What’s always surprised me about Gnaw Their Tongues — through all of the full-lengths, EPs, splits and other material released in the Dutch project’s 10 years of existence — is that there’s exactly one person responsible for it all: Mories. Over the years, he’s dressed his hate-filled worldview in different levels of noise and industrialized mechanics, generating some truly compelling material in the process. Everyone has a dark side to them, I guess. And much like his previous output, the new, eighth full-length, Abyss of Longing Throats, speaks to that dark side in a matter that’s both strangely comforting and, in fact, kind of welcoming.

Gnaw Their Tongues is never easy to classify, but they’ve always had the ability to amplify your mood. Case in point: album opener “Lick the Poison from the Cave Walls” sees Mories climb inside your head with a hellish background of noise and ambience. The vocals consist primarily of jarring, tormented screams, imploring you to let your inner demons flourish.

With “Through Flesh,” the album takes on more of an industrial feel, like a haunting soundtrack piece to an utterly insane movie. The shift on a dime between noise and doom is another play on your senses, and eerie soundscapes come at you from all directions. It’s a song that requires multiple listens to properly digest; you don’t want to take a chance of missing even a glimmer in the background.

The build of the first two tracks leads to the beautifully twisted black metal of the title track. Mories positions both his screams and his guitar’s industrious hum up front in the mix, while the drums lie just underneath the surface. Before hearing this song, I would never have imagined blast beats could have such an effect on a song at a lower volume than their surroundings but I’m thrilled to have been proven wrong here. The spoken sample of what I can only assume to be a religious cult further deepens one’s feeling of going off the rails — which, by now, is reaching a feverish pitch.

The remainder of the album stays close to this basic architecture, and does so well enough to position itself as a highlight of Mories’ catalogue. The combination of influences — black metal here, some doom and death metal there — are extremely well handled, and all combine for a truly unique release. I always look forward to new Gnaw Their Tongues material, and Abyss of Longing Throats certainly does not disappoint.

– Josh

Abyss of Longing Throats will be available August 7 on Crucial Blast. For more information on Gnaw Their Tongues, visit the band’s official website.