Label - Metal Blade Records
Release Date - 3rd May 2024
Words- Tony Bliss
When the gears finally began to turn again on the Daath machine in early 2023, those in the know would surely have been salivating into their beards at the prospect of the band's return. The fact that The Deceivers ends a thirteen-year drought of new music may give some cause for concern - can Daath still cut the mustard over a decade on? - however, mastermind Eyal Levi and his elite new cohorts (a revamped line-up featuring legendary blaster Krimh, no less) have clearly spent their time together forging the best possible version of themselves. They’ve thrown everything at these nine tunes and conjured up one of THE comeback records in recent heavy metal memory.
Indeed, The Deceivers takes everything great about its predecessors and injects a dose of both ultra-symphonic thunder and balls-to-the-wall confidence - make no mistake, this album rages from start to finish. Hyper-melodic anthems like ‘With Ill Desire’ and bruising, mid-paced head-boppers (‘The Silent Foray’, ‘Purified By Vengeance’) are flawlessly pieced together and heavier than ever, with that gleaming, mile-wide progressive streak audibly front and center and the band's tech-death credentials always jostling for the spotlight.
Of course, there is an absurd number of great riffs here, and for all the albums bells and whistles (and there’s a lot), everything is pitched with such class and songwriting panache that these cuts are never anything less than metal as all hell (flame throated frontman Sean Zatorsky makes sure of that, leading the charge like a guttural, end of level boss ) and teeming with virtuoso sophistication. Even looking beyond all this, it is the orchestral contributions of newbie Jesse Zuretti that really make the difference, his opulent, theatrical arrangements lending an almost Dimmu Borgir-like sense of drama (‘Unwelcome Return’) and a sort of grandiloquent, neoclassical depth that Daath have simply never been within touching distance of before.
Having said that, it is undoubtedly - and perhaps predictably - the exploits of a frankly ridiculous roll call of guest shredders that steals the show, with the likes of Per Nilsson and Jeff Loomis (amongst others) delivering some of this decade's most thrilling and spine-tingling lead breaks and bringing to mind some of the glorious six-string excess of our worlds heyday and - whisper it - the legendary likes of Rust In Peace or Heartwork. This thing really has god-tier chops aplenty.
There was always a sense in the early 00’s that Daath never really belonged - neither metalcore nor death metal enough to sit at either table. Not so in 2024. Matching and possibly outstripping the ambition of today’s most highly evolved tech-death maestros, The Deceivers is a wildly overblown and thoroughly modern piece of work that sits smugly in line with the very best that the contemporary metal scene has to offer. You need this album in your life.
9/10
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