Album Review: Distant - Heritage

Distant will be bringing us their third album, Heritage, on Friday 10th February. This dutch/slovak deathcore band offer us their unique, “low and slow” style, combining elements from brutal death metal, slam, noise and beatdown. Think deathcore, but heavier. Produced by Howard Fang (guitarist of Within Destruction), this 12-track album takes it’s influences from movies, anime and video games, such as Devil May Cry, Doom, Event Horizon and Predator.

Label: Century Media Records

FFO: Cabal, Fit For An Autopsy, Lorna Shore

The intro track Acid Rain is an industrial, atmospheric instrumental track which sets the tone for the rest of the album. The uneasy feeling it creates in the listener, is a running theme throughout the rest of the track list. And this feeling is quite literally ‘echoed’ in the album’s dissonant closing track Plaguebreeder, which features whispering vocals and a slow tempo.

The affore mentioned “low and slow” signature style of this band, is perfectly demonstrated in the track Human Scum, and showcases their ability to effectively switch tempos, vocal styles and create atmosphere with the clever use of samples.

The tracks Born of Blood and A Sentence to Suffer feature some very striking drum techniques, which immediately caught my attention. An interesting use of cymbals, alternative blast beats and extremely fast paced kick drum patterns.

When writing this album, Distant called upon their deathcore bretheren to contribute vocals to some of the tracks. The title track Heritage features the extreme vocal acrobatics of Will Ramos (Lorna Shore), which compliment Distant‘s vocalist Alan’s vocal style nicely. But the star of this album has to be the song Argent Justice, which features performances from no less than 15 other deathcore vocalists, inlcuding members from Crown Magnatar, Emmure, Cabal and Suicide Silence. The band describes it as “a bright, colourful rainbow of deathcore singers” and it truly is an intense, aggressive and powerful orchestra of deathcore – make sure you have a change of underwear at hand before listening to this one. (See the video below).

Distant have taken the core elements of deathcore and dragged them through the mud, after beating them to a pulp, to create a very commanding sound. Not only that, but they have apparently managed to devise a way of travelling to Hell and back, in order to get a demon to record the vocals for this album – very impressive indeed.

Rating: 8/10