Mouth of Madness – Event Horizon
Release Date: 16th July 2025
Label: Darkness Shall Rise Productions
Bandcamp
Genre: Blackened Death Metal, Black Metal, Death Metal, Thrash Metal.
FFO: Tribulation, Venenum, Chapel of Disease, Skeletonwitch, Bölzer.
Review By: Rick Farley
Originally formed in 2013, to say Germany’s Mouth of Madness have been deep under the metal radar, having only released a self-titled EP in 2016 is putting it mildly. Unaffected by timelines, pressure or expectations, the band is finally releasing what’s to be their debut full length album Event Horizon vis Darkness Shall Rise Productions on July 16th, 2025. Florian Exner (vocals, guitars, bass) and Marko Bieniek (drums) meld together blackened and thrashy death metal, kind of rooted in an old school, simplistic sound. Much in the same way Tribulation does, to give you an actual band comparison. Which I’m not always a fan of doing, but in some cases it helps.
Ok so I’m going to just jump right in with the negative. The five out of nine songs on Event Horizon that have actual vocals are pretty damn impressive. All five of them have a great old school swagger with doomy, thrashy, blackened death metal done in a fairly original way. Crusty guitars with a sharp, tremolo picked black metal bite, raspy, screechy harsh vocals, and a rhythm section that pounds as much as it has groovy hooks. This is 100 percent up my alley normally. The problem I’m having is, if this were another EP it would absolutely rate very highly with incredible anticipation of what’s to come next. Three of the four instrumentals are ambient, cosmic synths just ringing out into the void, not really doing anything for the album and each sounding similar to the others. Just those three tracks equal over five minutes of a thirty-six-minute album. The fourth instrumental is at least a minute thirty of actual traditional band instruments being played. It’s placement however is a little perplexing. It sits at track two, obviously directly after track one, which happens to be the first ambient instrumental piece. So, by the time the third track, Year of the Dog, starts, the album already feels weirdly disjointed. In my eyes, the third song is where the album actually starts, and you still have another two instrumentals, with the longest being the closing track. To me, it’s strange placement of songs, too much unnecessary filler and for having so damn long to write an album, it seems incomplete.
Music wise, though, there are some killers here. The track Worms alone is enough to get your blood flowing and your wickedly evil side debating coming out into the light. Its gnarly guitars are hellishly sinister and thrashy at times, while still having tons of headbanging groove. Combine this with slit throat, raspy growls and thudding drums that punish the hell out of your weak soul, and you have a song worthy of summoning a demon straight up from your floorboards.
So, with this being said, this album confuses me. I don’t really have a lot more I can say about it. The non-filler tracks are phenomenal pieces of burning, blackened death metal worthy of your ears catching fire to hear. In that regard, you should absolutely give this a spin. Hell, maybe it’s just me who will complain.
Honestly, I really want to love this, so it’s hard to give it too low of a score.
Actually, just listen to the damn thing and tell me to fuck off.
(3.5 / 5)
