There are no vocals on Blood Incantation's most acclaimed record. No blast beats, no guitar solos, nothing you would recognise as death metal at all. Just synthesizers, a tamboura, and two side-long pieces named after Sumerian gods of sky and earth.
That record is Timewave Zero, and it is not a departure so much as a confession of what the band had been building towards all along.
Blood Incantation formed in Denver, Colorado in 2011, and by the time of their 2016 debut Starspawn, on Dark Descent Records, they had already worked out the trick that would define them: extreme technical death metal stretched out to prog-rock lengths, riffs treated less as hooks than as recurring astronomical events. Paul Riedl handles guitar and vocals, Isaac Faulk drums, Morris Kolontyrsky joined on guitar in 2012 and Jeff Barrett on bass in 2015. Their 2019 record Hidden History of the Human Race closes with an eighteen-minute piece in four movements, two of which abandon riffs entirely and drift into pure tone. It was there, more than anywhere else, that the ambient move was already visible.
Timewave Zero, released in February 2022 on Century Media, followed that thread to its logical end. "Io" and "Ea," each in four movements and each running close to twenty minutes, are built entirely from keyboards, with no drums, guitar distortion or growled vocal anywhere on the record. The title borrows from Terence McKenna, an influence Paul Riedl has called central to the band since its founding, and the record's cosmic frequencies place it in a lineage that runs back through Tangerine Dream and Vangelis, composers for whom synthesisers and cosmology have always shared a studio.
Reaction split along predictable lines. Some longtime fans, arriving expecting the band's usual density, found forty minutes of slow-moving frequency a hard sell. Others heard a band proving that the atmosphere inside their death metal had never really depended on the metal part.
It helps that Blood Incantation have always thought in science fiction terms. Song and album titles across their catalogue read like transmission logs from somewhere off the star charts, a habit that lines them up less with other death metal bands than with a tradition of composers who scored the genre before it had pictures to go with the sound.
Two years later, Absolute Elsewhere folded the lesson back into a record that keeps the growls and blast beats but surrounds them with the same synthesiser language, mellotron included, across two more twenty-minute pieces. Riedl has called the result "a manifesto of the ultimate Blood Incantation-style song," every ingredient the band has ever used condensed into one presentation. Heard in sequence, Timewave Zero looks less like a side-step and more like the moment Blood Incantation worked out which instrument was actually driving the ship.
