Band: ABYSSIC GRAVE (Nz)
Album: "Born of the Wilderness"

Tracklist
01 - Demise
02 - I Am The Wilderness
03 - One By One
04 - The Hungering
05 - Nightfall
06 - Begat Of Blood
07 - Born Of The Woods
08 - In The Manner Of Death

::REVIEW::

Born of the Wilderness, the first and final full-length from New Zealand’s @AbyssicGrave captures the desolate rigor of traditional black metal at its most unadorned. Released posthumously through Gutter Prince Cabal, the record functions less as a debut than as a gravestone, an unflinching document of a band that burned briefly and froze completely.
Formed from members of Malevolence, Skuldom, Winter Deluge, and Anno Domini Mortis, Abyssic Grave existed as a short-lived convergence of experience and shared intent. Guitarist and composer Destragus, whose subsequent retirement ended the project, anchors the album’s aesthetic in a cold and minimalist strain of aggression. His riffing favors linearity and austerity, carved from the same frostbitten lineage as @Craft or early @Gorgoroth. The recording is resolutely raw, the guitars reduced to serrated texture, the drums skeletal but precise, the bass submerged beneath a haze of distortion.
Opening track, “Demise” establishes the mood immediately, repetition as endurance, melody stripped to its bones. “I Am the Wilderness” and “The Hungering” expand the tonal range without breaking the spell, invoking tension through sustained dissonance rather than variation. Femon’s vocals, dry, desiccated screams, function as another layer of abrasion rather than a focal point. On “Nightfall” and “Born of the Woods,” faint traces of melody surface, evoking the ruinous beauty of isolation. The closing piece, “In the Manner of Death,” extends the band’s nihilism into near-hypnotic repetition, dissolving into static.
No ornamentation, no revivalist indulgence, only the pure mechanics of desolation. Born of the Wilderness embodies the terminal essence of black metal, anonymity, futility, and permanence through decay. Abyssic Grave concludes as it began, unseen, unheard, and uncompromising, its absence now its final act of definition

Review written by FuegoCasa in collaboration with Headbangers Australia in November 2025.