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Style over substance has never really been a concern for St. Petersburg’s Hate Eternal. Their latest take on brutal and pungent technical death metal focuses just as much on accomplished arrangements as it does on the songs’ emotional weight.
Fury And Flames is a deeply personal album for founder Erik Rutan, who admirably eschews the genre’s detached and predictable lyrical aesthetics in favour of grand statements that clearly reveal his own internal issues. He leads his bandmates through dense, churning songs like The Funerary March and Whom Gods May Destroy, a song so venomous and unrelenting that we realize the title Hate Eternal is no exaggertion.