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I wrote about Cult of Occult's last album, Five Degrees of Insanity back at the end of 2015, and at that time, I dubbed it "lava-core" because of its slow, smothering heaviness. (And yes, I'm still trying to make "lava-core" a thing. Metal journalism needs to catch up with my inventive new micro-genre labels.) Their newest, Anti Life, doesn't radically change their sound, but as I said with their last album, I still find it strangely compelling.
If not lava-core, then call this funeral sludge rage. The tempos are achingly slow--better measured by an hourglass than a metronome--but the intensity is ratcheted up to 11 for each long, agonizing beat. This is the music you listen to when you go on a rampage in a steamroller. The songs are long (the shortest is still over 12 minutes) and punishing. That's not to say there's no variation--there's a nice stretch in "NI" when the roar-growl vocals go nearly a capella, accompanied only by the bass and the occasional drum strike before the guitar kicks back in--but by and large, this is an album that wants to grind you into submission with repetitive intensity. You could almost call it drone if it weren't so damn menacing. My cat is normally happy to listen to black metal with me, but this album made him hide in the other room. How Cult of Occult manage to make what, by most definitions, is pretty minimal music fascinating is a bit of a mystery (and maybe some black magic), but I'm once again ready and willing to be smothered by their brand of slow-motion sludge.