Review: Rintrah – The Torrid Clime

Style: avant-garde metal, progressive metal, chamber music, progressive rock, Romanticism (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Rush, Mertz, Liturgy
Country: California, United States
Release date: 1 August 2025

What makes metal metal? Indubitably, it’s some blend of attitude, riffs, lyrical themes, instrumentation, and “heaviness” (that last one is to say, you know it when you hear it). Until 2020, I would have thrown in distortion to the list of essential characteristics, but Kaatayra’s Só Quem Viu o Relâmpago à sua Direita Sabe, currently still my album of the decade, changed that as a fully acoustic yet recognizably black metal album. New avant-garde metal band Rintrah push my conceptions of metal even further, abandoning even the harsh vocals of Só Quem. That’s right, The Torrid Clime is classical acoustic guitar, drumming, and reedy, belted clean vocals. So what makes Rintrah metal? 

Their unabashed veneration for the Romantics. I mean, ask anybody; Romantic poetry is hella metal. But seriously, since metal’s earliest days, its practitioners have been neoromantics, intentionally or not. The genre’s acolytes are obsessed with individuality and freedom of expression, an idealization of the past and the exotic (through incorporations of folk music, for example¹), and, above all, a singular desire to attain the sublime. Metal mainstays—crushing heaviness, screamed and growled vocals, blast beats, crazy displays of guitar wizardry, singing of gore and nihilism—all act to make you, the listener, feel small compared to the display of sonic power. As eminent Romantic philosopher Edmund Burke said: “Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”² Like Romanticism, metal is, at its heart, a rebellion: against the shackles of a boring life, from the very start in the industrial hellscape of Manchester. It’s designed to make you feel something profound, with heaviness as its modus operandi.

Simply put, metal is obviously Romantic, and Rintrah fully embodies the philosophy more explicitly than any other band I’ve ever heard, so those dulcet acoustic guitars and blast beats are more than enough to be metal to the philosophical core. Rintrah’s Romantic aesthetic is, in a word, audacious. Adorning the album cover of The Torrid Clime’s is the 1818 painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, a work which is literally first on Wikipedia if you search “Romantic art.” The lyrics across Rintrah’s debut record are pulled from various Romantic poets—William Blake, Percy Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Lord Byron, Charles Baudelaire, and Charlotte Smith.³ There is even a Mertz piece, “Nocturne, Op. 4, No. 2,” on the record fitted in as a mid-album interlude. 

So yeah, The Torrid Clime is pretty damn metal, although musically it’s a far cry from what I’d expect. There are no grandiose orchestrations here à la Mahler, Mendelssohn, or Dvorak. Classical guitarist Justin Collins manages to make his instrument sound like a harp, while Arsenio Santos on bass (Howling Sycamore) gives The Torrid Clime a Rush-like rhythmic edge. The vocals provided by Otrebor (Botanist) and William DuPlain (ex-Botanist) are also Rush-y, powerful, nasal-y tenors; like Geddy Lee, I could see Otrebor and DuPlain’s vocals being a sticking point for listeners. Yet their delivery of the various poems is admirable, with drama, bombast, and spot-on cadence. It’s quite the bardic performance, in fact, and one could easily imagine one of the vocalists with the charmingly strummed guitar lines traveling city to city performing their poetry.⁴ The guitar tones are succulent with plenty of technical embellishment, keeping the music quite harmonically complex. During the faster moments, like those in “Ozymandias” and “On the Giddy Brink,” I even hear strong hints of Kaatayra with the rhythmic intricacy of the guitar parts—not to mention the wonky rhythms of tracks like “The Chariot.” The compositions are also full of masterful transitions which perfectly underscore thematic shifts in the text, such as the transition between the main riff and the softer, richer one in “Fearful Symmetry.” 

For much of The Torrid Clime, the frantic blast beats are in wonderful juxtaposition with the calmer classical guitar and breathily belted vocals, but at times Otrebor’s drumming becomes completely detached from the plot as Collin’s guitar and Santos’ bass fall out of rhythmic contact with him—the vocalists are off doing their own thing in the stratosphere most of the time, regardless. Rintrah’s unique combination of sounds works in its favor until their delicate synergy becomes unraveled. Thankfully, for most of the tracks on The Torrid Clime, Rintrah stay in their lane, letting those euphonious guitar lines, thumping bass, unique vocals, and blast beats all interact with surprising cohesion. The tracks that change up Rintrah’s characteristic sound are also strong points on the record: instrumental “Nocturne, Op. 4, No. 2,” blast-less slow track “Mutability,” and a cappella finale “Into an Echo.” Even within the band’s focused sound, one can never know what to expect. 

The Torrid Clime is a unique album driven by guitars that sound like harps and charismatic vocalists who could travel town to town in some idyllic reimagining of the past. Fraught with gentle tension and unruly percussion, The Torrid Clime doesn’t induce the sublime as obviously as in lots of metal but rather in a wholly unexpected way; as I kept returning to the album, it revealed itself to me in the dramatic performance of the lyrics, in the percussive transitions between riffs, and in the complex, expansive chords. Rintrah is an intriguing project, undoubtedly not for every metalhead, but for those with an open mind and an appreciation for the philosophical, the sublime awaits.

Recommended tracks: Fearful Symmetry, On the Giddy Brink, In Tempests, Into an Echo
You may also like: Botanist, Forêt Endormie, Howling Sycamore, Kaatayra
Final verdict: 8/10

Related links: Bandcamp

Label: Fiadh Productions – Bandcamp | Facebook

Rintrah is:
– Justin Collins – guitar
– Otrebor – drums, backing and lead vocals
– William Duplain – lead and backing vocals
– Arsenio Santos – bass

1. The Romantics’ glorification of the past, promotion of shared heritage, and emphasis on extreme emotion all contributed greatly to the rise of nationalism. This is also how I believe NSBM became such a problem in the black metal world. Metal’s full embrace of the Romantics’ philosophy comes with its negatives, too. ↩︎
2.  From A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. ↩︎
3. Rintrah don’t even quote some of my favorite basic-bitch Romantic poets like Colerdige, Wordsworth, and Keats. Definitely look into all of these Romantic poets, though! ↩︎
4. The bard is a common Romantic motif in their exaltation of the past. ↩︎