Lychgate – Precipice

Lychgate – Precipice
Release Date: 19th December 2025
Label: Debemur Morti Productions
Bandcamp
Genre: Black Metal, Death Metal, Doom Metal.
FFO: Voices, Dodheimsgard, Sigh, Rebirth of Nefast.
Review By: Aeons Burning

As a metalhead who listens to an ungodly amount of releases each year, it’s inevitable that I will miss some or have blind spots. One such blind spot was the band Lychgate, which has been described to me before I took the deep dive into their discography as “exactly my shit.” Alright, that has my interest piqued. My goodness, were they correct. I don’t think I’ve fallen so hard for a band that was previously unknown to me before, as An Antidote for the Glass Pill was the easiest 9/10 record I’ve ever given a high score to on first listen. I loved the other two records and the EP as well, which made me very excited for the new record, Precipice. The first record in five years, I had high expectations before I hit the play button, and I wasn’t disappointed in the slightest, because this is easily on the same scale for me as An Antidote for the Glass Pill.

For those uninitiated, Lychgate play a blend of genuinely evil sounding music rarely heard in black metal or extreme music due to the generally campy nature of most artists. Not so here though, as master of atmosphere Greg Chandler (Esoteric, et al.) knows exactly how to mix and master a record to sound as unsettling as possible, and he once again flexes his audio engineering chops on Precipice. The organs are the biggest selling point of Lychgate, though. While they’re a touch more subdued here, they’re still very much a prominent feature across the album and create this sense of otherworldly Lovecraftian bombast and splendor that has the power to make you feel like you’re at the mercy of an aberrant king waiting for the final sentence to drop. Precipice focuses a lot on nightmarish atmosphere while never sacrificing riffs, and the highlight is Terror Silence, which showcases Lychgate throwing in neoclassical soloing as they sometimes do, and it works perfectly among the rest of the album. Precipice also includes a couple introspective pieces, like The Meeting of Orion and Scorpio and closer Pangaea, but these never feel like wasted opportunities, rather breaks in the sheer chaos that other tracks like Hive of Parasites and Death’s Twilight Kingdom assault the listener with. This is another record I can’t put down.

Precipice was always going to wow me when I first listened to Lychgate, but I wasn’t expecting it to creep so far up my list at the end of the year. This is yet another magnificent record from these guys, and while it’s such a late release – the 19th of December is an insane time to release such a fantastic album – it’s worth your time. Don’t skip this, because you will absolutely regret it if you do.

(4.5 / 5)