Okkultist have given The Unyielding Bond its first airing as a live studio take, with the finished release still to come.
It is a choice more bands could make. A song played straight through in a room, filmed as it happens, tells a listener what four people actually sound like together, which a mixed single carefully does not. For a band whose selling point is weight rather than polish, that is the better advertisement.
The Lisbon group formed in 2016 and have built up steadily: the EP Eye of the Beholder in 2017, then Reinventing Evil in 2019 and O.M.E.N. in 2023, both full lengths. Earlier this year they put out Teeth of the Hydra, their first new piece since the second album.
They are on Alma Mater Records, the Lisbon label that also handles a good part of the Portuguese extreme catalogue, which has kept the band inside the country's own network rather than sending them to a German or French imprint.
Two singles in one year, with a third album unannounced, reads like a band assembling a record in public.