vote
7.0
- Bands:
SUMMONING HELLGATES - Duration: 00:21:00
- Available from: 11/28/2025
- Label:
-
Osmose Productions
Streaming not yet available
Although Osmose Productions no longer lives the glory days of the nineties, when it actively contributed to dictating the coordinates of the extreme European underground, the French label continues to demonstrate a particular flair for the new generation of the most extremist metal. Madrid's Summoning Hellgates are proof of this: their debut, “Spear of Conquest”, is a mini that in about twenty minutes manages to make a strong mark, despite the formula still being defined and the predictable dependence on some well-known models.
Born in 2020 as a parallel project of guys active in Aversio Humanitatis and Sota de Bastos, Summoning Hellgates embody a vision of “spiritual defiance”, as their bio states: a radical refusal, expressed through a blackened, feverish, threatening and uncompromising death metal. Five actual songs – plus an objectively superfluous introduction – make up this “Spear of Conquest”, built primarily on frenetic riffing and a constant tension that grants no respite. The production, clear but not licked, allows you to easily follow the movements of the songwriting, revealing greater attention to detail than expected: the variations, the harmonic nuances, the brief groovy or atmospheric moments that interrupt the flow without distorting it.
The starting point remains the belligerent death metal of Angelcorpse, Centurian and Infernal War: a polished sound here, full of sulfur and blasphemy, where fury is the measure of everything. But here and there signs emerge of an identity in formation, which seeks its own path in the dialogue between ferocity and control. A piece like “Prisoner of Your Own Flesh” is the best example of this: the song alternates convulsive sequences with more deviant passages, with a more pronounced sense of dynamics that makes listening anything but monotonous and which gives a glimpse of a growing compositional maturity. In this composition, as in other situations, we can also trace a certain tendency towards controlled dissonance, a basic transversality that does not contradict the old school roots, but enriches it with new nuances, reaching here and there to touch on militant black metal arias. The artwork, refined and evocative, closes the circle, restoring the image of a group already aware of its own aesthetics.
“Spear of Conquest” is not an epiphany, but it is a solid, intense and promising debut, capable of rekindling attention on an Osmose who, even today, still knows how to ferret out the true flame in the underground chaos.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
