DisAgreement Online

If you like your death metal delivered like a fist in your face, you might want to check out Fracturus from Montréal (Quebec, Canada). The band has only been founded in 2021, but most of their members used to be in Dark Century, another death metal band from their hometown. Vocalist Alex LeBlanc even used to be in Neuraxis, a tech death metal band that should be familiar to quite a lot of people.

Fracturus’ debut album Versus The Void comes about one and a half year after their first EP, and I was surprised that this very short album is only three minutes longer than the EP. The – dare I say? – longplayer begins with a short intro followed by six songs, all of which have normal lengths, ending the ride after not even twenty-five minutes. That’s even shorter than Slayer’s Reign In Blood.

But don’t worry, because Versus The Void is an excellent album. The musicians know what they are doing. The drums, performed by Alexis Serré, are pummelling themselves through the ultra-brutal material, which also sounds incredibly powerful courtesy of the fierce production by Chris Donaldson (Cryptopsy). The first two songs, Storm and the title track, have been pre-released as singles, and both display Fracturus’ sound: fast rhythms, complex instrumentation, enhanced by a modern approach that should appeal to fans of technical death metal and deathcore alike. The guitars add enough melodies that make the material memorable, and even though there are occasional djent-y parts, it all feels perfectly integrated and never like self-indulgent showing off.

It's hard to say if Fracturus add a lot of new impulses to a genre that has seen many excellent artists emerge, but one thing’s for sure: the Canadian quartet takes no prisoners, and their combination tech death and more melodic progressive parts, clad in an airtight production, has everything to keep the sophisticated death metal fan satisfied. Let’s hope that their next longplayer actually deserves the adjective “long”.