Echoes Of The Devil's Den

Album review

Terminal Nation has seen a remarkable glow-up throughout their 10-year history. The Little Rock, Arkansas, group began as a politically savvy yet musically uninspiring hardcore troupe, and then pivoted to a faster, though still middling, grindcore sound on 2017's cruddily-recorded Absolute Control. For 2020's Holocene Extinction, Terminal Nation's sound took on a few metric tons of weight, as the band refashioned their output into a relentlessly powerful churn of spitfire death-metal and skull-cracking hardcore. Their 2022 split with Japanese doom-core maestros Kruelty was even heavier, and Echoes of the Devil's Den, their second LP for extreme-metal clubhouse 20 Buck Spin, once again ups their sonic heft.

Lead single "Written By the Victor" is a vicious onslaught of HM-2-addled riffage and pile-driving double-kick grooves, imagining a world where Entombed were raised on classic Victory Records hardcore. It's made even gnarlier by the presence of Nails frontman Todd Jones, one of several guest vocalists—of Killswitch Engage, Integrity, Elysia and more—who turn the album into a hellish carousel of Terminal Nation's eclectic influences. The sonic ferocity rarely lets up, but the sobering weight of Terminal Nation's lyrics might be the heaviest part of Echoes of the Devil's Den.

Eschewing extreme-metal cliches about guts and gore, the band instead address real world political issues with an apocalyptic urgency. "The Spikes Under the Bridge" might be the first death metal song to include the phrase "hostile architecture," as the band promise to drive a spike through the pupils of people who think homelessness is an eyesore rather than a humanitarian crisis. "No Reform" expresses no mercy for police officers who murder children in the line of duty, and "Merchants of Bloodshed" is like a Chris Hedges lecture on the military industrial complex that you can mosh to. Like many of the best metal and hardcore bands before them, Terminal Nation recognizes that reality is more horrific than fantasy, and Echoes of the Devil's Den effectively soundtracks a civilization on the brink of a harrowing transformation. © Eli Enis/Qobuz