Album Review: Necronautical – Slain In The Spirit (Candlelight Records)

Necronautical have always been about exploring darkness. Their very name means ‘to explore death’. It’s fitting, then, that on their fourth album, Slain In The Spirit, the Manchester band are pushing both their sound and their concept to the outer limits.

Since forming in 2010, Necronautical’s name has become well respected among the British black metal underground. Across three albums – 2014’s Black Sea Misanthropy, 2016’s The Endurance At Night and 2019’s Candlelight Records debut Apotheosis – their sound has become one rich in its skill with the darker side of metal.

On Slain In The Spirit, this is truer than ever.

Says mainman Naut:

I always think that we are known as a typical black band, but there’s always been a lot of deviance from it as well. We’ve always had an idea about how we wanted the band to be, and we’ve always been a fairly straight-ahead black metal band, visually, but we had a discussion before we made this album and said, ‘Maybe we’ll stop using the typical corpse paint’.

What we’re doing now is more of a fusion between black metal and death metal, and progressive and symphonic elements. We felt that perhaps like we were turning people who might like us off because I think they saw us as just a black metal band. There’s more to us than that.

One listen to Slain in the Spirit will tell you that, while Necronautical may be evolving their black metal sound, it is still rooted in the dark and evil sound of the genre. The epic and evil sound of the genre as the grandiosity of Ritual & Recursion showcases.

A blistering and blackened opener, the symphonic touches add so much majesty. Though it is even more exciting to hear Necronautical push themselves into other territories on the gargantuan Occult Ecstatic Indoctrination and following title track. The layers in the former turn it into something special. The bass hooks, the jabbing screeches of guitar, a kick-ass solo and once again, that symphonic epic edge. Whereas the latter is a pounding blast of heaviness with ecstatic sounding blackness and some wonderful sounding melodies.

Doing the constantly impressive job of sounding savage and stunning at the same time, Necronautical keep things hot with Hypnagogia. The use of operatic-female vocals really hits hard here. Whereas Pure Conciousness Event is dripping in twisted and wicked atmosphere, something that almost has a ‘post’ flavour to it.

A short-ish blast of noise in the form of Necropsychonautics (although watch out for that brief melody drop) will get the neck muscles working overtime Before the pairing of Contorting in Perpetuity and Death Magick Triumphant see Necronautical continue to push their limits.

Unbendingly brutal in their inimitable black metal way but with such a liberal imagination. Both these tracks feature straight-forward ruthlessness but are coated in fascinating layers of varying metal influences and ideas. If you needed any more convincing of the quality of this record before this point, this will be more than enough to confirm what you already suspect.

Which brings us to the end and the shortest track on the album. A ‘throwback’ if you will, Disciple is as ‘no-nonsense’ as you’re going to get on this album. A nice blast of ill-mannered meatiness to wrap up an album of the year contender.

Necronautical – Slain in the Spirit Full Track Listing:

1. Ritual & Recursion
2. Occult Ecstatic Indoctrination
3. Slain In The Spirit
4. Hypnagogia
5. Pure Consciousness Event
6. Necropsychonautics
7. Contorting In Perpetuity
8. Death Magick Triumphant
9. Disciple

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