::REVIEW::

Orgrel’s The Abyssal Terror stands as a work of pure conviction, hosting black metal stripped of pretense & polished only by intent. The Italian trio continues their crusade against modernity with an album that resurrects the savage clarity of the mid-’90s underground, where melody and malice were never in opposition but symbiotic.
Where Red Dragon’s Invocation established their vision and The Oath of the Black Wolf refined it, The Abyssal Terror devours it whole. The production is vintage, flat, airless, and crushing in its immediacy. Every tremolo line bleeds into the next, guitars locked in unrelenting motion, while percussion erupts in disciplined violence. The vocals are venom incarnate with rasped proclamations that sound unearthed rather than recorded.
Orgrel’s strength lies in control amid chaos. Tracks “Infernal Pursuit” and “Horned Tyrant” move with militant precision, each riff designed to bludgeon yet burn with melodic purpose. “The Enshrinement of the Triumphant Beast” twists that energy into something near ritualistic, invoking the archaic grandeur of early Setherial or Pentagrammaton-era Katharsis. Beneath the savagery, faint echoes of traditional heavy metal flicker through, hints of heroic phrasing that lend their darkness a tragic nobility.
The album’s pacing ensures constant pressure but avoids monotony. When “Steel Storm Apocalypse” closes the record, it feels less like an ending than the final collapse of something massive. The atmosphere is claustrophobic, the musicianship exact, the intent unmistakable.
The Abyssal Terror refuses modern adornment. It is raw, linear, and utterly faithful to black metal’s original design, ascetic, wrathful, and transformative. In a landscape bloated with affectation, Orgrel sounds elemental, like a band not imitating the past but living within its bones. The Beast, as they declare, has been fed.
Review written by FuegoCasa in collaboration with Headbangers Australia in November 2025.