Relentless. That was the first word that sprung to my head when I hit play on In silbernen Sprachen by Urzirkel. Relentless. Not in a look how many blast beats and buzzsaw guitars we have kind of way, though they have plenty of those, but relentless in a musical blitzkrieg kind of way.

This is what I imagine it’s like being caught in a carpet bombing raid and loving every second of it.

What amazes me even more is that this sound, this noise that threatens to engulf me, is made by a three-piece.

Hailing from Northern Germany, the trio channel a brand of black metal that feels less like a performance and more like a total submission to divine ruin and decay. Every component of the three-piece setup has to carry maximum weight, grinding out hymns of death, earth, and blood without a single frame of studio trickery to hide behind. It is deliberate, apocalyptic, and suffocatingly heavy.

There is a darkness to this record that is disorienting. Akin to falling into a huge cave in pitch black, and not knowing which way is out, or which way round you are facing.

It is the sound of agony. Everything about In silbernen Sprachen is designed to inflict the uttermost damage possible. And not just on the eardrums either, this is pain you feel in your bones, in your marrow, and in your soul.

There is a moment during the track Heiliger Kreis, right at the beginning, where the whole piece conjures up the feeling of tanks rolling into a city. Everything pounds. Everything rumbles, everything feels oppressive as hell, and then in the blink of an eye it is back to the blitzkrieg again. The relentless, that word once more, never-ending assault on your senses that Urzirkel spend the four-track run time of this record perfecting.

When you spend as much time as I do listening to music, you can tell within about 30 seconds if a record is going to work for you. In silbernen Sprachen is one of those records that not only worked for me, but has found its way into my weekly playlist already.

It’s hard sometimes to write the way I do and try to convey just how much a band has impressed me, without the safety net of the usual ‘Band sounds like group A mixed with group B’ that I despise so much as lazy writing. It would be easy for me to make that comparison to every artist who finds their way onto the site, but it’s cheap and easy, and where’s the fun in that.

What I will say is that if you want a record that feels as if it has crawled into your body and is strangling you from the inside out, then you need In silbernen Sprachen in your life.

Out this Friday, don’t fucking miss it.