Blood Incantation's Timewave Zero is a death metal album without the death metal

Blood Incantation’s Timewave Zero is arguably the most anticipated death metal record of 2022. It’s also not a death metal record at all. There are no roars, no drums, very few guitars. There are a lot of synthesizers. There might be a zither. This is ambient music in the long-ago sense, the pre-Brian-Eno sense, the spaced-way-out sense: “a planetarium soundtrack,” as singer and guitarist Paul Riedl recently called it.

For longtime fans, this shouldn’t be terribly surprising. Blood Incantation’s deep interest in texture and extramusical sound, along with its knack for weaving generous amounts of grainy space into their all-out assaults, is what made 2016’s Starspawn and 2019’s Hidden History of the Human Race so transcendent. And like its predecessors, Timewave Zero is interested in rocketing us up into a cold and alienating cosmos. Rather than explore new ways of moving through zero gravity, though, the EP dutifully sends the listener down a carefully guided path that, while pleasingly inhospitable and frequently sublime in its own right, hints at much greater mysteries in the distance.

Thankfully, there’s still plenty to see on this expertly manicured ride. Both of Timewave Zero’s tracks—each of which is 20 minutes long and split into four movements—emerge from the black, slowly revealing the rotating objects at their center. A patiently arpeggiating figure is the focus of “Ea,” winding and unwinding in fuzzy tones while a pair of synths placed on either side illuminate it like spotlights rolling over a labyrinth; a menacing red glow grows and recedes in “Io.” Where Hidden History’s spree of riffing suggested infinite possibilities while confining the listener to the present, here the soundstage is tightly controlled. Tones lurk and moan, they peek around corners, curlicues of sound venturing off into the distant ether to die. In “Ea”’s final movement, the central melody seems to fade from perception, but its shape is still somehow implied in the music, its faint outline barely visible as a synth blots out all but the song’s three lolling chords. Nearly every moment here is rich in its own right.

The album is named after a theory developed by Terence McKenna, the writer perhaps best known for suggesting that humankind evolved from apes who became conscious after eating psychedelic mushrooms. Very briefly put, McKenna argued that a “strange attractor” was leading us to the end of human history—timewave zero—and true to form, both songs feel pulled along by a dark inevitability. But that sense of cautious plotting, the way “Io” and “Ea” follow the classic narrative arc—establish atmosphere, develop conflict, rise to a peak, slide into a cooling denouement—saps them of potential. Independent of one another, “Io” and “Ea” are for the most part well-constructed. Placed side by side, they become predictable.

Blood Incantation isn’t the first cosmically minded death metal band to make ambient music. And while Timewave Zero is less ambitious in scale than, say, Wolves In The Throne Room’s Celestite, it’s far more ambitious in its commitment to itself as an album in the lineage of records by Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream. That self-consciousness is what makes these songs work; the attention to detail and refusal to indulge any obvious death metal tropes allows Blood Incantation to demonstrate its mastery of atmosphere and highlights the subtlety of touch whose presence can be missed on earlier records. If the band was trying to make something that feels like Blood Incantation without sounding like Blood Incantation, it’s succeeded.

But plenty of experimental ambient artists have learned how to build a sense of surprise and 3D motion into their music without abandoning the genre’s principals; for a band who made their name compressing death metal into fractals to offer up such easy symmetry is a disappointment. By setting the album down on rails and allowing it to click along in such a conventional way, Blood Incantation removes any real element of danger or spontaneity; the end is always visible on the horizon. Even Disneyland knows to run Space Mountain in the dark so you can’t see the track in front of you.