Style: Melodic death metal, death metal
Primary Emotions/Themes: Violence, aliens, tributes to the past
Thoughts: When Nuclear Blast announced that they were going to be repressing Hypocrisy's early albums I was excited. I hoped that we would get reissues of the late 90's to early 2000's albums. I passed on the first batch of records that came out. As much as I would have liked to have grabbed them, I couldn't justify it at the time. They would have just sat on my shelf for years without being spun.
Fast forward several months and we get the second wave announcement. Now this was the repressings that I was hoping for. The Final Chapter through Into the Abyss. This era right here, this is my favorite of the band. Let's find out why.
Into the Abyss is slightly different than the self titled or The Final Chapter. In a lot of ways, it sounds like it should have been released right after Abducted. If I'm remembering correctly Peter said around the time of this album's release the band wanted to go back to a more aggressive sound. One more in touch with their death metal roots.
Legions opens the album exactly the way you would expect with a statement like that. The riffs are solidly death metal and the band is blasting away like they haven't in years. The keyboards have been stripped out and replaced by riff after riff of audio onslaught.
The bands atmospheric and melodic sound isn't completely gone from this release though, just diminished. Songs like Resurrected embraces this along with Unleash the Beast's chorus. It never gets to the levels of the last two albums but it's a nice balancer to the aggression that the band is channeling for most of the album.
Out of this batch of releases for the band this is probably my least favorite. That said, this is still well worth owning, and will hit the turntable with some frequency. This also gives me hope that the next wave of releases (if they happen) will include some of the Horgh albums... now that would be a real treat.
Written December 21st 2023
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