Beats and yelling: Horrendous cut the ribbon on their long awaited Funhouse

Ontological Mysterium
Out 18^th August on Season of Mist

Philly content sifters descend with characteristically good timing for another trope dump of trending hashtags. A buffet of the hottest brands available on the metal market, duly homogenised and processed . With the release of ‘Ontological Mysterium’ – a title screaming pop philosophy non-speak – they at least deserve credit for finally leaning into their role as architects of a metal funhouse.

What Horrendous have in spades that comparable darlings of modern death metal lacked – Morbus Chron, Blood Incantation, Skeletal Remains, Tomb Mold, a host of others – is an uncanny ability to shift with the times whilst maintaining a veneer of legitimacy. This latter is achieved by at least nurturing a proto identity. Their debut ‘The Chills’ landed in 2012, early enough to ride the wave of nostalgia death metal dominating the airwaves at the time without appearing as a follower. But even then something didn’t quite sit right. Despite the retro cover art, the Boss HM-2 guitar tone, and a batch of early Swedeath offcuts, Horrendous were relatively austere retroists compared to their peers.

Having mulled on this for some time, I realised that this austerity came not from any particular fealty to authenticity, but because – despite being accomplished musicians – they don’t really know how to play death metal all that convincingly, even when compared to a bargain basement OSDM act. An off kilter technicalism felt uncannily domesticated thanks to a flat, death ‘n’ roll swing, a latent foreign object made all the more monotonous by an insistence on mid-paced barrages, laboured riff exchanges, and contemporary emotivism, as if desperately walking a tightrope of trying to look interesting enough to stand out whilst they feared alienating a wider audience through overt esotericism.  

2014’s ‘Ecdysis’ leant further into the death ‘n’ roll plod, eschewing the genre’s signature comedic baggage via a “mature” cover art and searing melodic expressions that created a catharsis that was just so 2010s. 2015’s ‘Anareta’ unfurled the technical and emotional melodicism further, giving fans a simulation of death metal whilst maintaining the base ingredients of rock swing, obvious cadential resolutions, contrived emo driven melodic finales, and a basket of “legitimate” death metal riffing to cloak an almost totalitarian lack of focus.  

With 2018’s ‘Idol’ Horrendous were ready to out themselves as “progressive”, using the same hacked up fragments of death metal to craft what was essentially a fractured expression of pop prog. The dynamics were there, as were the meandering jazzy basslines, frequent tempo changes, and just enough dissonance to secure extreme credentials. But Horrendous understand prog no better than they do death metal. An unfocused collection of self-referentials, agenda-core that wants us to know that we are listening to an outlier, but never gets past telling us why the mechanics of the music should look compelling. The great deception behind the Horrendous entity is that they have little to offer beyond exposition, it tells you how and why it’s novel, how it stands apart from the status quo, without actually being so.

But if art is the process of “becoming who you are”, the arrival of ‘Ontological Mysterium’ should be greeted with some celebration. Whilst many this deep into their career are wont to “go back to basics” or some other placeholder for giving up, Horrendous have doubled down on their passion for concocting a basket of on-trend tropes into an album that at least looks like it has a reason to exist. At this point even their most dedicated sycophants note the liminal carnival bizarre on the horizon with the coming of ‘Ontological Mysterium’. Of course this must be framed as cause to celebrate, variety is good because consuming lots of different things makes us interesting, and Horrendous have been good enough to upload them all into one convenient package, “behold, eclecticism, and rejoice”.

A phantasmagoria of the familiar made strange. Scraps of ridiculous emo prog metal sit happily alongside the mangled finds of a NWOBHM archaeology begging to be left in the ground. Whilst tracks like ‘Exeg(en)esis’ restore Megadeth’s ‘Five Magics’ for a generation raised on TikTok dance trends. A social media scroll through the latest vibecore pushed by paid up influencers desperately thrusting content into the aether in the hope of a page share, maybe one day racking up enough followers to quit the coding day job.

Horrendous have clearly always wanted to be the ultimate in post-post-modernism. The OSDM band that finally forced the genre out of Sweden and Florida (although Death and Opeth’s voices are still clearly audible on ‘Ontological Mysterium’). This is packaging material for a much broader metal pedigree. Why bother with playlist shuffles when albums like this exist? Although Horrendous feigned a legitimate artistic message on their earlier works, their true talents have always been in making trend chasing look like an art in itself. With ‘Ontological Mysterium’ they at last lift the veil, revealing the freewheeling ridiculousness lurking behind the façade all along.

Thus it feels entirely appropriate to join the ranks of Horrendous champions in celebrating this release. Having finally abandoned the dream that they will ever be seen as high minded death metal, a genre they never really understood in the first place, they can now fully embrace the funderground metal circus. Expect chimeras of malformed spare parts appropriated from the underbelly of a more serious artistic class.