Verminous Serpent Black Metal / Co. Dublin

VERMINOUS SERPENT are a brand-new entity, but one bearing old souls: Joseph Deegan (SLIDHR, HAUD MUNDUS, MYRKR, CACODEMON) on guitar, Matt Bree (MALTHUSIAN, TWISTED MASS, ON PAIN OF DEATH) on drums, and A.A. Nemtheanga (PRIMORDIAL, DREAD SOVEREIGN, PERDITION) on vocals and bass, here exhibiting a frighteningly different side of his signature voice. While all three men hail from different yet equally considerable backgrounds, their sound as VERMINOUS SERPENT is completely its own creation – a headspace distant and mostly removed from their collective pasts & presents.

Aptly titled, “The Malign Covenant” is VERMINOUS SERPENT’s first public work: a five-song/41-minute album that brims with ancient black metal energies. Rough and raw but never sloppy or taking half-measures, the trio’s debut album twists and coils and fatally STRIKES similarly as their namesake; one could liken these songs to ‘corridors’, but that would suggest a finite destination. Instead, the entirety of “The Malign Covenant” evokes a rippling soundworld of lurking dread and sulfurous tension, where intensity is measured not by speed or density but by the hideous sensations that shapeshift within the listener’s subconscious. The most complete crystallization of this can be found in the album’s closing 13-minute epic, ‘Deaths Head Mantra’, fittingly ending the album on a climactic (and chilling) note. Bestial in the olde definition but dispensing with the semantics shackling so much of nowadays ‘black metal’, VVERMINOUS SERPENT have delivered a tome defiant of time itself.