Metalcatto
Obscurity has a long career, and I probably should’ve realized that sooner just by looking at the name. Seriously, how did nobody take it before? Anyway, Ascheregen is clearly meant to make us feel the pain and destruction of the world. Very uplifting stuff. That said, the album has a noticeable blend of death and post-metal elements that give it a more emotional edge than you might expect. On paper, that combination should work for me, and in practice… well, I genuinely wondered what the worst that could happen was. Turns out, not much in a bad way.
Can you imagine if Harakiri for the Sky wrote shorter tracks? If not, Ascheregen might be exactly your thing. It takes that melodic suffering and compresses it into more concise structures. The result is paradoxical: less depressive on the surface, yet more brutal in impact. It feels like someone took old-school Death Metal and taught it how to express feelings without losing its backbone. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. The album pulls a lot from acts like Officium Triste, but don’t panic just yet, because Obscurity remains very focused in its execution.
There’s enough rawness here to keep anyone happy who thinks melodeath is for the weak. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Obscurity was subtly selling me MeloDeath for people who claim they don’t have emotions. It’s sneaky, and yes, it got me harder than chlamydia (pretend you didn’t read that). Jokes aside, the album feels authentic. These are veterans, after all, and time has treated them kindly. I’ll try to extend the same courtesy in the next paragraph.
My main complaint with Ascheregen is that many of the tracks tend to blend into one another. They’re all solid, but the variety is somewhat limited. That would be tragic if it weren’t for how deeply cathartic the whole experience is. Even so, Obscurity could benefit from approaching their sound from a slightly different angle, if only to surprise me more than my tax returns do. See? I’m being nice here, so everyone please calm down on our socials for once.
In the end, Ascheregen wasn’t quite what the artwork led me to expect, and this time that’s actually a good thing. What we got instead feels more emotionally rewarding than anticipated. This is exactly the kind of album Pegah would be into, and maybe I should tell her. Why not? Promoting bands is basically the job. Good press or bad press, it doesn’t matter. Being talked about is always better than being forgotten in the oblivion of the “on hiatus” section of Encyclopedia Metallum.
Label: Trollzorn Records
Release date: January 29, 2026
Website: https://obscurity.bandcamp.com
Country: Germany
Score: 3.5/5.0
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