“With a haunted look in her eyes, she said, ‘It’s comin’ for us…’ ”

Rorcal is yet another well-established band of whom I only became aware after hearing their 2019 release. The Swiss quintet has been around for over a decade now; their first EP came out in 2006 and Myrra, Mordvynn, Marayaa, their debut full-length, in 2008. Since then they’ve been honing a style formed from equal parts cavernous black metal and atmospheric sludge riffs, and Muladona is the latest remarkable entry in the continuum. Subtitled A tale by Eric Stener Carlson performed by Rorcal, the LP opens with a passage from the original Muladona, the 2016 Tartarus Press novel, read by the author himself. As Carlson sets the scene for the supernatural horror soon to occur against the bleak backdrop of a post-WWI Texas town ravaged by the Spanish flu, the musicians of Rorcal translate the tension and pervasive sense of impending doom into a seething rumble of noise out of which grow destructive but deliberate avalanches of unison hits. This first track, “This Is How I Came to Associate Drowning with Tenderness,” contains only a hint of the formidable power that Rorcal harnesses over the course of the album, where the massive, dense guitar mudslides coat hypnotic blast beat sections and the unified sludge slams conjure terrifying strength from the shadows. “Carnations Were Not the Smell of Death. They Were the Smell of Desire” is a concise and hard-hitting amalgam of everything that makes Muladona so fantastic, forcing heads into motion as its stretch of repetitive blasting culminates without warning into a crushingly cathartic sludge climax. The samples of Carlson’s reading throughout, whether it’s amidst the rubble at the end of “I’d Done My Duty to My Mother and Father. And More Than That I’d Found Love” or is set right in the middle of the chaos of epic closer “I Was the Muladona’s Seventh Tale,” gives Rorcal time for crucial moments of mood building and provides valleys of meditative yet harrowing respite before the deafening evil forces its way back in—and then retreats for a surprisingly optimistic conclusion.

“Every day since then has been a gift.”