We are honored to welcome into our family obscure New Zealand based death metal terrorscapers Exaltation, an elusive band emerged from the elite of their country’s extreme metal underground with debut album “Under Blind Reasoning”, a towering beast over five years in the making.
Leading up to the record’s long awaited release, the closing track from the monstrous album has been revealed by illustrious extreme metal blog Toilet Ov Hell (and in collaboration with the famed Death Metal Promotion YouTube channel) who in introducing the song “Divider of Redemption” has remarked how the track “is a monstrosity emerged from the abyss, part doom, part dissonance, all foreboding. It’s like Grave Miasma by way of Incantation, touching on the former’s blackened death mastery and the latter’s umbral delivery. It is dark, it is devastating, it is vile, and it is glorious“ - you can check out the feature and the track HERE.
After a long silence New Zealand bestial death metal horde Exaltation finally unveil their first proper full-length offering, "Under Blind Reasoning", after a demo tape had surfaced back in 2017 amongst generalized obscurity. Indeed what we find on this debut offering is something distant from the lo-fi quality of the promising but under-produced demo, and sees the band tap instead into a realm of vehemence and aural destruction of unseen magnitude and terror. Feral, enveloping, monumental and sprawling in its unrelenting wrath, "Under Blind Reasoning" sees the obscure New Zealand death-bringers whip the sum of their influences (Immolation, Morbid Angel, Incantation, Deicide, Blasphemy) into a coercive realm of shelshocking torment and rise from the depths of obscurity like a cataclysmic weapon of mass-destruction. The album's dense and multidimensional recording quality (courtesy of engineers Raj Singarajah and Cam Sinclair along by mastering from Luke Finlay of Primal Mastering) has yielded a death metal beast of truly unsettling proportions. Every instrument and the utter violence with which it is wielded appears on full display, as the listener is helplessly left annihilated, blow after to blow, to witness the band's tight, savage and merciless performance and technical proficiency literally maul down the fabric of reality piece by piece. These are death metal songs from a realm of perpetual darkness that bare a load of death and ruin of unprecedented traits. Songs of boundless terror and oblivion that evoke eons of darkness and an immanent and oppressive presage of complete inevitability as the music roars out of the speakers with ominous grimness and near-weaponized violence. All hail the realm of darkness and death conceived by Exaltation, one where the death metal craft is reborn as a feral ungovernable force to inflict merciless ruin unto this mortal plane and all that dares to attempt to exist within it.
Exaltation are by all means one of their nation’s rising extreme metal forces, surely destined to share their country’s highest underground ranks with other notorious local death dealers like Heresiarch, Vesicant and the such. Exaltation started in early 2013 with Mort on guitar, Aaron Baylis on drums and his brother Nathan Baylis on bass. The band started off playing black metal primarily influenced by bands like Clandestine Blaze and Dødheimsgard's Kronet Til Konge album. Around 2015 Exaltation’s members had ammassed further influences and refined the band’s vision further, becoming a more focused and violent project and changing direction into a more black/death metal style. Nathan Baylis switched from bass to guitar in 2015 and started writing more for the band, a change which contributed to the change in musical direction. Al Cunningham joined Exaltation early 2016 to fill Nathan’s place on bass, also becoming the vocalist later on that year. A year later Exaltaion's first demo was recorded in March/April 2017 with a consolidated lineup of Aaron Baylis on drums, Al Cunningham on bass and vocals, Mort on guitar, and Nathan on guitar. The demo was DIY recorded within the band’s confines with Nathan Baylis tracking and mixing jointly handled by Mort and Nathan. It was this demo which captured the attention of Sentient Ruin and which subsequently brought the two parties in contact via the mediation of Heresiarch’s vocalist N.H.. Label and band thus agreed to remain in touch as events took their natural course. Exaltation subsequently went dormant as they quietly envisioned and executed their first debut full-length offering over the next several years. The debut full length album Under Blind Reasoning was finally recorded between November 2020 and march 2021 by Raj Singarajah, mixed by Cam Sinclair of Dymanic Rage, and mastered by Luke Finlay of Primal Mastering. During the album’s recording sessions with Singarajah, Mort and Nathan experienced a shift in inspiration and vision for the band and were able to develop their sound further and experiment with different ideas, adding a much deeper and darker atmosphere to the music, a lengthily, patient and meticolous but natural process which in the end yielded one of the most caclysmic and majestic dark death metal releases to ever see the light on New Zealand soil. Exaltation’s bleak, unforgiving and merciless aura is further shaped by Cunningham’s lyrics which deal with themes of struggle and suffering amongst modern society and its constant flaws, downfalls, and sudden shifts. Under Blind Reasoning was released on CD/LP/MC/Digital In July 2022 via Sentient Ruin as a crowning achiemevemnt in New Zealand extreme metal.