apanthropy

Anthrodynia
Unspeakable Horrors Emanating from Within
Nameless Grave Records
To Be Released: August 15th, 2025

Rating: 86/100

“Each track crawls through a field of broken glass, deep and powerful chords slam into the listener with suffocating intensity, the slow metronomic beat of the drums animates these dying compositions, and gut-turning gutturals bring life to this listless corpse of an album.”

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1 – Severed from Mundanity
2 – Engulfed in Grief
3 – Cathartic Dissemination
4 – A Rotten Sun
5 – Suffering Pure Light
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Anthrodynia is defined as the melancholic exhaustion resulting from the cruelty of humanity, typically against the vulnerable, for no justifiable reason. Turning on the television, picking up the newspaper, doomscrolling through social media, it’s a hyper-onslaught of humanity’s barbarism. War, famine, natural disasters, animal cruelty, mass shootings, it’s all exhausting at the spiritual and metaphysical level.

Hailing from Alberta, Canada, the duo of Derek Orthner and Durell Smith have attempted to harvest the expression and subsequent projection of this melancholic exhaustion through the battering doom death of Anthrodynia. Unspeakable Horrors Emanating from Within is five songs clocking in at around 40 minutes of crawling, hopeless, miserable death metal that leans deeply and heavily into the doom palette. Nameless Grave Records is responsible for the release.

Unspeakable Horrors Emanating from Within is an exhausting grief-inflicting mass of caliginous sonic despair. Each track crawls through a field of broken glass, deep and powerful chords slam into the listener with suffocating intensity, the slow metronomic beat of the drums animates these dying compositions, and gut-turning gutturals bring life to this listless corpse of an album.

‘Severed from Mundanity’ is the entryway into the record; an archway made of bones and rotting meat. Deep guttural doom death, a toxic bog infested with the likes of Coffins, Incantation, and early Anathema. Chords rage and lash out, ringing into the abyss. Abrasive single-note tremolo-picked lines coil around the track like a noose. Its slow crawl becomes a frightening chase as the song shifts tempo and becomes faster, playing out in a late 1980’s style of early death metal, that of the likes of Therion and Abhorrence. The song slows back down again and the atmosphere becomes thick and dense once more.

‘Engulfed in Grief’ begins with a desolate, suicidal tonality, a clean tone drenched with reverb and delay, which plays a simple motif over and over while distorted chords beat down upon the listener. Once again, the pacing is slow and methodical up to a certain point, where the attitude and killing capacity of the song shifts with increases in the tempo. These contrasting elements – the slow and the fast – mix like a shotgun and a human head. Its destructiveness is palpable.

This eerie clean guitar tone emerges once again in the near-instrumental center track ‘Cathartic Dissemination,’ which splits the album in half. The stark riff combined with the cavernous drums brings to mind the mental image of Jack Torrance from “The Shining” slowly losing his mind. Pure atmosphere undisturbed by vocals, like a pool of stagnant water or an undiscovered suicide in the woods.

The most direct effort on the record is the fourth track, ‘A Rotten Sun,’ which invokes early desolate Incantation in its riff structures and composing. The band break from the mold of contrasting tempos and play in a faster manner throughout the course of the track. Grinding death metal with plenty of vicious riff changes and ancient throwback.

The closing track is another nine minute evisceration, with the otherworldly clean tone returning once again to predicate the crawling doom hell waiting deeper in the song. ‘Suffering Pure Light’ closes the record like a shallow burial. A beast of a track that feels as if it was pulled from the wet and stinking earth.

Production on Unspeakable Horrors Emanating from Within is surprisingly animated, with great heat and depth to the guitars, a cold and cavernous drum tone, and bleak desolate gutturals that perch in the core of the mix.

2025 has been an excellent year for debut releases and Anthrodynia’s offering is another contribution from the underground abyss that deserves much praise for both its sonically inflicted crushing despair and desolate atmosphere, which rivals that of the veteran bands. Where others lean too deeply into excess melodicism, or atonal technicality, or hypersonic speeds, Anthrodynia is the soundtrack for no man’s land in the midst of a trench war.

Only death and despair await.

Label: Nameless Grave Records
Band: Anthrodynia

AJK