Thou: Umbilical review – one of the finest metal albums of the past decade

(Sacred Bones)
Huge riffs, guttural vocals and fearsome intent create a formidable wall of sound in the US band’s maximalist, in-your-face sixth album

A caustically intense mainstay of the US underground, Thou combine cavernously sludgy riffs with raw punk energy. Theirs is a sound of stifling humidity, a near hallucinatory heaviosity. Indeed, the narcotic heat of Louisiana – the band are from Baton Rouge – seeps through every sickly pore, wedding itself to the circling riffs, loose rhythmic under-swing and throat shredding screams alike: a brutal urban blues.

But where 2014’s breakthrough Heathen was of a more epic, doomy bent, Umbilical – the band’s sixth full length album – speaks more closely to Thou’s links to the underground punk and hardcore scenes with shorter, (even) more aggressive songs and in-your-face delivery. Working up a vast – at times overwhelming – wall of sound, Emotional Terrorist and Unbidden Guest rage along with fearsome intent while The Promise is brutally off-kilter. I Return As Chained and Bound to You and album closer Siege Perilous, meanwhile, are lumbering sludge classicism.

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