Band: BINAH (Uk)
Album: "Ónkos"

Tracklist
01 - Mount Morphine
02 - The After Evermath

::REVIEW::

Seven years since Phobiate, Binah reemerges with Ónkos. A monumental, two-track descent through sickness, dissolution, and the shadowed persistence of consciousness. Issued via Osmose Productions, the album abandons any pretension of accessibility. Instead, Ónkos delivers two sprawling movements, “Mount Morphine” and “The After Evermath,” that fuse death metal’s carcass with ambient hypnosis and oppressive grandeur.
Across its 43 minutes, Binah dismantles the genre’s architecture and reassembles it into something ritualistic and destabilizing. “Mount Morphine” unfolds like a fevered hallucination, hazed synths dissolve into crushing distortion, where Aort’s guitars and Storm’s (My Dying Bride) percussion congeal into an overwhelming mass. The sound lingers between narcotic drift and total annihilation, every passage decaying beautifully into the next.
“The After Evermath” functions as both continuation and disintegration. Here, Binah moves from cavernous death to progressive ruin with guitars spiraling, vocals emerging as a subterranean lament, and the rhythmic flux invokes the spirit of Obscura-era Gorguts filtered through a dying star’s gravity. The synths, handled by multiple members, bind the chaos with a cosmic undertow, transforming the record from mere heaviness into transcendence.
Conceptually, Ónkos meditates on illness and aftermath, on what remains when vitality erodes. Yet it avoids melodrama. This is clinical introspection rendered through distortion and decay. Jaume Mayans’ artwork and the band’s meticulous self-production complete the immersion, every sonic and visual element serving the same diseased vision.
With Ónkos, Binah reaffirm their isolationist stance within death metal’s second wave, being untethered from scene obligation, wholly devoted to craft and atmosphere. It’s a demanding work, heavy not only in sound but in weight of meaning. A slow, corrosive triumph of form and concept with death metal stretched to its breaking point, then left to rot beautifully in the aftermath.

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