Style: Dissonant Black Metal, Experimental Doom Metal (Harsh Vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Blut Aus Nord, Portal, Oranssi Pazuzu, Thou
Country: Czechia
Release date: 17 July 2026

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This summer’s airwaves have been dominated by power metal for me, and I’ve reviewed a slew of releases from that genre in the last couple months. I love exuberant choruses and fretboard frenetics, and who can blame me? But after a three-day road trip with my dad where the heaviest thing I could listen to was Dream Theater, I started growing increasingly restless with the dog day’s glut of melody. The long-running Czech dissonant black metal band Inferno’s ninth album, The Anthropic Sophisms (On the Heights of Despair), seems like the perfect palate cleanser. The album title alone guarantees all the pretentious avant-gardeness I’m suddenly craving again.

Inferno don’t follow any form of standard songwriting, letting the four beastly tracks of The Anthropic Sophisms function as evocative, atmospheric soundscapes. The cavernous production emphasizes the blaring strums of guitar—whose sliding parts are similar to the last few Blut Aus Nord albums—balancing a low end that rumbles from the abyss. Endless layers of claustrophobic sound, like Scarcity but less defined, crush from all sides, only getting more suffocating as the album goes on—it’s the pressurized fright of being lost in an underwater cave. The songs don’t offer much to grab onto, either, with only occasional riffs, instruments focusing on texture and the creation of unnervingly vast sounds: guitars like calving glaciers and foreboding cetacean songs. The harsh vocals are spectral whispers, barely audible and providing an air of mystique—what philosophical themes does vocalist Adramelech oracle here? Except for the industrial pulse of closer “Circulus Vitiosus Deus (The Infinity Ravages All),” Sheafraidh’s dynamic drumming—alternating between blast beats, Danny Carey-esque geometric grooves, and even traditional heavy metal patterns with focus on the crash cymbals—rarely contributes to forward momentum so much as collapse in on the listener from all sides, making the album feel singularly focused on the present moment.

At the midpoint of “Fission of the Soul,” a hint of stately orchestration cracks through the murky depths, reminiscent of Qrixkuor, like chrome-plating disintegrating to rust in a post-apocalyptic, mechanized world. Halfway into “Dekranos Katexochen (Mých smrtí je bezpočet, mých nemocí mnoho),”¹ a riff touches the sublime as a disconcerting doom section is imbued with melodic synth: a contrast like walking from a resonant, pitch-black chamber of a cavern into one filled with a menagerie of bioluminescent organisms, breathtakingly beautiful and eerie (something similar happens at the midpoint of “With Raving Mouths They Utter Things Mirthless, Unadorned and Unperfumed”).² The “Dekranos Katexochen” transitions into a blizzard of tremolos shortly thereafter, turning the avant-garde into the familiar chill of the second wave of black metal, before the track concludes with a terrifying, howling synth that evokes a man being flayed.

Inferno invoke a wide range of imagery, but The Anthropic Sophisms succeeds because of how impressively monolithic it is. Despite being a trim forty-one minutes, the record is massive and intentionally impenetrable; The Anthropic Sophisms is so texturally dense that one may never extract all the details from it—both the album’s greatest strength and flaw. But the small details that stand out from the colossal wall of suffocating sound make sitting with The Anthropic Sophisms worth it. For instance, at two-and-a-half minutes into “Circulus Vitiosus Deus (The Infinity Ravages All),” Inferno pen a fantastic transition scaling the fretboard in the midst of alien Blut Aus Nord-like sliding riffs; the switch from extended industrial ambient intro in “With Raving Mouths They Utter Things Mirthless, Unadorned and Unperfumed” to classic black metal is also impressive, shocking the system with the heaviest passage of the record from the most gelid. 

As the days begin to shorten, Inferno’s chilling avant-garde metal will continue to be the antidote to accessible music. The Anthropic Sophisms’s vast and unrelenting soundscapes can be at once immensely beautiful and wholly intimidating; its only shortfall is that it intentionally lacks the purposefulness of Scarcity or the distinct layers of Qrixkuor. The punishing, weighty production ensures that the record’s density will forever be slightly veiled, its layers tantalizingly just out of reach. Nonetheless, searching for the compositional minutiae in The Anthropic Sophisms is a rewarding challenge for those who have the patience.

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Recommended tracks: Fission of the Soul, Dekranos Katexochen (Mých smrtí je bezpočet, mých nemocí mnoho)
You may also like: Tchornobog, Abyssal, Cult of Fire, Nightbringer, Omega Infinity, Emptiness, Scarcity, Qrixkuor
Final verdict: 7.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram

Label: Debemur Morti Productions

Inferno is:
– Adramelech (vocals)
– Ska-Gul (guitars)
– Morion (guitars)
– Sheafraidh (drums)
– Matron Thorn (keyboards, vocals)

1. The parenthetical is translated from Czech as “My Deaths Are Countless, My Illnesses Many.” The first part of the title relates to ancient Greek. Katexochen means “in the purest sense” and Dekranos is a made up word formed out of Greek roots. ↩︎
2. God I love avant-garde metal song titles. ↩︎