DESECRESY – The Secret of Death

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7.0

• Bands:
  DESECRESY
• Duration: 00:42:46
• Available from: 05/21/2026
• Label:

• Xtree Music

With “The Secret of Death”, Desecresy return with yet another full-length of a journey that is now long and not always linear, but which today seems to have found its own stability. The project of multi-instrumentalist Tommi Grönqvist, after the beginning marked by an abundant and sometimes dispersive production – often penalized by a sound that was a little too 'homemade' and by ideas that were not always fully in focus – finally appears centered here, with a clearer identity and a recognizable direction.

The formula is now defined: a predominantly rhythmic death metal, built on solid supporting riffs and immediately attributable to a certain tradition, with evident echoes of Bolt Thrower and Demigod. However, to stop there would be to grasp only part of the picture. On these robust structures, Grönqvist grafts an increasingly conscious melodic work, made of cold, almost glacial lines, and atmospheric openings that shift the center of gravity of the album towards more nuanced and enveloping territories. It is precisely the more rarefied passages that represent the true strong point of the work: here the inspiration emerges more clearly and Desecresy manage to distance themselves from cumbersome models, avoiding being trapped in a traditionalism which, elsewhere, has already been explored with more incisive results. In these sections, the sound expands, becomes almost hypnotic, and that martial framework typical of a certain type of death metal is transfigured into something more distant, almost sidereal, as if the conflict evoked by the riffs were observed from a colder and more detached perspective.

The production also contributes decisively to the overall success: fuller, more balanced, capable of giving the right emphasis to the death-doom slowdowns, which here acquire a notable specific weight without being excessively burdensome. The sound performance enhances the internal dynamics of the songs and allows the atmospheric components to emerge with greater clarity. For its part, the tracklist, as a whole, proves to be solid and well-structured: there remain some accelerations that are not entirely centered, episodes that seem to slightly break the flow instead of strengthening it, but these are details that do not compromise the general stability of the album. However, when Desecresy move into more controlled registers, the result is decidedly convincing: one perceives a sense of proportion, a careful management of tensions and, above all, a melodic vein that manages to give depth to structures that at first might appear canonical.

Ultimately, “The Secret of Death” represents one of the highest points achieved so far by the Finnish project. Not so much for a hypothetical underlying originality, but for the ability, finally fully realized, to rework a well-known language in a form that is all in all suggestive.