Album Review: DVNE, Voidkind
Voidkind is the third full-length from Edinburgh-based five-piece DVNE and their second to be issued with the historically-significant endorsement of Metal Blade Records behind 2021’s Etemen Ænka (review here) and sees the heavy, progressive metallers reaching for and attaining new levels of refinement in terms of craft. In intensity, melody, ambience and impact, Voidkind (cover art by Felix Abel Klae) weaves its 10 tracks together across nearly an hour’s runtime that is so clearly meant to be taken in its entirety and only benefits from having enough arrogance to demand the listener’s attention for its span despite earning it with the songs themselves.
And as to those songs. They are dynamic in tempo, volume, the arrangements of vocals from Daniel Barter (also guitar live), keyboardist Maxime Keller and guitarist/keyboardist Victor Vicart, and the hairpin rhythmic turns of bassist/guitarist Allan Paterson (Alexandros Keros also contributes bass on stage) and drummer Dudley Tait, the latter with a performance that could and probably should be a blueprint on how to accompany younger-Mastodon-style angular riffing without overplaying. Working with returning producer Graeme Young on the recording and mix (Robyn Dawson assisted engineering) and the also-returning Magnus Lindberg (Domkraft, Vokonis, Wren, countless others, plus his own band) for the master, the pieces that comprise Voidkind resonate with scope and narrative, and as deep as you want to dig into the references and vocabulary of the lyrics, DVNE will meet you there for lines like “Synesthetic submergence saturates the mind,” from “Abode of the Perfect Soul” or “The zephyrian scents of verbena” from “Eleonora” earlier as the band dig in following the more bombastic, willfully aggressive opener “Summa Blasphemia.”
Like the lyrics, the instrumental arrangements feel plotted, worked on, and thoughtful of the linear thread that brings the songs together and the intended flow across Voidkind as a whole. “Summa Blasphemia” takes about nine seconds for its surge to sweep in, but from that point on, DVNE‘s sense of control is complete in the turn that introduces the record’s first soaring, melodic, emotive vocals at about the one-minute mark so they can gradually come together in the apex with the harsher growls and screams that pervade amid all the ensuing crush, and in the way “Reliquary” moves from its solo section to the ambient break that begins its second-half build, in the subtle atmospheric flourish of interludes “Path of Dust” (led by guitar) and “Path of Ether” (more of a keyboard/synth drone) and how they surround “Sarmatæ” even on the 2LP edition of the album, giving that song’s memorable lines about casting tales and ribbons into fire space to breathe before the rush start of “Abode of the Perfect Soul” renews the onslaught en route to the closing pair of the lushly post-metallic “Plērōma” and the near-10-minute finale “Cobalt Sun Necropolis,” which feels like nothing so much as a next-generation’s nodding back as its last crescendo is blown out in a mode not dissimilar from Neurosis‘ “Stones From the Sky” at the finish.
There are arguments to be made for and against what seems from outside to be such a deeply cerebral take, but at more than 10 years’ remove from their debut EP, Progenitor (review here), DVNE know who they are in terms of sound, and Voidkind comes through as all the more sculpted and literary in its ambitions for their efforts, and as they stand in the center of the tumult in “Eleonora” or bring together the airier float of guitar on “Reaching for Telos” with layered vocal harmonies as yet another example of their growth as a unit, the complexity is a strength. They’re never lost in it. They never forget where they just came from or lose track of where they’re going, how it fits, or why. As a listener, Voidkind is exciting even on a first impression because of its charge, its aggro throb, its stops and starts and twists that toy with adrenaline and pull you deeper into the material, but the reason any of it works at all is the emergent mastery of songwriting DVNE have been chasing for the last decade-plus.
So is Voidkind an arrival moment? Sure, and you wouldn’t have been wrong to say the same of Etemen Ænka or 2017’s debut LP, Asheran, either. At the very least, it’s a landmark for them along their path of continued evolution, but I also can’t seem to get out of my head the notion of placing it in the broader sphere of metal. Part of that might just be that DVNE sound fresh in their ideas of what heavy sounds can convey, whether fast or slow, loud or quiet, dissonant, melodic, etc., but Voidkind only gets more difficult to categorize the more one hears it. With the level of consideration put in and the somewhat heady vibes throughout, it’s only fair to call it progressive despite how much it uses raw ferocity to make its case, and while it might owe a debt of influence to post-hardcore, post-metal, sludge, and doom, it’s not just any one of those things. Familiar in parts, but imaginative and distinguished in its point of view.
Metal, as a genre, has splintered since the dawn of the internet such that, if someone were describing a band as “metal,” it would tell you almost nothing about the character of what you’re hearing other than it’s probably loud and potentially unspeakably dumb. Is DVNE metal? Is Pantera? Tool? Five Finger Death Punch (who are the worst band I’ve ever seen and I will say so every time I mention them)? Korn? Black Sabbath? You can get debate for the rest of your life about what is or isn’t metal, musically or as a lifestyle, without even a coherent definition to work from, and given the emotional attachment of those in the subculture to it and a long-held mistrust when those from outside — i.e., the broader pop-cultural sphere — deign to acknowledge its existence, that’s not likely to change. So what is metal and what should it be? I promise you I have no idea and I wouldn’t be so pretentious as to make any declaration in that regard even if I did. But if DVNE were the shape of metal to come, I have a hard time seeing how metal could be anything but better for it.
DVNE, “Plerõma” official video
DVNE, Voidkind (2024)
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Tags: DVNE, DVNE Voidkind, Edinburgh, Metal Blade Records, UK, Voidkind
This was one of my most anticipated albums of the year and it is living up to expectation. Time to put it on again!