music is pummeling, not unlike Decapitated, and a blackened edge cuts through all of Tooth and Nail, bringing aspects of Mgła and even middle-era Behemoth to mind—clearly, Dormant Ordeal fit well in the Polish extreme-metal scene. What separates Tooth and Nail is how punishingly visceral it is.
The guitars of Maciej Nieścioruk drill right into your chest cavity and violently rip you apart. Maciej Proficz’s gruff yet articulate growls then speak venom into your exposed soul. Seriously, any time the riffs in “Halo of Bones” or “Dust Crown” batter that lowest string, I feel it. The speckless production retains a vicious bite, allowing each instrument to wage war on your ears with poised brutality. The down-tuned, overdriven bass rumbles the bones, and session drummer Chason Westmoreland’s inhuman performance bludgeons and shines in equal measure. All this, combined with some subtle ambient touches, makes Tooth and Nail one of the most sonically addicting albums I’ve heard.
Fortunately, the album doesn’t just sound excellent—it has the songwriting and performances to match. Subtle shifts in rhythm, well-placed touches of melody and dissonance, and vocals that are somehow both emotive and atonal give a thick atmosphere alongside the incessant assault. Always at full speed, standout track “Horse Eater” cycles tirelessly among blackened tremolos, somber melodic lines, and choppier technical riffing, all bathed in a slight dissonant haze. Westmoreland finds fresh rhythms to suit each part, while displaying incredible cymbal work that ranks up there with Mgła drummer Darkside. Flexing Dormant Ordeal’s keen sense of timing, “Orphans” holds one of Tooth and Nail’s best moments, delivering a perfectly placed and absurdly heavy mid-paced bridge after nearly three minutes of blasting. “Solvent” then provides compositional contrast, building tension as clean, reverberated guitars give way to repeated distorted riffs, whispered refrains accent Proficz’s growled declarations, and the drums favor the toms over sparse snare hits. But make no mistake, there’s no breathing room here. The instrumentation remains violent, and when the song opens up, the tension sustains rather than releases.
If one song showcases Dormant Ordeal’s ability to keep their death metal barrage engaging, it’s penultimate track “Everything That Isn’t Silence Is Trivial.” Following a rare bit of acoustic strumming, the band unleash their entire musical arsenal, keeping the tension and intensity high while coherently moving through about a dozen passages. To highlight a few, there are noisy siren-like tremolos backed by machine-gun drumming, an infectious bridge that builds into the album’s most impactful vocals, and an almost cathartic melodic outro that resolves with a final bout of blasting. When the track abruptly ends, there’s a notable feeling of exhaustion from this overwhelming show of force. Fittingly, a short, moody instrumental track (save a few whispered lines) with wailing guitars closes out the album, allowing you to come out of hiding and witness the destruction around you—a perfectly bleak ending.
Tooth and Nail isn’t the sort of album I typically connect with, yet I can’t stop coming back to it. Its relentlessness and constant tension might be fatiguing, and it could have ventured out to further sonic territories, but Dormant Ordeal turn these potential shortcomings into defining features—a concise salvo with the production to make the shots land. So grab your helmet, join me in my bunker, and brace for another assault. With the rate I’m returning to this album, there soon won’t be much left standing.
Recommended tracks: Horse Eater, Orphans, Solvent, Everything That Isn’t Silence Is Trivial
You may also like: Vitriol, Hath, Replacire, Slugdge, Sulphur Aeon
Final verdict: 8/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives
Label: Willowtip Records – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website
Dormant Ordeal is:
– Maciej Proficz (vocals)
– Maciej Nieścioruk (guitars, bass)
With guests:
– Chason Westmoreland (drums)
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