- Country: USA
- Style: Death metal
- Label: Nuclear Blast
- Release date: 10 April 2026
Zack Ohren produced Descent, the twelfth Immolation album, and the first thing you notice is clarity. Bob Vigna’s riffs are famously knotted, all bent, dissonant intervals and sudden lurches, and on a muddy record they turn to sludge. Here every twisted chord shape is audible, the drums have punch without the plastic click that flattens so much modern death metal, and Ross Dolan’s low roar sits right in the centre rather than on top of everything.
Structurally it’s tighter than Acts Of God: ten songs in about 41 minutes, with little of the sprawl that crept into that record. The band have said they wanted to push the approach of their last couple of albums further while nodding to their earliest work, and you can hear both. The opener is a wall of blasts and dissonance, while the mid-tempo sections carry that heavy, slow-motion dread Immolation have owned since the ’90s.
If there’s a complaint, it’s that the band’s signature is so distinct that a few songs feel interchangeable on first listen. Give it three spins and the details separate out. Few death metal bands this far into their career still sound this dangerous.
Best tracks:
These Vengeful Winds
Adversary
Attrition
Bend Towards The Dark
Author’s rating: 8.5/10
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