Terzij de Horde emerged in 2022 after almost eight years of silence with a lot more fury. Where their prior effort Self had plenty of roaring black metal in 2015, their exploration of slower sludge/post metal and even post hardcore resulted in some somber, introspective moments in between the blasting. In One of These I Am Your Enemy took an even harsher approach, emphasizing black metal and hardcore intensity while still giving a little bit of breathing room across some of its lengthy tracks. It was the type of album that made an immediate impression but did seem to fizzle out slightly before reaching its conclusion, but there were hints that Terzij de Horde was only continuing to sharpen their attack. That has held true on their third full length Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone, which orients itself towards a constant onslaught of blast beats and abrasive tonality while keeping some of the other musical styles in the background.
While the group has always fallen somewhere into what you’d call the post-black side of things, Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone feels like the most black metal forward the band has ever been. That’s not to say they’ve lost the other elements completely, but a song like “Raise Them Towards the Sun” is a great example of how the writing has pivoted. This track comes roaring in like a freight train with a towering, blasting sound that sounds like the more modern 2000s-2010s black metal framework sped up and run through the same type of production as a Converge album. The riffs don’t necessarily fall into what I’d consider blackened hardcore, but the abrupt transitions and re-focusing to ensure that each section pummels the listener as hard as possible creates a similar feel as some of the bands in that sub-genre. There are natural ebbs and flows on each track, with a lot of emphasis on very triumphant and powerful melodies that make the attack surprisingly bright despite its density. But the dips rarely give you time to breathe compared to Terzij de Horde’s last two albums, with the one exception being closer “Discarding All Adornments”. Here the band lets things fade out for a period, reaching a more fragile and haunting level of atmosphere before the waves of blasting and dense riffs come roaring back in. It’s an effective closer and keeps the intensity at the same level as earlier in the album, avoiding the issue I had with In One of These I Am Your Enemy. It may initially sound like there’s less variety to the material given the continued emphasis on blasting, but the subtle shifts and nuances to each of the melodies gives each song its own identity.
Joost Vervoort’s vocals have only gotten more and more intense over the course of Terzij de Horde’s career, and the raspy screams add that extra fire to an already dense soundscape. Considering just how massive the rest of the band sounds, the fact that the vocals don’t just get swallowed up and stand above it makes a big difference. Where a lot of other groups in the post-black side of the spectrum opt for singing or other pitches, this group has opted to keep things a bit more straightforward. There are some higher shrieks on songs like “A Hammer To The Great Matter of Birth and Death”, but the bulk of the performance sticks with the same pitch and gives enough space between verses to avoid repetition. “Discarding All Adornments” does bring in folk singer Amelia Baker (also known as Cinder Well) for some spoken word passages that really enhance the haunting nature of its softer instrumentation, showcasing another detail that helps the album to stand out.
Terzij de Horde’s third album showcases their black metal sound at its most potent, and over the course of forty-two minutes it rarely lets off the gas. This might seem less dynamic on the surface compared to the band’s previous material, but the triumphant melodies and fluid transitions make this a lot less of a uniform listen than you would expect. It’s got quite a bit of staying power and pushes this long running group to even greater heights. Our Breath Is Not Ours Alone is available from Church Road Records.
-Review by Chris Dahlberg