Review by Greg on June 15, 2025.

In a world where promo kits uncannily exaggerate many a band's talents, which are usually nowhere to be found in the music, and in an age where said blurbs are usually written via the ever-loathed (by yours truly) AI, resulting in me being more and more desensitized to the copy-pasted, vacuous words of adulation for every next mediocre act, something hit me the moment I stumbled into Nuclear Tomb, and saw them advertising themselves simply as 'weirdo thrash stalwarts'. I'm one to appreciate modesty and conciseness, and sometimes less is really more... especially when accompanied by some killer music.

Yeah, I didn't create a lot of suspense for that, but neither did the band, admittedly, offering a bit more than half an hour of music and a goddamn ferocious opener in charge of introducing their debut LP Terror Labyrinthian, out last year. As soon as 'Obsoletion' kicks in, indeed, you're teleported into that wonderfully unsettling post-apocalyptic world portrayed in the artwork, to the sound of hateful, nihilistic, and kinda technical death/thrash. Not that the following title-track, or any other track for that matter, is any more forgiving – there's nary a moment to catch a breath, between thrashers in essence ('Vile Humanity'), although still filtered and distorted through a myriad of twists and turns, and deeper cuts that go far down the death metal path. 'Manufacturing Consent' is a part of the latter field worth mentioning, as it adds a bunch of alien riffing and stop-start textures that were almost perfected by Quebecois tech-death fellows Dissimulator some months earlier on their awesome debut Lower Form Resistance – needless to say, it's a win, probably the album's best episode, and surely a match made in heaven with the subsequent, and even more agonizing, Sadus-esque speedster 'Parasitic (Live A Lie)'. There are a couple of slight curveballs, like 'Dominance & Persecution' being really a mere minute of devastation bookended by two equally disturbing clean(ish) sections, and the creepy, hopeless march of 'Born Into Torment', that surprised me due to its placement at a point where I was convinced they were incapable of slowing down, but Nuclear Tomb showcase a superb coherence throughout all this, one that would be more suited to a veteran band (although, yeah, they've been around for a while).

Of course, the novelty of an emerging band debuting with a great production has somewhat worn off in 2024, yet on Terror Labyrinthian it manages to deserve its own paragraph, sounding like the spiritual successor to Hypnosia's Extreme Hatred (which we all know is where metal production peaked, right?), with delicious, incredibly metal drums, guitars that sound made of molten lava... and what about the bass? You'll hear it, and feel it lurk behind you, as if Amelia Morris were playing in your room, regardless of whatever device you're using to listen. I sometimes feel the need for just a few more things to remember – naturally, Michael Brown menacingly yelling 'YOU ARE OBSOLETE' is forever etched into my memory as a useful monition for my futile existence, and that's precisely why more of it would have been awesome.

Just a venial sin, though. I absolutely love Terror Labyrinthian's omnipresent rotten, dystopic feel of impending calamity that puts you in a state of constant distress for its whole duration, and I probably can't emphasize it enough. Among last year's most shining stars.

Rating: 8.7 out of 10