Hellretic have released a lyric video for Imago Mortis, from their debut album Darkness in Fabula, and the song comes from a specific place: Dario Argento's Quattro mosche di velluto grigio, made in 1971.
Italian horror cinema has been feeding metal for fifty years, usually as a sample or a cover image. Taking one film and writing a song inside its atmosphere is a narrower and harder thing to do, and David Bagarić's video follows the same source rather than inventing a parallel one.
The music underneath is death metal that moves: heavy stretches giving way to faster and lighter ones, with atmospheric detail doing the cinematic work. Giuseppe Orlando of The Foreshadowing mixed and mastered the album at The Outer Sound Studios, which explains the clarity.
Twelve years out of Rome, one EP in 2018, and a debut album that finally arrived last spring. They release it themselves, which in Italian death metal is less a statement than the usual arrangement.