Ancient Torment’s Follow the Echo of Curses
If black metal has lost its bite for you, if it’s started to sound like it’s either too clean, too ironic, or too desperate to cosplay the past, Ancient Torment is here to peel your eyelids back and shove the abyss back down your throat. Follow the Echo of Curses, their first full-length album after nearly a decade in the trenches, doesn’t pander to genre trends or bury itself in lo-fi murk for cred. But it’s not just brute force, it’s intentional, heavy with spiritual weight and cursed atmosphere.
Ancient Torment have a flair for the esoteric, and here it crystallises. This album feels like a carefully orchestrated ritual: six tracks, forty-something minutes, each one paced like a procession of plague-bearing monks, dragging hooks and bells. There are no interludes, no ambient fluff, no trendy dungeon synth to pad the runtime. Every song serves the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is thick enough to choke on.
The band hails from Providence, Rhode Island, a region whose history is steeped in colonial hauntings and weathered churches, and it shows. There’s a coldness here that isn’t Scandinavian mimicry. It’s American: damp cellars, icy woods, bones buried in old farmland. You can feel it in the recordings, tracked in a winter-locked studio in the woods and mixed to preserve every frostbitten breath. The production is raw but muscular, giving the riffs room to spiral and the vocals enough decay to feel ghost-touched. It never sounds modern, but it never sounds fake.
This album shows that black metal doesn’t need gimmicks, keyboards, or orchestras to feel huge. It just needs conviction. And this thing is foaming with it.
The Sound of Ancient Torment
Let’s talk about the sound, not in a sterile, theory-head way, but in terms of how it actually feels. There’s melody here, yes. A surprising amount, actually. But it’s always warped, wounded, lurching out of dissonance like something that shouldn’t still be alive. Ancient Torment play with riffs that have memory.
They repeat, evolve, echo, decay. You’ll hear passages from one track show up in a twisted form later in the album. It’s subtle, but it gives the whole record an internal logic, like it was written in one possessed breath.
Guitars are tuned low, most likely drop B or even C and the tone is more death-warmed-over than icy screech. It’s not chainsaw buzz or glass-shard tremolo. It’s more ancient-sounding, earthy, closer to funeral doom in places. But there’s movement in it, and when the leads break through, they shimmer with that nasty harmonic minor tension, like early Dissection playing through rusted equipment.
“Hanging from a Dead Star” kicks off like a crowbar to the ribs: mid-tempo stomp, tremolo riffs that bite down and don’t let up, and a vocal delivery that sounds like Stygal recorded it after eating hot ash. But by the time you hit the middle of the track, things slow down and breathe, chords stretch out, and there’s this droning undertone that makes the whole thing feel ritualistic rather than just pissed off.
“Sorrow Verses” is a standout: it’s genuinely mournful without ever slipping into post-black melodrama (not that theres anything wrong with that). The riffs are structured around long phrases that feel like they’re trying to claw their way back to something sacred, and failing. There’s an emotional pull here, one that doesn’t rely on clean vocals or shoegaze reverb walls. It’s black metal doing grief right.
And then you’ve got something like “Dejected Dreams Molested in Purgatory”, which manages to squeeze more character into five minutes than most bands do in entire albums. The tempo switches are sharp, but they never feel showy. There’s one riff around 3:15 that sounds like it’s being strangled by the drums in real time, and that’s a compliment.
The real centerpiece, though, is “Under the Guise of Virtue.” It’s nearly eight minutes of tension and release, building on itself like a spell being cast in reverse. The vocals shift from screeches to this almost chant-like drone, and the last few moments of clean-sung dread hit harder than any blast beat. It feels like the album’s thesis: that darkness doesn’t always scream. Sometimes it just waits.
Funeral Smoke, Liturgies, and No Happy Endings
This is music to be alone with. Not “coffee shop with headphones” alone, more like “walk into the woods and don’t come back” alone. Every track feels like it’s part of a larger spell, something old and mean that doesn’t want to be spoken aloud. It’s patient black metal. Not in the sleepy, ambient sense, but in the ritualistic sense. You’re not being entertained, you’re being brought in, whether you want to be or not.
There’s a spiritual energy to this record, one that doesn’t feel like roleplaying. It’s not overtly occult, but it’s soaked in intention. The way the album moves, the pacing, the song lengths, the lack of filler, gives it a strange gravity. It feels like a curse. Not cartoonish Satanism, but something darker and more personal.
The production helps. It’s raw, but not a mud bath. You can hear the guitars bite, the vocals shatter, the drums snap in the room. There’s a tactile presence to it all. It sounds like something recorded in an old church basement, or a mausoleum that still has its original tenants. There’s no click-track tightness here. It breathes like a living thing. The imperfections make it better, like the whole record is held together with rust and threadbare robes.
And while the album isn’t overtly political or “conceptual” in some literary sense, it absolutely has a theme: corruption of spirit, loss of belief, rituals gone wrong, virtue as a mask for rot. It’s not spelled out, but it’s there, and that atmosphere carries through every riff, scream, and silence.
Final Verdict: One of 2025’s Most Potent Black Metal Debuts
Follow the Echo of Curses is a rare debut in that it actually feels complete. No filler, no trendy aesthetics, no compromise. It’s ugly and it’s beautiful in equal measure. It moves like a beast, but it thinks like a priest. This is black metal that doesn’t just want to be heavy, it wants to pull something out of you and replace it with ash.
For long-time listeners of black metal, this is the kind of record that makes you remember why you fell in love with the genre in the first place. For newer heads looking to go deeper than algorithm-core, this is a perfect baptism by fire and frost. You’ll hear echoes of early USBM, echoes of the old Nordic waves, even echoes of death-doom lurking under the surface, but what you won’t hear is imitation. Ancient Torment have carved their own path, and it’s lined with bones.
Written by: Chort the Crop Infestor
“Hi, I’m Chort I infest crops and listen to Black Metal!”
