Review by Felix on November 1, 2026.

After a promising start with “Upon Promethean Shores”, Hecate Enthroned released “The Slaughter of Innocence, a Requiem for the Mighty”. I hoped they would present themselves on the next tier, but what the hell... the opposite became real. Their full-length debut suffers from different wounds, and the biggest one is the songwriting. No, I don’t say that everything goes wrong. But let's be honest, how many songs keep sticking in the ear? Of course, the band tries to impress with a complex approach. Nevertheless, the combination of speedy, partly ill-defined sections that leave no trace and calm intermezzos that fail to add depth is very problematic. Perhaps I am stupid, but I do not really understand what the material wants to tell me.

In terms of the sound, we are confronted with two further problems. On the one hand, the production gives the keyboards a lot of room, almost too much for a metal album from my point of view. Sometimes the guitars, usually the biggest player on a metal output, are at risk of being torn between the drums and the keyboards. Speaking of the drums, I have to be more precise. Their only component seems to be the comparatively powerless snare, while the bass drum, cymbals, and so on are obviously of minor importance. On the other hand, the vocals sound anything else but natural. Maybe this is no shortcoming per se, but in a difficult situation, this feature becomes pretty annoying. And even more annoying: even the rarely appearing clean or totally demonic vocals do not work.

Anyway, as said before, the main mistake is the incoherence of the tracks. Even if they start in a cool way (“Beneath a December Twilight”), they are overloaded with breaks. Probably they should show the great artistic variety of the band, but a song should still be a song and no almost egocentric demonstration of musical variety. The dudes break down under the pressure to show in each and every song their orchestral bombast. I would not have missed the piano in “Aflame at the Halls of Blasphemy”, to give but one example. Naturally, it is okay that a band's DNA holds an affinity for pompous design, even though this was not the initial intention of the inventors of metal. But everything falls down without strongly reverberating guitar lines or riffs.

All this results in the sad fact that the entire album lacks atmosphere and does not trigger (m)any emotions in me. I start listening, the music begins, and after a pretty long time of non-exciting sounds, it ends. A little question from my side: was there something? For sure, and it is a tragedy for a few good or at least solid parts one can find in more or less all tracks. But this is not the kind of tragedy the band wanted to convey with “The Slaughter of Innocence…”. A good artwork alone does not make things better, that’s for sure. Fortunately, the following “Dark Requiem… and Unsilent Massacres” catapulted Hecate Enthroned back to a higher level. So let’s say it politely: I guess the ambitions for the first full-length were simply too high. Shit happens.

Rating: 4.9 out of 10