Nihilus have released Borealis, their first full-length, and it arrives a long way from where they started. The Bangalore band, built around Siddharth Manoharan and Manu Manjunath, had exactly one release before this: the EP Without Gray Matter, in 2016. Kronos Mortus dates the band's founding to 2009, Metal Archives to 2010, so somewhere around seventeen years to a debut.
The record is a concept album about the gradual destruction of Earth, and the band built it as separate stories rather than one line, each a different angle on a world going down. The detail that stands out from the accompanying material is compositional: one song on the album was written both forwards and backwards.
How it sounds: technical death metal with the physical end kept intact, which is the harder balance to strike. The riffs are intricate without turning into exercises, and the drums are mixed to hit rather than to demonstrate.
The lyrics stay on post-apocalyptic collapse, geopolitics and what people do to themselves, which has been the band's subject since the EP. The album is out independently and is streaming on Bandcamp and Spotify.