FOSSILIZATION – Advent of Wounds

vote
7.5

• Bands:
  FOSSILIZATION
• Duration: 00:35:53
• Available from: 02/13/2026
• Label:

• Everlasting Spew Records

Streaming not yet available

Three years after “Leprous Delight”, promoted on the stages of events such as the Kill-Town Death Fest in Copenhagen or the Maryland Deathfest in Baltimore, Fossilization reappear on the scene with an album in which – once again – there is nothing of that imagery based on beaches, sun and subtropical climate of their homeland.
The Brazilian group, born from an offshoot of the already very heavy sludge/doom metallers Jupiterian, continues its descent into the underworld with this “Advent of Wounds”, trying to take to the extreme what was done in the 2023 full-length and to give the whole an even darker and more evil patina, which – not surprisingly – ends up here bordering on black metal registers and atmospheres.
In short, the parable traced is clear, and although the derivative component continues to echo between the walls and along the corridors of the crypt dug by our team – in an exercise of genuflection in front of the altar of pillars such as Krypts, Dead Congregation and Cruciamentum – what can be distilled from the tracklist is the sound of a competent and close-knit reality, whose capacity for re-elaboration is becoming increasingly effective and uninhibited.

Bread for the regular pilgrims of the aforementioned Danish festival and of all that 'new old-school' that has exploded at an underground level in the last decade, here expressed in a functional and compact album (seven songs for thirty-five minutes of music) which in its slavish adherence to the canons of the genre – without any intention of going beyond it – still manages to go beyond the niche of products for completionists and fanatics of cavernous sounds, the number of which is progressively diluting the quality of the market.
The right riffs, moreover, are not lacking, just as the ability to impart an inexorable and constant tension to the pieces is not lacking, capable of mounting like a volcanic eruption from the bowels of the Earth and overwhelming the listener between very severe aggressions (just listen to the incipit of “Disentombed and Reassembled by the Ages”, according to the leader V himself conceived as a tribute to the Antaeus) and parentheses from which instead, on a stentorian and rarefied rhythmic structure, a series of arcane arias are released which contribute to the sensorial immersion and narrative cut of the work.

The surface is and remains impenetrable to light, but underneath, finished by a meticulous production that loses nothing of its roughness and organicity (by 'our' Gabriele Gramaglia), there is a songwriting that has never been so attentive to transitions and dynamics, to those details which, in a strictly 'genre' product like this, determine the ability to be highlighted within the circuit to which it belongs.
Obviously, not even in “Advent…” the São Paulo duo pulls an “Arrow of Entropy” or a “Teeth into Red” out of the hat, but this does not mean that episodes such as the opener “Cremation of a Seraph”, the aforementioned “Disentombed…”, “Scalded by His Sacred Halo” or “Terrestrial Mold” (with the latter representing the sum of the collection and the expressive range of the project), can be dismissed at the like a 'more of the same' devoid of flashes and substance, making the listening – especially in the first part – flow without missing a single beat.
A vigorous and passionate return, therefore, which consolidates Fossilization's position and provides fans of certain hazy death metal with one of the first listens worthy of attention of the year.
Those who can, don't miss them on the tour with Phobocosm scheduled for the summer.