AD INFINITUM – Abyss

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6.5

• Bands:
  AD INFINITUM
• Duration: 00:41:23
• Available from: 11/10/2024
• Label:

• Napalm Records

Streaming not yet available

Also 2024, exactly like the previous three years, marked the release of a new Ad Infinitum album, this time entitled “Abyss”. The band was born in 2018 as a solo project of the Swiss singer Melissa Bonny, and then transformed into a more stable musical group a few months before the release of the first album, coinciding with the signing of the recording contract presented by Napalm Records.
Ad Infinitum's musical proposal is almost identical to that of groups like Amaranthe, Beyond The Black or League Of Distortion: a sort of goth metal characterized by many electronic influences that alternate with symphonic elements; all surrounded by a dry and ordinary rhythm section, on which the guitars offer an accompaniment aimed mainly at creating sound volume with distorted chords and some minimal riffs. The singing side instead – exactly as expected – alternates clean parts with rasps and growls in the style of Alissa White-Gluz of Arch Enemy, re-proposing the now hackneyed duet between an angelic and sweet female voice and a brutal, violent and almost orcish.
The eleven songs proposed in the full-length perfectly follow – as you may have guessed – the classic stylistic features of the genre mentioned above. We start with very energetic intros which open with an extremely melodic chorus, often followed by an aggressive breakdown dirtied by a growl vocal, to remind the listener that, after all, we are still talking about metal.
Tracks like “My Halo” or “Follow Me Down” are excellent examples of the structure described and pave the way for tracks whose focus is more markedly electronic like “Euphoria”, which has very little metal and sounds more like a rock/rock mix pop of the nineties, in which a guitar lick appears suffocated by a quilt of effects that we could only euphemistically define as 'solo'. The lack of originality reaches the end of the album with “Dead End”, the closing song which remains impressed at least for the intro which is very (perhaps too) similar to the iconic “The Beautiful People” by Reverend Manson, and a chorus instead inspired by “The Death Of Peace Of Mind” by Bad Omens.
At the end of the day, “Abyss” comes to the listener as an album with good production, overall well composed and dignifiedly performed: in short, a homework done without infamy and without praise. Listening to the work it almost seems as if this new album was released just to put a new record product on the market, without caring in the slightest to add a piece or take a step further from the path already taken.
Ad Infinitum's latest album may represent a bit of the way of making art of our times: yet another very short-lived experience destined, after a couple of listens, to end up inexorably forgotten, as it lacks that element which transforms a set of sounds into real Music – creativity.