The Anthropic Sophisms (On The Heights Of Despair)

vote
7.0

• Bands:
  HELL (CZE)
• Duration: 00:40:50
• Available from: 07/17/2026
• Label:

• Debemur Deaths

Despite a less than original name, the desire of a group like Inferno to constantly evolve their sound is undeniable. After over thirty years of history that has seen them move from a classic Scandinavian-style black metal to an avant-garde sound that brings to mind the path taken by Blut Aus Nord in the second part of their career, the Czech group seems to have found its ideal dimension within a black metal with surrealist and dissonant tones. Although the fruits of this evolution, which began with the marvelous “Omniabsence Filled By His Greatness” (to date the most balanced album between tradition and innovation), have been fluctuating, reaching peaks of forced abstraction in the discontinuous “Gnosis Kardias (Of Transcension And Involution)”, it seems that with the last two works Inferno have straightened out their aim, and this “The Anthropic Sophisms (On The Heights Of Despair)” is undoubtedly the best episode since the aforementioned “Omniabsence Filled By His Greatness”.

The first thing that catches your ear is the production, in line with its predecessor but even more defined, a choice capable of highlighting the complexity of some guitar lines, while maintaining an underlying heaviness and that murky feeling necessary for a record like this.
The opening is riskily entrusted to the most complex piece to assimilate, almost entirely instrumental, with a hypnotic and martial flow, with hints close to the more cryptic Blut Aus Nord, developed like a large musical fractal in which it is easy to get lost, if you don't keep the bar of attention high. Although in some moments the song tends to open into more atmospheric and evocative moments, the entrance to the album is not the simplest and risks discouraging the less patient.
Things get slightly easier with the following “Dekranos Katexochen (Mých smrtí je bezpočet, mých nemocí mnoho)” – yes, the complex and very long titles are a prerogative of the band – which acquires a more actual song structure, with numerous instrumental sections that collapse on top of each other but in a more orderly and less dreamlike manner. There is also more than one moment in which the keyboard and synthesizer arrangements take control of the situation before the final outburst, which explodes after an unnerving crescendo useful for accumulating tension.
After twenty minutes, the album seems to veer towards more extreme coordinates with the thirteen minutes of “With Raving Mouths They Utter Things Mirthless, Unadorned And Unperfumed”, which proves to be the best song of the lot, between noise corrosions, very fast outbursts full of anxiety and hypnotic and dissonant slowdowns, all on a cohesive narrative structure that is functional to the evolution of the song.
Finally, “Circulus Vitiosus Deus (The Infinity Ravages All)” closes, the song with the most canonical structure – again by the standards of a group like Inferno, of course – of the album, with more linear rhythms and a slightly more relaxed atmosphere, close to a certain symphonic black, while maintaining a certain underlying density in the wall of guitars and in the electronic inserts, here too strongly indebted to the intuitions of the two chapters on behalf of “Disharmonium” by Blut Aus Nord.

The artwork is also particularly effective and exhaustive, a precise photograph of what happens in the grooves of these forty minutes, capable of raising the band's artistic average, net of some excessively redundant moments that lose the thread of the discussion in some points, especially in the opening song.
Ultimately, however, “The Anthropic Sophisms (On The Heights Of Despair)” is a very refined and fascinating work, which will certainly appeal to those who wallow in the most cerebral and cosmic black metal; it restores the renewed hope of having found a group previously somewhat lost in the meanders of a bizarre self-induced chaos.