IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT - Goldstar

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Goldstar

New York's Imperial Triumphant continue a career that, from the black-death-metal of “Abyssal Gods” (2015), has led them toward increasingly extreme and avant forms of contamination on excellent albums such as “Vile Luxury” (2018) and “Alphaville” (2020), and which has lately instead seen them return to a slightly more linear style of songwriting with “Spirit Of Ecstasy” (2022) and now with this “Goldstar”.

To anyone already familiar with them, the new compositions will sound like a continuation of their highly creative trajectory within contemporary extreme metal. The brass that embellishes the arrangements, the borrowings from jazz and classical, and the retro imagery are all elements that reinforce the identity of a band with few equals in the contemporary scene.

In practice, the nine tracks gathered here each stand as explorations - as usual, fairly free and unpredictable - of highly technical, psychedelic and contaminated death metal. The terrifying “Eye Of Mars” batters the listener and plunges them into an urban dystopia built on death metal adorned with funereal tolling bells, atmospheric rifts and bursts of symphonic intensity. The tribal dance that opens “Gomorrah Nouveaux” is the pretext for another round of technical, suffocating death metal in constant mutation, before the calmer “Lexington Delirium” upends the mood: with Meshuggah drummer Thomas Haake, who here only acts as narrator, the New York trio opts for a dismal crescendo, with a tense pause dominated by bass. Their avant-death-metal is in full form on “Hotel Sphinx”, amid psychedelic hallucinations, djent references and a Handel quotation, but the band's game remains to wrongfoot the listener, and so there follow 47 seconds of grindcore courtesy of “NEWYORKCITY” Yoshiko Ohara of Bloody Panda.

The closing trio of tracks is devastating: “Rot Moderne” pummels with obsessive, labyrinthine rhythms, also capturing a ferocious vocal performance; “Pleasuredome”, featuring Haake and even Dave Lombardo, delivers a deranged latin-fusion-metal interlude that stands out even within their shapeshifting discography; “Industry Of Misery” once again takes aim at the distortions of the capitalist system (“Kleptocratic regimes manufacture crisis”) in a ritual that merges Lovecraft with Ligotti (“At the banks, thou shall kneel”), carried along by spectral guitar tolls, a blues solo (!) and one final infernal climax built on the riff of the Beatles' “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” by the Beatles.

Imperial Triumphant's sixth album preserves their uniqueness without scaring off the less initiated, as “Alphaville” might (which, for this writer, remains their masterpiece). Certainly, this carousel combining Voivod, Gorguts, Frank Zappa and John Zorn is still only to be recommended to those seeking strong emotions, highly evocative tracks and anguished visions tragically inspired by our reality. Ideal listening while smoking.

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22/04/2025