Maximum Metal Rating Legend

Usurpress makes it clear that listening to their latest offering, 'Interregnum', is not a task to be taken lightly. While that might sound like a dig, it is intended as a compliment. In this day and age of metal, you pretty much know what you'll be getting when you see the genre a band falls in to, but Usurpress pushes the boundaries of defining a genre and then makes you really think about what you just listened to.

What Usurpress does to make themselves stand out is the different styles that they utilize in their music and the ways that they combine them together. You wouldn't think influences as varied as Rush, Fleurety, Unleashed, and Ved Buens Ende would work well in any iteration but Usurpress makes it so. The opening track of the album "A Place in the Pantheon", really tricks you in to thinking you're in store for a more mellow listen. Then the title track obliterates that thought with 2 minutes of unfiltered, aggressive Swedish death metal. The tracks throughout the album are varied, intricate, and extremely well-crafted to work within such a wide spectrum. For me though, "Ships of Black Glass" is the standout track on the whole album. The thought the band put into the instrumentation and structure of the song itself highlights everything that the band loves and what makes this album so intriguing.

I promise you that you will not find a metal release out there like this one right now and that if you can be patient and give the album several listens, you will find an album that not only defies genres but defies what we've come to expect from heavy metal itself.