A Diabolic Thirst Review

Band	Spectral Wound
Album	A Diabolic Thirst
Type	Album (Studio full-length)
Released	April 16, 2021
Genres	Black Metal
Labels	Profound Lore Records
Length	40:14
Ranked	#36 for 2021 , #1,723 all-time

Reviewer :  Cosmicism         Rating :  100 / 100

After I first played this album I immediately listened to the whole thing again, and even contemplated pressing play a third time. This record is straight from a demonic soul. It's furious, evil, and as precise as you could imagine.

The title and cover photo together make it certain; this is meant to be compared to Darkthrone's Transilvanian Hunger. Now some of us might want to have a thorough debate about if A Diabolic Thirst is stylistically more like Darkthrone, Mayhem, or Dissection. So whichever band it's most comparable to, let's just say that Spectral Wound has recorded something that screams of early 90s black metal, and the cultural references of the photo and title inform us that this record aims to equal or surpass those seminal classics. The men of Spectral Wound sure put in enough effort. The guy on the album cover looks like the amount of effort that it must've required.

These days, available to so many musicians worldwide, there is the technical capability to make your record sound as lo-fi as you want, while also taking advantages of hi-fi quality wherever you want to, so you can strike the perfect balance you envision for you black metal project, and this record has that perfect balance. This gives it kind of an unfair head start on those seminal albums, but if we keep that difference in mind and judge fairly, A Diabolic Thirst still deserves to stand alongside the big boys, and maybe even outshine them. It's just that good. I'm not trying to make a sport of this though. There is immense passion and love of music just radiating from this album, and justice can only be done to it if we recognize how hot that hellfire is.