Description
World-renowned American death metal icons NILE return in 2024 with their highly-anticipated 10th onslaught, The Underworld Awaits Us All, out August 23 via Napalm Records. Boasting airtight technicality and unrelenting brutality, the new album pushes each member of NILE - founding mastermind/guitarist Karl Sanders, longtime drum master George Kollias, vocalist/guitarists Brian Kingsland and Zach Jeter, and bassist Dan Vadim Von - to their furthest extremes both in artistry and performance. Once again produced and recorded at Sanders' own Serpent Headed Studios in Greenville, South Carolina, the band returned to Vile Nilotic Rites engineer Mark Lewis (Cannibal Corpse, Dying Fetus, Whitechapel) for mixing and mastering. The Underworld Awaits Us All's mind-bending art was once again envisioned and created by Michal 'Xaay' Loranc, with reference to the cycle of life and judgment at its end. Facing the planet's inevitable end with their diehard fans at their side, NILE waste absolutely no time with histrionics on The Underworld Awaits Us All, distilling their trademark Egyptology driven tempest down to its most streamlined essence. Charging into battle as its namesake depicts, "Stelae of Vultures" makes an immediate impact with dissonant guitar chords and supernatural drumming, teasing the auditory evisceration to come. Topped by impressive screams and gutturals, the track leads into "Chapter for Not Being Hung Upside Down on a Stake in the Underworld and Made to Eat Feces by the Four Apes", a winding hacksaw of brutal tech-death citing the Egyptian Book of the Dead's 181st chapter. The album's most succinct track, "To Strike with Secret Fang", blends low-end punishment with blackened death metal inspiration, before album standouts such as "Naqada II Enter the Golden Age" and "Overlords of the Black Earth" breathe new life with thrash and fusion experimentation, as well as real human choirs - adding a raw element to the NILE fold. Each track soars as a technical tour-de-force - featuring career-defining extreme drumming from Kollias, as well as razor-sharp soloing from all three active guitarists and palpable bass exploration. A perfect example of this equation is pinnacle burner "Under the Curse of the One God", combining sinister atmospherics with breakneck pacing and whirlwind, vicious riff acrobatics. Throughout the remainder of its 11 pummeling tracks and intricate interludes, NILE masters full-tilt speed and ferocious musicality. 30 years into their heavy reign, The Underworld Awaits Us All proves that NILE is marching onward and undoubtedly upward, bleeding metal for their fandom for as long as the sands of time will allow.
