ALBUM REVIEW: The Abyssal Plain – Dryad
Hailing from Iowa, DRYAD are an incredibly impressive outfit that have quickly risen to prominence within the US black metal underground, with their intriguing blend of chaotic black metal with underlying symphonic elements giving the trio a sound quite unlike many of their contemporaries. Coming from a state where extreme metal acts are relatively thin on the ground, the band have still managed to garner wider attention with their eponymous 2017 EP and 2018’s The Silurian Age, along with their split with blackened thrashers ACID LEATHER in 2019. The band’s debut album The Abyssal Plain takes their tried and tested sound to new heights and an even wider audience, and it stands as easily their best work to date.
After the short but deeply atmospheric Counterillumination, with its haunting, sombre and minimalistic sound, the album proper begins with Bottomfeeder. It’s a belligerent piece of black metal with caustic guitars, energetic drumming and a brilliant contrast between the ethereal shrieks and impenetrable gutturals which only adds further, along with the murky production, to the claustrophobic feel of this track. Brine Pool Aberration possesses a chunkier guitar sound, but is nonetheless feral in its approach. It couples hooks and acidic, soaring vocals with dense freneticism for a great punk/black metal hybrid that sounds impressive.
Trenches, being more mid-paced and expansive in its sound, allows the band to play up the underlying grandiosity that was evident in the first two tracks, with the relatively measured moments and a shift towards more melodic guitars turning this into a punchier, but still rabid, take on black metal. Loki’s Castle follows in a similar vein to the preceding song, albeit with brief bursts of cacophony, making this fleeting piece of music incredibly effective. The similarly short Hadal is, stylistically, a complete departure from what it immediately follows, being an instrumental dungeon synth piece that has more in common with the album’s opener and acts as a great interlude between the record’s two halves.
Pompeii Worm sees the band utilise cleaner guitar tones and a more polished mix, with the eerie opening passage being thoroughly bleak but progressive, before shifting back to the intense and raw sound that has become familiar at this point. There is, perhaps more so than on earlier efforts, a shift towards melodicism, making for a song that is as catchy as it is visceral. Chimera Monstrosa, another grand, synth-driven track, blends the subtle symphonic elements that appear on this album with the coarser black metal sound more fully, and it’s a shame that this song is as short as it is because it works extremely well. The Abyssal Plain, with its crisp, almost gothic leads and cavernous rhythms, quickly lurches from the hypnotic sound that it starts on to a blisteringly bestial slab of black metal with arid, howling vocals, biting guitars and tight drumming. It rarely eases up as it gathers momentum, making this one of the most ferocious offerings on the record.
Black Smoke, with its authoritative beat and muscular guitars, is another track that blends punk with black metal with excellent results, capturing a primal intensity and a confident groove for a punchy piece of music. Raptures Of The Deep sees the synths return, adding an ominous and foreboding feel to act as yet another short but extremely powerful instrumental break from the rest of the album. Eutrophication initially is a musical continuation of Raptures, before launching into more beguiling symphonic black metal territory. The rawness of the mix on the guitars, vocals and drums serves as a fantastic counterpoint to the domineering keys that carve through to the surface, making for an exciting preamble for the album’s closing track, Abyssobrotula (A Nagging Thought); built once again around the bombastic and dramatic synths, it’s a powerful and cinematic conclusion to the record that brings things to a head magnificently.
Listening to this album and comparing it with the band’s earliest work, notably their 2017 self-titled EP and 2018’s The Silurian Age, it’s clear that DRYAD already possessed the song-writing ability and musicianship to make any full-length they produced impressive, and it’s impressive just how many of the core elements of the band’s early sound have been retained and carried forward to The Abyssal Plain, with what little fat there was from those early days being trimmed away and leaving only the leanest parts intact. Although there is definitely a marked step up in terms of production, allowing some of the more subtle components of the band’s sound to come to the fore, this music still has that brilliant, low-fi edge to it that lends to the atmosphere of the record without detracting from the obvious talent that the band undoubtedly has. This is a chaotic and confident slab of black metal from start to finish, and bodes well for the band’s creative future.
Rating: 8/10
The Abyssal Plain is set for release on January 20th via Prosthetic Records.
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