Hazzerd – The 3rd Dimension
Release Date: 17th January 2025
Label: M-Theory Audio
Bandcamp
Genre: Thrash
FFO: Havok, Artillery, Megadeth.
Review By: Jeff Finch
There’s a couple of things that seem to be a guarantee in the music world: Canadians churning out stellar metal, and thrash still getting the blood pumping. For Hazzerd, the focus of today’s review, they check mark both boxes, friends from the great white north and purveyors of absolutely blistering thrash metal that harkens back to the golden era with a modern flair.
When you think of thrash, chances are the words speed, riffs, solos, and intensity are thrown around with reckless abandon because that’s what thrash is all about: passion, enthusiasm, intensity, and speed when crafting riffs and solos, yielding a sonic landscape that’ll make even the most sedentary of us want to get up and run a marathon. Because what Hazzerd does with their new record The 3rd Dimension, surprising approximately zero of us, is lay bare their insane technical chops and their songwriting abilities over the course of about 40 minutes, leaving our necks sore and our appetite for thrash satiated…for now.
Fury is the name of the game on this album and there are a bevy of moments on this record to bludgeon that point home: the insane fretwork to open ThArSh TiLl DeTh virtually never relents, double bass drumming and a wickedly paced vocal performance rendering this barely two minute track feeling like a race against time (or perhaps deth?), while the double and triplet kicks in opener Interdimension bring forward a blistering performance from the rest of the band, culminating in a controlled aggression at roughly the halfway point, where the pace has backed off a bit, but the riffs continue to fight a concrete wall for supremacy, disgustingly heavy and making up for the lack of percussive speed. A round of pure shredding follows suit, a brief spike in the pace signalling a transition into the final minute of pure riffage, the song never reaching that apex it did early on but rocking us out with some thick, beefy riffs tattooing that stank face to our countenances.
Deathbringer, on top of containing riffs that feel like two guitarists in perfect harmony and a stellar mid-tempo pace that keeps us in a nice pocket where we still feel like we’re thrashing, has an anthemic feel to it, as if a call to arms, the gang vocals of the chorus punctuating the song at perfect intervals, listeners riding high on the energetic riffs and vocals only to feel that extra zeal and ardour when the chorus arrives, as if we’re in the song itself, rarely falling below a fever pitch.
Though it hasn’t been mentioned yet, one reason the band hits so hard for this listener is their similarities to Denver thrash titans Havok, vocalist (and drummer!) Dylan Westendorp with that nearly identical higher pitched, menacingly raspy voice, hitting some shrill high notes on Unto Ashes and a vicious, powerful performance on Plagueis where he nails some wickedly clean high notes as he comes out of his wrathful shouting. Which makes it all the more curious that they chose to make their longest song, A Fell Omen, purely an instrumental song. Curious, that is, until you’ve listened. Grandiose in scale, epic in sound, technically masterful in performance, A Fell Omen may well be the best track on this record, the band seamlessly transitioning from acoustic, near flamenco guitar, to down tuned, pummeling thrash, right back to the long, drawn out notes that precede an emotionally charged, perfectly paced guitar solo that feels written by David Gilmour for its lack of flash but undeniable beauty and impact. The band feels like throwing everything AND the kitchen at this one, the last minute or so a pure shred fest, just an inhuman volume of notes hitting us at every angle, a section with such a frenzied pace it wouldn’t feel out of place on a Dragonforce record, the final few seconds bringing silence, so listeners can catch their breath before the finale.
Prior to this record, somehow Hazzerd never entered my musical stratosphere, which is shocking given the absolute love I possess for the genre, but with The 3rd Dimension, these Canadian gents have a new fan who is salivating at the thought of there being more of these albums to digest. Does it reinvent the thrash wheel and do things that have never been heard? No, no it doesn’t, but in the world of thrash, that’s more than acceptable, because why try to fix what has yet to break over the course of forty years. Hazzerd has managed to whet my thrash whistle, something that hasn’t been done in a long while, and in doing so has dropped an early year contender.
(4.5 / 5)
