Oraculum - Hybris Divina (2026)
Hybris Divina feels like a homage first and a statement second — a death metal album that wears its lineage proudly, channeling the primordial pulse of early Death, Morbid Angel, and the ritualistic fury of classic underground death/black hybrids. The riffs are thick with cavernous weight, drums punch with visceral insistence, and the vocal delivery sits somewhere between guttural bark and ritualistic invocation, which gives the album a gritty, organic presence rather than a sterile modern sheen.
What works here is the sheer physicality of the sound-world. Tracks like “The Great One” and “Mendacious Heroism” demonstrate real momentum, propelled by spiraling mid-tempo riffing and abrupt shifts that keep you alert. There’s a willingness to let tension hunker deep and grind slowly rather than shout from every peak, and that aligns with how old-school death thrives — in slow doom-laden grooves as much as in blastbeat assaults.
But this strength also points to the album’s limitation. The aesthetic is so deeply rooted in its influences that Hybris Divina sometimes feels more like reconstruction than reinvention. Some passages lean on repetition in ways that dull their impact over time, and the interludes intended as thematic bridges don’t always justify their space, leaving the record feeling a tad longer than necessary.
This lands as a solid, earnest offering for fans of rawer death metal with a ritualistic edge: heavy, authentic, and aggressive, but not consistently transcendent. It’s music you respect for what it’s trying to evoke, even if it doesn’t always push beyond that evocation into something uniquely gripping.
Genre: Death Metal
Country: Chile
Final Verdict: 61% (Good Album)
Yearly Ranking: 28th / 39
Highlight: The Great One
Made me think of:
Morbid Angel
Obituary
Bolt Thrower
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