SOUL OF ANUBIS – Ritual

vote
6.5

• Bands:
  SOUL OF ANUBIS
• Duration: 00:41:24
• Available from: 01/20/2026
• Label:

• Time To Kill Records

At least until the first half of the 1910s, the main European festivals were full of large and small sludge bands. A concentration of big, dense sounds, sizzling violence and imaginations, sometimes more ignorant, on other occasions progressive and exploratory, exhausting and dreamlike, changeable or ruthless: a long wave, the effect of the success of Mastodon and Baroness and the vitality of a scenario which, on opposite sides of the Atlantic, has produced several valuable groups.
That effervescence subsequently subsided, several groups reduced or stopped their activity and the hold of this type of sound on the public inevitably loosened. Obviously, sludge metal has not disappeared, it has taken on different forms, it has retreated partly into the shadows, while still remaining something important in contemporary metal.
Among the smaller groups that insist on frequenting these sounds and try to give them a credible formulation faithful to its spirit are the Portuguese Soul Of Anubis, a duo that has been around since 2010 and previously authored only one EP (“Alone” from 2013) and two albums, “The Monster Among Us” from 2016 and “The Last Journey” from 2019.

The silence of seven years is now interrupted with “Ritual”, a record that has no intention of infusing renewed impetus to sludge metal, but rather of consolidating its fundamental dictates, forcefully engraving a firm, spiteful and essential idea of ​​sludge in the flesh of the listeners.
The two Portuguese musicians have limited interest in the atmospheric inventions, progressions and melodies brought to the fore by this genre in its evolved phase. In “Ritual” everything is done the opposite: the sound is rough and quarrelsome, closely related to crust/hardcore, black and smelly, something that smells of slums, pure and hard underground.
The tracklist winds dark, severe and kicking between episodes of gruff and wild metal, crossed by a constant nervousness and a propensity for the bad and resentful anthem. We don't look for great digressions, we hit hard without compromise, without stopping, grafting ourselves into that trend that saw High On Fire as the most noble and lasting fruit, and a whole series of minor names (Black Tusk, Black Cobra, Lord Dying) to battle it out and inflame souls for a short season.
Hugo Ferrão's thick, granular and wild guitar is the cornerstone of “Ritual”; it becomes the spokesperson for a simple feeling – at the basis, if we want, of everything that is metal purified of great intellectual ambitions, when it becomes a means of breaking down, beating, hammering to exhaustion. Even his vocal approach, coarse and perpetually shouted, guttural, is in that field, where music becomes a simple vehicle of brute force and instinctive anger.
As we move from one track to another, no particular characteristics or moments that can remain imprinted are highlighted, in the name of a reassuring underlying repetitiveness, galvanized however by effective leaps forward and bone-breaking average tempos of appreciable resolution.

The square tempos, the overall rhythmic rigor and the way in which the guitar and voice fit together may remind us of Mantar, but if the Turkish-German creature can boast highly respectable creativity and a talent for very captivating melodies/harmonies, in the case of Soul Of Anubis the matter is decidedly more concise and limited in ideas.
“Ritual” is certainly an album for those who madly love this subgenre of metal, a way of shoring up the underground and making people understand how alive and pulsating it is still in this field too. He doesn't have the ability to ask for who knows what favors, he doesn't seek consensus, he doesn't have an unmissable listening experience to offer.
Here and there, just in brief glimpses, you feel that Soul Of Anubis could dare a little, indulge in some predictable trends. They just don't care, they prefer to hit hard while making as much noise as possible.
And ultimately, that might be enough. “Ritual” therefore has its limits but it is a pleasant listen, without deterioration in quality, good to alternate in a long day of listening with something more artistically relevant.