Tunisian avant-garde metal project Primordial Black have been moving fast since their debut EP Monas Hieroglyphica – debut full-length Dark Matter Manifesto earned Album of the Year from Mexican outlet Metalpedia and close to 60 international press features, with guests including Rotting Christ’s Sakis Tolis. Heterotopia is their next step, and it arrives with serious company: Steve DiGiorgio (Death, Testament, Sadus), Karim Bouazra of Tunisian prog outfit Lost Insen, and Italian guitarist Gianluca Morelli of Antiqus Infestus all appear across the record. Led by Yasser Mahammedi Bouzina alongside guitarist Walid Chaaben and drummer Selim Bouladi, the band describes Heterotopia as a push further into avant-garde territory while preserving the dark and immersive essence that established them in the first place. The themes are decay, transcendence, and psychological fragmentation. The music earns them.
“Heterotopia” is cinematic and quite surprising at times – there’s a lot of music here, and the way one song weaves to the next flows really well. It’s an album that’s meant to be listened to in one sitting from start to finish, and in that way, they’re upholding the art form of the album, unlike the trend these days to curate music specifically for short form content and loops. You get to explore a shifting sonic palette, and that alone tells a story aside from the main lyrical method of narrative delivery. The music tells the side story and provides context and movement to the story here, and the way the band shifts dynamics from powerful, aggressive sounds to haunting and borderline disturbing ambient sounds serves the storytelling marvelously.
The title track is symphonic in its arrangement, starting almost like a horror movie cue with a simple yet harrowing piano line and then unleashing the might of this metal orchestra. The deliberate dissonances in the riffs and how they descend chromatically create a terrifying spiral of sound. The intermission that breaks off the song into two halves features ominous drones and breathing sounds that add to the disturbing atmosphere invoked by the lyrics, and then when the band comes back in full force, it just makes that much more impactful.
“Immaculate” has an intro riff that sounds like someone blowing into Gjallarhorn itself, ushering in the indescribable evil that emanates from the lyrics like ancient words that aren’t supposed to be spoken out loud. Their voices screaming “Immaculate reflection!” sounds like a thousand frenzied demons shrieking, and the legendary bassist Steve Di Giorgio tearing it up in the breakdowns make this one of the heaviest tracks on the album. The performances here are immaculate indeed.
“Begotten” is an example of those surprising tracks I mentioned. It starts off with drones and what sounds to my ears like Mongolian throat singing, and it builds to a relentless blast beat as the main vocalist trades vocals with Camilia Bayazi’s soaring vocals. The relentlessness crashes down to an ambient section with a saxophone in a borderline jazz noir-inspired section that conveys desolation and hopelessness. The ambient section is very similar in function to the intermission in the title track. The band knows their strengths, and they are playing to them.
Heterotopia is the kind of record that rewards the listener who gives it the full, uninterrupted sit-down it asks for. Primordial Black is operating in a space where extreme metal, cinematic atmosphere, and genuine compositional ambition don’t cancel each other out – they compound. For a band this young in their discography to already have this kind of control over texture, pacing, and darkness, the only real question is where they go from here.
