Immolation: Resounding. Dark. Triumphant!

They may not have the notoriety of their contemporaries from the Tampa death metal scene, nor the genre-spawning stylings of the sudden explosion of talent from Stockholm, but there is no escaping the fact that IMMOLATION are death metal royalty. Theirs is a legacy of dissonant, obliterating death metal, sacrilegious splendour melding with some of the heaviest extreme metal to come from the USA’s north-east coast. And the New Yorkers are showing no signs of letting up on their intensity.

With a back-catalogue spanning over 30 years and some of the genre’s greatest classics – look no further than Dawn Of Possession for some of the most evil sounding death metal in the genre’s formative years – and a few modern gems – Majesty & Decay is undeniably one of the finest death metal albums of the 21st century – IMMOLATION have built a legacy on consistency. No real slumps in quality, no wild, sonic U-turns or forays into mainstream popularity, IMMOLATION have been brutally and unapologetically pure IMMOLATION for the better part of three decades. And now the Yonkers natives are back with their long awaited follow up to 2017’s Atonement, the monolithic Acts Of God.

“Atonement set the bar high for us, it was very unexpected when that album came out. I mean we were happy with the album, we knew it sounded good, we were happy with the songs but we just weren’t expecting as much of a positive reception that we got for that record. And was across the board from the press, from the fans. We’re always used to a little negativity in there, a little critiquing, but we had a lot of positive feedback on that one.” Reflects the ever-delightful IMMOLATION frontman, Ross Dolan on the Atonement cycle and the build-up to Acts Of God. “It was nice for a change to have that overwhelmingly positive vibe for that album cycle. Moving forward we knew what we wanted to tweak with Acts Of God, we knew we wanted the new record to be much darker, to be much more aggressive, more extreme in some ways than Atonement.”

Mission accomplished, and then some. Look, IMMOLATION are never going to release an album that could ever be described as light and breezy. But there was a bit of a polished touch to Atonement, a hint of – and whisper this, lest the elitists hear – accessibility to their tenth record. Acts Of God is another beast, a more malevolent beast shrouded in pure rage and brutality.

“We used Atonement as a jumping off point for Acts of God. We knew what we wanted to address with Atonement, and we could make those changes with this new record. When it came to the production, we went into this knowing that we had a great sound for Atonement. Atonement was a great album, it was produced really well so we wanted something similar, but to refine it even more,” Dolan comments, reflecting on how pleased he and the rest of IMMOLATION are with the band’s evolution from Atonement. “I think Acts Of God sounds even better than Atonement in a lot of ways, it has a great vibe and really straddles that line of sounding great without being overproduced. It still has feeling to it, that rawness. It just has a really good vibe, we’re all really happy which is unusual, for us to come out all on the same page. So yeah, we did carry some stuff on from Atonement but more as a template for what we wanted and what we didn’t want to do.”

Though IMMOLATION have never been ones to rush themselves from album to album, with the five year gap between Atonement and Acts Of God, and the small matter of a global pandemic landing right in the middle, it should come as no surprise that the New Yorkers have had their eleventh bun of anti-religious dissonance in the proverbial oven for quite some time. And the relief from Dolanthat the record is finally seeing the dark of night is palpable.

“We’ve been listening to this album so critically for the last year and a half, we’ve been doing nothing but listening with a critical ear so it’s nice to be past that,” Dolan says, excited and relieved in equal parts. “Bob [Vigna, guitars] started writing this record back in 2018. We had about five songs finished by the time we finished the Atonement cycle in 2019 – by IMMOLATION standards that’s amazing! We usually book studio time and treat that as a deadline, but with Acts Of God it just wasn’t like that. Bob started writing, anticipating the end game back in 2018, because we had planned to record the record in 2020 originally. But then the world shut down! That allowed us more time to finish up that whole process, we had that pandemic time to fine tune everything and just absorb the songs. Bob set out to create something that was much darker, much more extreme, much more explosive than Atonement. We wanted an album that had a lot of feeling and a very haunting vibe, and I think he accomplished that.”

Though Dolan is keen to stress the point that Acts Of God isn’t a concept album, there are some unifying themes found throughout the record, themes that remain true to the very heart of what IMMOLATIONhas always been about as a band. Spoiler alert: they still absolutely detest religion.

“I think lyrically all of our records are dark in their own way regardless of whether we’re talking about religious institutions or just humanity in general and all the horrible things you see in the world. Acts Of God is no different. I think this album harkens back more to some of the early IMMOLATION releases, and what I mean by that is we touch more on the religious themes. But it is not a concept album!” Dolan muses. “We’re all over the map and each song is very specific to an idea. We didn’t want to write a pandemic record but that being said, I think there was a lot of inspiration from the craziness of our world during the last couple of years. We also came back to some of the same ideas we’ve touched on in the past because they’re still issues, there’s still big problems that we see specifically within the church and institutionalised religion. We see the same patterns, the same things repeating, the same horrible stories, just we’re reading them now instead of 20 years ago. Acts Of God is definitely an extremely dark record lyrically because we’re talking about the reality of our world, our species with its insatiable quest for power and wealth.”

IMMOLATION aren’t going to transcend extreme metal as we know it with Acts Of God – it’s not a record that’s going to catapult them to playing the Superbowl’s halftime show, nor convert legions of uninitiated into the hallowed halls of extreme metal. What it is, though, is another example of the blindingly good consistency Dolan and Vigna have developed over the last 30 years, never wavering in their quest to burn down the church in a wave of punishingly good death metal. Long may they reign.

Acts Of God is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.

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