Seven years is a long time between records for a technical death metal band, and Victims of Contagion have used them: Egregore is out, the Pittsburgh band's second album and the first since 2019's Lamentations of the Flesh Bound.
The most conspicuous name on it belongs to somebody else. Forced March, the second track, carries guest guitar from Chris Poland, whose playing on the first two Megadeth albums is the reason anybody argues about them forty years later. The band have put the song out as a visualiser.
Around it the record keeps the shape the band have built since their debut EP Parasitic Unborn in 2014: neoclassical arrangements and progressive structures over old school death metal, with the high speed passages and polyrhythmic writing set against blackened tremolo riffing, atmospheric sections and slower grooves. Those contrasts are the development the band claim over the earlier material rather than a change of direction, and on a record this long delayed that is the honest description.