One of the reasons we enjoy hosting premieres is that they sometimes introduce us to bands we quickly realize we should have paid attention to before. The Belgian progressive black metal group Nyrak is now one of those bands, making their first (and long overdue) appearance among our shredded pages.

If we had been paying closer attention, we would have witnessed their evolution from a solo studio project created in 2021 by Belgian musician Guy Van Nieuwenhove (aka Nevel of Gotmoor) into a fully-fledged group capable of live performances. We also would have discovered the still-ongoing evolution of the music beginning with the debut album Malvs (2022) and continuing through a second album named Devourer of All (2024) and their Faceless Tyrant EP released this past spring.

Any song named "Leviathan" tends to inspire a bit of fear in advance of listening, but especially when it comes from an album heralded by the kind of cover art installed at the top of this article. The press materials being circulated for the album include a description of each song, and this is how "Leviathan" is described:

After a symphonic build-up, Leviathan erupts with brutal intensity. Pulsing rhythms, dissonant textures, and slicing guitar layers pull the listener into a vortex of chaos. The track feels like an awakening -- not sluggish, but furious and determined. Choirs heighten the drama, giving it a ritualistic weight as if an ancient evil is being resurrected.

This is all accurate, and undoubtedly a sufficient introduction for the song, but of course we have a few things to add.

The song's ethereal overture is haunting, and it makes the music's sudden upheaval even more overpowering. The drumming is furious, the riffing molten, the vocals a harrowing assault on the senses, but the music also becomes vast and sweeping, wondrous but still haunting in its own way, creating a feeling of peril as great as the legendary beast for which the song is named.

The vocals descend and ascend, an effective manifestation of terrors, joined by blistering percussive outbursts and bubbling bass-lines, and backed by slowly flowing tides of melody that are both ominous and stricken. Fiery and flickering guitars writhe within those vast waves, and viciously boiling riffage returns, along with vividly tumbling tom-drums and dark, groaning throbs.

The music is by turns calamitous, incendiary, thunderous, storm-like, and hopeless -- apocalyptic in its scale, an elaborately textured rendering of terrible majesty and ruinous downfall that's as captivating as it is stunning. You might even find yourselves helpless to join in the closing chant as the song pulls you DOWN.

We'll also share what the press materials state about the album as a whole: